who supports marijuana rights?

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Why "attack the stoner culture"? It's a culture where people get together to sit back and relax and enjoy some food. There are rarely fights at these parties, whereas alcohol usually inspires at least one fist-fight. They don't bag on people for skin color because they see all colors of the rainbow while high. They don't get together while stoned to decide which gay man or lesbian woman to rape and leave bleeding in a ditch.

Amotivational syndrome? The stoners I knew had good jobs. I was someone who avoided most of the recreational drug use and no one would hire me. The stoners found it easy to get jobs and still do.

It affects the competence and behavior of the observers. If you believe that a student cannot do the work because he is a "n****r", "k*e", "wetback" or "wop" then your actions and attitude will affect his work. If you believe that a student is going to excel because he is a genius or an Asian, that student will find himself doing the work easily. It is hard to find a neutral observer just to determine if racial differences exist, not as hard as it used to be. I knew someone who had the highest grade point average who used a lot of pot. You will dismiss that as an exception, but that's part of the problem with the anti-marijuana people. They cook the evidence just that way. They pick and choose the evidence that they will allow to be evaluated.

If a student was "performing" because he was motivated by fear, then the fear is removed by marijuana use, and he changes the way he acts and his grades drop, I think that we should not automatically decide that this is a bad effect. Think it through. A teenager has been forced into a situation, made to fear for his life, and his performance is directly related to how fearful he is that he will be punished for failure. Come on, put yourself in his position. You are threatened. You may very well be murdered if you come home with poor grades. Whether this is literally true or not, you have been deliberately made to feel as if you will die horribly. How many of us know how this feels? I do. Through most of my career at school I felt that way.

Then something comes along and relieves the person's mind of some of the fear. Bear in mind that his entire mental balance has included that fear for so long that he has to have it to maintain, well, his balance. If he had known for certain that this was wrong, it would have helped because he might have been able to do something about it. If he had been taught that the way he felt was right, and that this was the way he should feel, and even that this wasn’t fear he was feeling but “motivation”, then he’s going to have a lot more trouble. He thinks that the only thing that can move him to do anything for himself is that feeling, like a drug, that has been pushing his body into a fight-or-flight response most of his life, every waking hour and a lot of his sleeping hours. If he is relieved of the fear he doesn’t have what once motivated him. At the same time he feels new sensations that he isn’t used to, human sensations like actually feeling the warmth of his own skin. For a little while, he is just himself. Others will say that his behavior and his life have been degraded, and a vital part of him simply knows better.

Those who find themselves at peace with the new sensations do much better. I could not because my mother, every time she found me acting as if I was alive, would beat it out of me, if not with fists, with words and death threats. There was a lot of this going around. The awakening of sensation only made things worse for me because they motivated her to increase her abuse and drive me crazy. She also had the psychiatrist use drugs on me. At no point was she willing to give me a chance to attempt to define my own life. Any time she “allowed” this was just the lead-up to another opportunity to crush me.

To this day it was the street drugs that messed me up, not the manipulation, not the crushing and destruction of myself, not the death threats, and definitely not the psychiatric drugging. There is the result of attacking the “stoner lifestyle.” These attacks really are simply destroying people because you don’t like something they are doing, and they are criminally motivated.

I think I stated the same hypothesis way back in this thread:
The reason why marijuanna is illegal is because the tobacco companies wanted to lower their competition.

Many of us say "I believe" because on a personal level we despise or love a substance.
How can we possible make everyone content?

Easy, we have places where people can smoke marijuanna and places where they cant.
Lets have a regulated bonfire with marijuanna inside a large warehouse. People can drop in if they want.

Where I live, cigarettes are banned in all public places. Even someplaces in a park.
At first there was an outcry but eventially everyone loved it.
Its strange how fines affect people worse then jail.

I wouldn't be so sure. The tobacco companies would just start selling marijuana in prepackaged cigarettes if it were legal.

Hempseed oil has to be expensive if it is imported, but it would be literally dirt cheap if it were produced domestically. I could buy hempseed oil now and run an engine with it, but it would still be more expensive than using diesel fuel. If I were allowed to grow it and I had a small farm, I could satisfy all of my fuel needs with it if I had all diesel engines and an oil furnace. It may seem like sort of a lot of work to do that, but how many hours would I have to slave away in a factory to pay for home heat at $400 to $800 a month? The oil companies want that money from me and they would kill me, my family, and a lot of Iraqis to get it.

These are quotes from Harry J. Anslinger, the man directly responsible for cannabis prohibition;

"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."

"marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

"Marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing." - bit if a U-turn there!

"Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."

"Marijuana is taken by ... musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type."

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

At least it would generate tax revenue then, instead of spending tax revenue (on the War against drugs).

It's worth repeating. Back then "playing the race card" didn't mean the same thing that it does now. As late as the 1930s it was pretty easy to use it to get Congress to pass bills based on fear that the "degenerate races" were going to do something to us.

Whatever it takes to inspire fear amongst the politicians and general majority of the population is often used to pass horrible law. It happens every single year. These days the fear mongering is about attaching the "War on Terror" to everything, or speculating that all your children will turn gay and/or marry animals and streetlights if "gay marriage" ever becomes legal.

That sort of prejudice could just have been used to do the right thing for the wrong (very wrong) reason, though: Faulty reasoning does not prove a conclusion false--it just means the person doing it isn't being logical.

I think, when discussing this issue, it's best to look at marijuana and what it would do to society today, not what it was thought to do in the 30s.

And, really, we have enough problems with drunk drivers as it is; ending up with stoned drivers as well would really raise the rates of substance-related car accidents.

In this case it's the wrong thing and for the wrong reason. Marijuana has never been proven to do significant harm especially compared to tobacco and alcohol. Free use of marijuana would have substantially changed history for the better just for its psychoactive properties if people had even bothered to adopt it. Then we would also have better medicines and better fuel and fiber.

While I believe marijuana should be legalized, I'm afraid it will never happen in my lifetime, even for medicinal purposes. The reason is that I think the US is just too conservative and is in general resistant to change. They made pot illegal many years ago, and it would be too much of a paradigm shift to change it at this point. Our country seems to be resistant to any kind of change.

The illegality of pot and other drugs was a change. How did they make this change come about?

I agree that the punishment for driving drunk should be more severe and the same would go for "stoned drivers" as well.

People are too jacked into the belief that only government can protect them from evil drugs, and the government is too thrilled with the invasive laws they've been able to pass under the guise of the "War on Drugs." To roll those back would greatly diminish the power of the federal government, which they aren't really interested in. For an idea of how powerful the "War on Drugs" has made the government, look at how many times the "Controlled Substances Act" is referenced in the PATRIOT Act.

The United States Government is infiltrated by corporate terrorists from within. Lobbyist who are funded by pill makers manipulate the laws so profit can win out over safety and testing. These corporations and their paid activists also put a stranglehold on making sure that marijuana is kept forbidden. It's not because it is dangerous, it is because it is a multi-role wonder drug that threatens profits.

When I was doing clinical research, I was obsessed with doing a study of medical marijuana for people with HIV. I spent 6 months trying to get it off the ground. I met with a lot of resistance, most of which was governmental (Federal - not local or state) including our friends, NIDA.

Frankly, I don't think the majority of Americans are bright enough to consider this issue, or many others, rationally. They are stuck in a world of not wanting things to change. Can you think of any radical changes that have happened to our society in the last 75 years? And look at our newest Supreme Court Justice who may threaten abortion rights. One more example of conservatism enabled by an unintelligent and uninformed majority.

It is NOT just about money.