williatw wrote:
I will limit use by having a legal product sold only by licensed providers with much lower THC content, much cheaper than the illegal street supply (driving them out of business) without contamination by paraquat or any other noxious by-product. I will limit sell to those over 21, registered as users. I will emphasize treating drug abuse/addiction as a medical problem to be treated as such not a law enforcement matter. I will not make it "societally sanctioned" any more than heavy drinking is much nowadays. If addicts remain social pariahs, find by me, more incentive for them to seek treatment
yeppers that the solution, that works so well with booze as well.
Works better than prohibition did, and it would work better IMHO than the current war on drugs does.
I think the difference with booze is it only gets so powerful, 100% is 100%. The high end limit to drugs has not yet been found, other than death.
To further the point, an ounce of 200 proof alcohol is not going to kill you, and in the average person, probably not make you drunk. An ounce of pure cocaine would be a one time good deal.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)
williatw wrote:
I will limit use by having a legal product sold only by licensed providers with much lower THC content, much cheaper than the illegal street supply (driving them out of business) without contamination by paraquat or any other noxious by-product. I will limit sell to those over 21, registered as users. I will emphasize treating drug abuse/addiction as a medical problem to be treated as such not a law enforcement matter. I will not make it "societally sanctioned" any more than heavy drinking is much nowadays. If addicts remain social pariahs, find by me, more incentive for them to seek treatment
yeppers that the solution, that works so well with booze as well.
Works better than prohibition did, and it would work better IMHO than the current war on drugs does.
Let us suppose you have a force shield that intercepts 98% of the projectiles thrown at it.
So it's a failure because it doesn't get that last 2%?
A better solution is no shield?
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —
Diogenes wrote: Let us suppose you have a force shield that intercepts 98% of the projectiles thrown at it.
So it's a failure because it doesn't get that last 2%?
A better solution is no shield?
That would depend on the cost of the "force shield" monetary or otherwise and whether I had alternatives that I believed might work better with fewer undesirable side effects. When they start for instance seizing increasingly more of the product of your hard earned labor (civil asset forfeiture), behaving more and more like gestapo/stasi (no knock warrants/wiretaps) the good citizenry might consider whether it was worth it. I don't consider legal but regulated from a licensed provider the equivalent of no shield. I don't equate legal pot regulated as to content safety, especially concentration, & availability, the equivalent of no protection.
ladajo wrote:I think the difference with booze is it only gets so powerful, 100% is 100%. The high end limit to drugs has not yet been found, other than death.
The salient difference is alcohol is a sedative. It's pretty difficult to get alcohol poisoning because if you drink enough, you go to sleep. Cannabis OTOH, smoke enough and it will make you hallucinate, and even kill you. Death is rare, but making one psychotic, not so much. And since we now know it actually morphs brain morphology into that of a psychitzophrenic, and cuts your memory down to 1/37 what it would otherwise be (and memory is the number one indicator for intelligence) the debate should end about whether its harmful. It's completely destructive.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Drug prohibition and civil asset forfeiture are 2 different issues. You can have drug enforcement without unconstitutional searches and forfeiture without due process. Those conflating them mostly seem to want civil asset forfeiture or to do away with drug prohibition.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.
hanelyp wrote:Drug prohibition and civil asset forfeiture are 2 different issues. You can have drug enforcement without unconstitutional searches and forfeiture without due process. Those conflating them mostly seem to want civil asset forfeiture or to do away with drug prohibition.
One inevitably leads to the other...the more people you incarcerate the higher the cost; we have the highest incarceration rate in the world; people don't like having their taxes raised, so that puts pressure on the authorities to find ways of paying for the "war on drugs". It started out modestly, confiscating stuff from people arrested, then progressed to any proceeds believed to be "ill gotten" then finally to someone who fits a "profile" of a drug user/seller. When you can seize the belongings of someone without having to charge let alone convict them of a crime, then you are off to the races. Those minority youth who are so blessedly easy to arrest/stop & frisk/convict really don't have assets for the most part worth taking; for that they start casting their covetous eyes toward your well-to-do suburbs.
