So Colorado legalized marijuana.
It looks like endless credit, free iPhones, mountains of medication, and cheap plasma TV sets are not enough to keep everybody meek and compliant any longer.
Legalization
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
So Colorado legalized marijuana.
It looks like endless credit, free iPhones, mountains of medication, and cheap plasma TV sets are not enough to keep everybody meek and compliant any longer.
Clarissa's Blog 
Reblogged this on WORK IN PROGRESS and commented:
I hadn’t looked at it from that angle, but now that you mention it . . . John
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That’s about right.
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Depends on who you are. If you’re a veteran, you might find it helps, to chill.
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I got mixed feelings.
I think major decriminalization should have happened everywhere decades ago.
On the other hand, there is a ‘keep the proles quiet and compliant’ aspect here that’s disturbing.
Will increasing legalization do anything for non-violent pot offenders in jail?
The very few times I tried pot it didn’t do anything at all for me.
IME major potheads (as opposed to occasional recreational users) are super irritating, they cannot be relied on for anything and are paranoid an unpleasant.
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I don’t like the substance either. I used to eat wheat before I knew I had a severe intolerance of it and I have the same reaction to it to that substance. I don’t get a high. I don’t get anything. I just feel a bit allergic.
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Yes, I agree with this comment completely.
Long-term use has obvious side effects, and I always wonder what’s wrong with people who deny the obvious.
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A reaction to extremely exaggerated anti-drug propaganda, I’d guess.
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IME major potheads (as opposed to occasional recreational users) are super irritating, they cannot be relied on for anything and are paranoid an unpleasant.(Cliff)
I know several that would prove your theory wrong. In fact, they are quite the reverse and amazingly successful business owners. I have a sneaky suspicion the ones you know would probably have been even more paranoid and unpleasant if they weren’t regular pot smokers. 🙂
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Success in business has nothing to do with this. There are alcoholics and cocaine-users who run businesses and manage to dissimulate their state for years or even decades.
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@Clarissa
You might be surprised the people you know who smoke pot and you have no clue based on their behavior.
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“the ones you know would probably have been even more paranoid and unpleasant if they weren’t regular pot smokers”
No. I knew some before and after everyday chronic usage and the decline in life skills and increase in paranoia was pretty obvious.
On the positive side, pot does seem easier to quit than alcohol (and it seems to be easier for pot abusers to go back to more occasional usage without backsliding into overuse than it is for former alcholics).
Again a few times a week doesn’t seem to have real unplasant effects, but when a person gets to the more than once every single day they get real unpleasant to be around, ime.
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It may be legal but its not like your going to have more people smoking it. You will just have less people going to jail for it. 😉
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Psychotropic drugs are a lot more accessible in the US than anywhere else. As a result, more people are taking them. A lot more.
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Marijuana for the most part is illegal in the USA and it has more people smoking it than places where it is legal. So I highly doubt legalizing it is going to increase that number. If anything it may decrease it.
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I don’t know. I know you don’t drink much. But I personally enjoy wine and craft cocktails. I don’t smoke marijuana but I think of it as similar to alcohol. If I can enjoy my wine, why can’t someone else enjoy marijuana legally? It’s about as dangerous as alcohol and considerably less dangerous than many legal perscription based pain medications (like oxycontin.) If it’s legalized, it can be regulated for safety and, even more importantly, taxed. Why not have marijuana contribute to the economy in the same vein as alcohol and tobacco? Do you think it should remain illegal?
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No, you misunderstand. I support legalization of marijuana. I have to wonder, however, why it is getting legalized now. I’m seeing a connection with the unrelenting recession.
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Because you country is going bankrupt and its asinine to continue to police(which costs a fortune) a substance that has very low side effects in general.
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“Because you country is going bankrupt and its asinine to continue to police(which costs a fortune) a substance that has very low side effects in general.”
– I’m not a Marxist, so this isn’t an explanation that is likely to work for me. If the US were motivated by what is profitable to the Treasury, we would see neither Iraq and Afghanistan wars, nor the overblown defense budget, nor the brouhaha over the sequester, nor the disinvestment of education, etc., etc.
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Obviously this is a victory.
I don’t think legalizing has anything to do with placating the masses. I think the reason it happened is that the stigma around pot as being a degenerate’s drug has lessened in the last five years and the fact that pot is BIG business. As far as I know, marijuana has all but turned around California’s economy and other states are greedy for this income as well.
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“I think the reason it happened is that the stigma around pot as being a degenerate’s drug has lessened in the last five years and the fact that pot is BIG business.”
– The stigma around psychotropic drugs has also disappeared. Now we have a zombified population that seems to not care at all about the erosion of the civil rights, the collapse of the economy, the rollback of all the advances of the 1960s-70s.
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Those things are correlated, but is there causation as well?
Cocaine use is highly stigmatized now, but in the 80’s this was a very normal thing in certain social circles ( yuppies).
Legalizing all drugs will be a huge progression for the U.S. Hopefully, prostitution will quickly follow suit.
I have so many ravenously politically active friends, I just don’t see the ‘zombified’ population thing.
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My students care about nothing. Most of them had no idea that a presidential election was going on in 2012. My colleagues have absolutely no comment to make when academic freedom is being eaten up and their contracts are being disposed of.
As a foreigner, I find it unbelievable that this is the same country that stunned the world with the civil rights movement, the workers’ movements, the student protests, the feminist revolution of the 1960s-1970s.
There was an Occupy Wall Street protest on my campus. Eight students participated. I asked in class what people thought about the movement and they just looked bored and shrugged. I asked students what they think about the global economic crisis and the response was “What crisis?”
During an oral exam, students were asked to talk about their political beliefs. All they had to say was, “I’m against abortion” and “I hate Obamacare.” Both ideas were delivered in mechanical, bored voices.
My blog’s readers know that I’m not into negativism and hopelessness but in terms of political engagement today, I see nothing going on. I watched a documentary about the student protests of the 1960s last week and I actually cried. If I could see this passion and engagement in my students on absolutely any subject whatsoever, even something silly like video games or becoming rich and famous, something, but I’m not seeing anything.
As I said, I support the legalization of all drugs and of prostitution. However, I can’t avoid thinking that these developments will lead to even greater meekness, contentedness with the status quo, and emptiness of political life.
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“Cocaine use is highly stigmatized now, but in the 80′s this was a very normal thing in certain social circles ( yuppies).”
– A colleague’s fiance worked for Microsoft and got arrested for cocaine use after 6 years of regular consumption. He had absolutely no feelings of shame over this and said it was something people he worked with did to get through their high-powered jobs. This was in 2006. I don’t know if the attitude towards this drug changed since then.
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There was a lot of bush fire smoke in the city when I made this video, so my state of consciousness was a little altered. Eucalypt smoke revs you up and makes you feel slow at the same time. There’s a stimulant in it, but you can’t seem to function.
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Isnt policing paid for on a regional level? It makes economic sense for cities to spend their money more efficiently and policing marijuana isn’t one of them.
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Yeah, but *why* does the police want to allocate their resources elsewhere? Smoking pot just doesn’t feel like a crime the way it used to.
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Yes … YES … more Soma and mumbledypeg. 🙂
I for one support our “Brave New World”. *sinister snicker*
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Former Colorado Jail Might Transform Into a Massive Marijuana Grow Facility
http://marijuana.com/news/2014/07/former-colorado-jail-might-transform-into-a-massive-marijuana-grow-facility/
As is said, sometimes life is stranger than fiction.
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