Japan managed to win its war on drugs. Why can't we?

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Seems you have forgotten what Big Tobacco is about. They aren't really interested in the home-growing artisan pot-fanatic. They are just the useful pawns, the invented martyrs of the "drugs war". They aren't Big Dope's target market. Big Dope is interested in getting millions of current non-users enjoying and hopefully becoming dependent on cheap mass produced drugs and buying super-yachts filled with foreign hookers with the proceeds, the consequences for individuals and society be damned.

Yes, the parallel with Big Tobacco, so eloquently pointed out here by Mr Mikah and Mr Powell is so clear that it's uncanny; future generations will condemn us for having forced cannabis on our children (which is what it comes down to, because "free-will" for the most part is a myth, or if it's not, most people won't utilise it rationally).

It's funny how those who want to push poisonous drugs always fixate on the minority cases where it can be of some medicinal benefit; pink eyed, babbling, incoherent winos don't enter into it, apparently. Just the other day, I heard someone in this state babbling about how he was going to beat up random members of the public.

I agree that there's an argument to be made for medicinal cannabis, but the utility of medicinal cannabis in a small number of cases isn't a rational argument for pushing it as a recreational drug.

As for those who make the childish argument that it's a matter of individual choice ("if it feels good, do it" - the Marquis de Sade would be proud), aside from their ignorance of the neighborhood effects of the drug, I'll leave them with the words of BF Skinner:

Nah man. Dope is grown non-commercially by hippies on a communal farm. Dope is totally safe and non-toxic and actually increases your intelligence. The man wants to ban dope because he doesn't want us using it to project onto the astral plane. /sarcasm

^ This is it - those in what passes for the left seriously believe that by campaigning to legalise cannabis they're "sticking it to the man"/being rebellious/being good Marxists, when all the time, they're playing right into the hands of the neo-liberal (neo-feudal), corporatist agenda. People's gullibility, particularly those desperate to be accepted as "liberals" never ceases to amaze me.

That didn't get digested so I'll explain the point of bringing that up.

If it was feasible for people to grow their own tobacco in a quantity that would be enough to satiate nicotine fixes it would have been a have problem for the tobacco industry. The only other benefit they had is that it's a lot more work to roll a cigarette vs. get one - even if you got an injector and a box of sleeves and the quality is a lot worse. With marijuana a whole cigarette would be way too much for most people, most people prefer a pipe because they get more efficiency out of it, and the home-growers would cover enough of their habit with home grown to make a significant dent in their profit margin. In a lot of ways, economically, it's not the same animal and it would take a stupid amount of corporatist/crony-capitalist regulation to tilt the scales heavily enough in their favor for monopolies to make a killing on it. To do that they'd have to all but make it illegal again outside of their networks.

Making something legal is not pushing something onto somebody, they have the 'free will' to smoke it or not. I hate to break it to you, people for legalization are not 'the minority', I believe it's more like over 50% of the US, hardly a minority.

And what argument is the opposing making? We don't like you being able to get a buzz so we think it should be illegal.

I used to love smoking a bowl then writing a whole program out just for the thrill of finding the bug, processing thousands of lines of code in my mind to find the error.

As I tried to make clear in my post, no human being exists in social or intellectual vacuum; there will be peer pressure, there will be advertising and there will be the constant eulogy on cannabis smoking (and it will generally be smoked, which means a resurgence of THAT habit, too) in the media which we're already seeing. Free will, as I also tried to make clear above is at worst an illusion and at best very, very far from being a guarantee of rational decision-making. Edward Bernays, the father of advertising and public manipulation, bragged in the 1920s, nearly a hundred years ago, that after being employed by the major tobacco companies to do so, he had persuaded the women of middle-America, for whom it had previously been taboo, to smoke in public; within a generation, it seemed all but impossible to find a woman who refrained from this habit.

I never claimed that support for legalisation of cannabis was a minority position in the United States, which proves once again that you weren't paying attention when you read my post. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that you're quite right in thinking it's a popular policy, but this only proves how easily public opinion is manipulated. Popularity is not a guarantee of moral or rational justification - after all, a large portion of the American public also believes the world is six-thousand years old and that Moses and Jesus were contemporaneous with one another.

There's a problem with your argument. Not all plants are the same.

This is asinine. The technology you use to push prohibition was partly created by stoners.

Call me a dope fiend all you want, you still won't be able to do what I do.

This is, respectfully, a slightly silly argument; after all, much modern technology, including most notably rocket-technology, was created by Nazis, but that doesn't mean we should approve of Nazism. Nazism and dope-smoking are two very different things, but the same principle applies.

Dude! You're reading way too far into this. I just enjoy something you don't. There is no excuse for this kind of animosity in what's called a free country. The constitution wasn't written on wood-paper. Stoners aren't going to stab you in an alley, this thread opened with a snap judgment about the character of total strangers.