Scientists use the term "lethal dose" (LD) to describe the dose (or in the case of alcohol, the concentration) that produces death in half the population (LD:50). Most authorities agree that blood alcohol concentrations in the 0.40 - 0.50% range meet the requirements for the LD:50. The blood alcohol concentration is the percentage of alcohol in the blood that results after alcohol is absorbed from the stomach into the blood supply. Obviously, studies of lethal dosage cannot be tested empirically in the laboratory, so the LD:50 for alcohol is estimated from post-mortem cases in which alcohol poisoning was found to be the primary cause of death. However, there are documented cases of fatal overdoses from alcohol at blood alcohol concentrations lower than 0.40%. To place this in perspective, a 100-pound woman or man who consumed 9-10 standard drinks, respectively, in less than an hour would be in the LD:50 range. A 200-pound man would have to consume about 5-6 drinks per hour for 4 hours to reach the LD:50. Although such high rates of consumption are atypical of most situations, participating in drinking "games" or club "initiations" often involves highly unregulated alcohol consumption. Impaired judgment from intoxication, coupled with large amounts of alcohol, is a potentially fatal combination.
THC is the chemical in cannabis that causes the high. It is almost impossible to overdose with as you would have to smoke 1500 pounds (680 kilograms) of cannabis within 15 minutes. [1]
[1] Reefer madness-The Federal response to California’s Medical-Marijuana Law.Annas, G.J. ; New Eng J Med, 1997; 337: 435-439
You know there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the topic of marijuana overdose, despite there having been no reported cases ever. Frankly, we just don’t think its possible and neither do 9 out of our 10 visitors. It might be possible that someone with an allergy to marijuana could die from ingesting it, however due to its legal status in many places there has been little research conducted on a marijuana allergy. It is a plant, some people are allergic to certain plants, it only makes sense that certain people would be allergic to marijuana. And of course, everyone has heard the old urban legend, “You can overdose on weed if you smoke your weight.” The Merck Index lists the LD50 (dosage of a certain chemical which will kill half of a population given that dosage) of pure THC to be 42 mg per kg of body weight for rats when the THC is inhaled. What does this mean for us? The lesson I learned is, if you have pure THC, please, don’t waste it getting rats high.
Now, let’s make some assumptions with this Merck Index LD50 of 42mg/kg. So, let’s assume we have a 75kg person (165 lbs) and that this LD50 also applies to humans, that gives us 3150 mg or 3.15 g. But, even hash oil isn’t pure THC, neither is hash, nor is weed itself. Assuming that you have the best hash oil in the world and it is 90% pure, you would need to smoke 3.5 grams in order to have a 50% chance of dying. Assuming you have some awesome hash and it is 70% pure, you would need to smoke 4.5 grams in order to have a 50% chance of dying. And lastly, assuming you have some top shelf weed from a dispensary and it has a 20% purity, you would need to smoke 15.75 grams in order to give yourself a 50% chance of dying.
15.75 grams of high grade weed is a very little over 1/2 ounce. Considering that from what I read the typical sale of weed of that quality is 1/8th or 1/4 oz and that kind of quantity lasts a heavy user between a week and a month the odds of a weed overdose are for practical purposes zero.
I have yet to read even in the popular press of any overdoses on weed in the last year. Reports of alcohol overdoses are frequent - typically college drinking parties.
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And of course people never hallucinate from alcohol consumption.
Curious you didn't bother to research the link I posted above that reports on THC/cannabis overdose deaths.
And really it's obvious you intend to spread your disease at all costs, isn't it simon? With proof positive that cannabis alters the morphology of the brain (despite the political antagonism toward any negative reporting about cannabis) and with proof that it seriously impairs memory, you're still shucking your wares.
That's an addict for you. Please do't confuse him with the facts.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
15.75 grams of high grade weed is a very little over 1/2 ounce. Considering that from what I read the typical sale of weed of that quality is 1/8th or 1/4 oz and that kind of quantity lasts a heavy user between a week and a month the odds of a weed overdose are for practical purposes zero.
Hard to believe that a "heavy user" can make 7 grams last a month. That would be 7 joints(ish), although one may argue that a "heavy user" is burning more than a gram per joint...
I am throwing the Bullshit Flag on that one Mike.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)
