Yeah, hmm, what a mystery. How can this possibly be? It’s not like a psychosis-inducing substance has been legalized and made a staple of young people’s lives.
And for the fiftieth time, it’s not the same marijuana you consumed on 1973. It’s many, many times more potent. Also, if you used this drug in the past 3 months, your opinion on it is not valuable.
This new weed is not the same weed my dad and uncle were smoking in the 70s while listening to Led Zeppelin 😂 But seriously, these new strains of weed are nearly pure THC and can render people inchoate and psychotic instead of just being chill. That stuff back in the day was low-quality homegrown that took forever to get a buzz, more like light beer instead of hard liquor. Maybe someone should update the 60s song The Pusher to be about weed instead of heroin: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3XqyGoE2Q4Y
Huh.
“This is not the weed from the 1970s – this is much stronger weed with different effects” didn’t come up in the all the anti “legalizing- recreational-weed amendment” commercials. Which would be very important.
I can’t speak to weed potency before my time, thirty years or twenty years ago or now, because…I don’t use it and that stuff smells.
We’re in an age where people just want to get blotto, no matter their poison. Or want extra strength something to do capitalism better because changing structures and the environment is seemingly not in an individual’s power.
I’ve never smoked myself but my dad and uncle smoked it back in the 70s and that’s what they said, so I’m just going by what they said. I agree that a lot of people just want to get wasted, people just want to be high and drunk all the time because they feel helpless and don’t think they can change anything. Doing anything in moderation seems very uncool to younger people, this is not like in my parents’ generation where people might have had one drink after work and chilled out
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That might be it, legal marijuana is a huge business in states like California. The industry has good PR where they portray themselves as outlaws or genial hippies, when in reality a lot of the big marijuana farms are run by cartels and criminal gangs. People seem to think they’re buying from an old hippie or outlaw, but actually they’re benefiting the cartels. If one really wants to smoke it, they’d be better off growing their own plants instead
I think what you’re getting at is the idea of luxury beliefs, per the author Rob Henderson. He’s written that ideas and actions that are dangerous are often pushed by wealthy and high status people who often don’t suffer the consequences, but are actively harmful to the poor and working class. Wealthy people who smoke weed won’t suffer the same way as poor people, poor people will bear the brunt of drug abuse compared to higher status people
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Maybe?
But also… no. There’s got to be more to that one, and I think a lot of it is simply that so many states have legalized as a result of very well-funded lobbying efforts. There’s money in it. It wasn’t our pothead uncles who ran those campaigns.
We can all still say that Uncle J’s pot habit is not doing good things for his life. It is self-evident. But if you say anything negative online… the troll hordes jump in to tell you what an awful person you are. I’m inclined to think that’s not just people who’ve taken it on themselves as a personal crusade. There are always a few of those, of course, but anything that chums the waters on the internet in that way… has got paid trolls. And that means it’s a question of money, power, or both.
That could be it, I remember seeing all these big campaigns to legalize weed years ago when before it was a fringe issues. Before the big push, legalizing weed was a fringe issue promoted by some libertarians, old hippies and anarchists. Most people could care less and people who smoked just bought it and smoked without it being a huge deal.
Years ago I thought legalization was a good idea to stop clogging up our court system, a friend of mine is a bailiff at the country courthouse and a lot of the cases were low-level pot dealers or people who got caught with small amounts. At the time I thought it was a good idea in order to stop clogging up our courthouse with small fries, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this bad. But there’s too much money involved to make it illegal again, it’s best not to smoke it in the first place
We are, right now, going through some kind of civilization-wide culling process, sloughing off people with low IQ, low self-control, and high hedonic impulse, in the ugliest possible way.
A friend once told me a divorce-custody story, where the addict mom had (of course) gotten custody in the divorce, because she’d never been arrested for drugs, so there was no papertrail to say she was an unfit parent. Dad had money though, and over the following couple of years, every time the ex called him up asking for money, he gave it to her. More than she asked for, steady stream of cash, knowing she’d spend it on drugs. Finally OD’d and he got the kid.
It feels kind of like we are doing that on a nationwide scale now. OK, do all the drugs you want. Here’s some more. No, there’s nothing wrong with it. Everybody does it right? Don’t stigmatize! That’s mean! Even the illegal stuff… with no border enforcement, it’s cheaper and more available than ever. And we seem really determined not to do anything to slow it down.
I saw a chart recently, that showed both the meteoric rise in overdose deaths in the US over the last several years– it really starts to take off in 2015, IIRC, divides it up by cocaine, synthetic opioids, heroin, “other”… and there’s a really interesting dip in the numbers recently. It’s an open question *why* that dip is in there. Is it a collating error– like, we don’t have all the death certificates tallied for this time period, so this is simply incorrect? Or has it really declined? And if the decline is real, why? Is it possible that we’ve now, with our lax policies, killed off so many susceptible people, that there just aren’t as many around now?
Who benefits?
That’s a horrifying idea, but it makes sense. People who are inclined to get addicted to substances are often the same kinds of people seen as useless by elites, like with pharmaceutical companies dumping pills in depressed areas of Appalachia and then mocking the victims. This is a population already seen as useless by a lot of other people and so dumping pills on them makes sense in a disgusting, eugenic way *sarc*
It’s similar to how many people thought crack was invented by the CIA to destabilize poor black and Hispanic communities, to regress the progress of the 70s and the Civil Rights movement. From that standpoint, flooding inner-city areas with drugs makes sense to retard progress and get rid of undesirable people. Or in the late 40s when heroin flooded poor black communities via the Mafia, who wanted to make money off drugs but not hurt their own people like in The Godfather. In these cases, powerful people benefit from “useless people” killing themselves without actual murder
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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