Solve your own problems instead of slandering people you refuse to understand.

So I've just about finished the Joe Rogan interview with Michael and Alex.

I think the thing that can be gathered from this is that marijuana seems to have pronounced effects on brain plasticity. Toward the end Michael sites how it can help people bounce back from traumatic brain injury, and at the other side its also considered to be much higher in correlation with bad outcomes for children and young adults under 25 - at a time where the brain is attempting to prune receptors for stronger and better neural connections which means that a rapid increase in plasticity can often times be a bad thing. In that sense it's a double-edged sword and 'context is king' with respect to how its used.

This is really where anyone who says that it's only good is as off-point or ignorant as anyone who says it's only bad. To the extent that our culture is still stuck in these black and white purely 'for or against' debates whether online or in the media it shows that we still have a really bad time with nuance, and that could be maybe because we're still dogmatically clinging to the idea that if we want to believe in meritocracy or 'all men are created equal' we have to sweep all evidence to the contrary under the rug to keep our worldviews intact.

Where I really think the future of drug use needs to go - these need to be tools that people use more for self-improvement and thought of less as vice or recreation. Self-improvement use is a significant factor for a non-trivial portion of the population with both THC and CBD and even larger for the portion of the population who can at least use something like CBD for overcoming phobias, panic disorders, and the like. Also if we can have genetic screening and some degree of gating with respect to who these things are legal for or at least whose allowed by high-yield vs. only allowed to buy low-yield. We could, especially for things like more traditional psychedelics, go for something similar to a CCW model where the people need to be educated, screened, pass tests, and go through psychedelic therapy before they have a license to buy which gets voided in the case of committing any kind of felony that would be related to substance abuse.

Fine with me. Forming a corporation to make money is totally legal. Vaping cannabis is healthier than smoking. And you can eat or drink it. It's use lowers alcohol and opiate consumption. It has a history of human usage at least as long as alcohol. It doesn't cause cancer, quite the opposite. Lots of unhealthy things are legal, it's a matter of degree, and weed hasn't been shown to be a public health hazard.

I've read an article that suggested marijuana use among teenagers has dropped since recreational use has been legalized(In California). but, to make another point let me ask this question, what is the purpose you feel marijuana should be ban for recreational use? Is it for health issues or simply because it gives a person an euphoria/buzz?

Where are you willing to draw the line? Products that contain processed sugar are constantly advertised and are widely consumed and are very unhealthy, should we make sugar illegal? How about bad diets? Should we enforce people to eat healthy? Should we enforce people to make intelligent decisions and penalize them when they don't? I really don't get the argument.

Free will most certainly is not an illusion. People can be persuade, that's the basic principle of all advertisement, that doesn't go against free will. People are born with free will, even if something is illegal you can still choose to do it, your choice is your free will. People can make stupid choices and people can make smart choices, false advertisement is wrong on both sides, whether trying to promote a product or demonize a product.

The reasons for keeping cannabis illegal are a combination of its effects on the individual and - more so, for me - its effects on society.

I don't believe that the fact that I argue for cannabis' remaining illegal on the basis of, among other things, its health effects, leaves me duty bound to argue that all things currently legal that are unhealthy should also be banned. This is a French Enlightenment fallacy; I don't accept the eighteenth century view that every generation can - far less should - build itself anew. Every one of our laws in Britain and America (at least before Britain became an EU - for which read "Franco-German" - colony) is the product of countless compromises over hundreds of years and dozens of generations. The order and prosperity which have resulted from the miracle of Common Law mean that it is not something to be played with by some feckless social-science graduate just because he thinks he knows better; it's a delicate and finely tuned system which isn't amenable to revolutionary changes.

Regarding advertising, people can be persuaded to do many things, including give away their freedoms, agree to foreign wars designed to enrich arms manufacturers and to dismantle the welfare state. The fact of the matter is that when persuasion is used for destructive ends, it can no longer be trusted to continue working unmolested.

What about obesity? That has very large impacts on the individual and society. Should obesity be outlawed? It still seems that you are trying to attack one substance while neglecting many other things that also impact the individual and society. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems more like you are so passionate about marijuana simply because people get high when they smoke it. Else, there are many negative things that are widely negative for the individual and society, to attack peoples free will to me is to enforce dictatorship.

I have heard that psychedelics possibly played a huge role in curiosity, expansion and evolution of the human mind. There is also a funky little monkey that likes to sit on a tree branch and rub a poisons leaf all over it's body specifically to hallucinate. Wish I could remember that funky monkeys species name.

But also, smoking marijuana or consuming marijuana is not all negative, it has it's ups and downs, seems you should be more passionate about making processed sugar illegal as it mainly consists of negative impacts.