And I know a lot of people who use medical marijuana on a daily basis and who are completely productive and indistinguishable from anyone else. Hell, they’re better off than those using opiates that are prescribed for pain, or any number of other traditional pharmaceuticals that the marijuana replaces.
The thing that makes slackers slackers is not marijuana. Marijuana is what slackers turn to to, well, slack. I’ve had far, far more problems with people using alcohol, by a long shot.
I don’t work with this group anymore, but it is absolutely true to say that in addition to drug use many of the young people in the program that I did work with came from troubled houses and homes, were dealing with criminal backgrounds and in some cases were also very young parents. So absolutely, it was not just the drug use. However, once we successfully weaned them off, they became easier to work with. Now it could also be they just felt more hopeful about their future… I don’t know. I wonder though if there is a different affect on young developing brains than the say middle-aged retired group. Because of early drug use, some of their brains were probably delayed developmentally.
It’s legal in my state now, and the older group that uses it seems just as productive as they were when they didn’t. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’d heard that that’s the group that began buying it in larger amount, the retirees not the kids.
I believe that there is legitimate scientific reasoning to believe that Marijuana can have developmental impacts on young people, and really shouldn’t be used until they are adults. But the same goes for Alcohol.
I have no problem with medical marijuana and with recreational use, but I will agree with you from my own experiences (and the weed wasn’t as good then) that daily use does make many people “lazy”, or maybe just less outgoing when it comes to doing the things you need to do to succeed. And while I understand there is no medical “addiction” with weed I do believe people become psychologically addicted to it.
And as with you, yea, just anecdotal.
Heh, in college we had an epiphany regarding weed.
Weed isn’t necessarily anti-motivational. Rather, it just makes whatever you are doing, cool. So if you are just sitting around doing nothing, then that’s cool.
But if you go out and do something, whatever it is you do WILL ALSO BE COOL. Go to the park? COOL. Go Hiking? COOL. Go to class? COOL.
That last one was a really great epiphany, where you could smoke weed and then go to class, and it’d be really awesome. This freaked me out once when I went to what I expected was a review for our networking final, but ended up being the actual final itself which I had not prepared for. But then I took it while stoned and got a 97%, so lolz to that.
It’s been a long time since I smoked weed, but in retrospect I don’t feel that it harmed me or my productivity at all when I was in college.
Yeah I agree with this. In my salad days as a musician, we used to work long hours in the studio stoned, and were often tremendously productive. It does take a bit of experience and conscious effort to work around the tendency to get into the weeds though - e.g. an hour tweaking a hi-hat, that sort of thing. And sometimes, because everything sounds cool, it gets hard to decide what would actually sound cool to a punter in the cold light of day.
I went the way of Hemingway in grad school and decided to try writing while under moderate-heavy alcoholic influence. It worked, at least for me. The words flowed. I expected heavy editing the next morning, sober, but that wasn’t the case either. Carried a 4.0 gpa too, so. . . .
David Eckert was pulled over for rolling a stop sign. A police K-9 that wasn’t certified to do drug searches alerted to the presence of marijuana, but the cops couldn’t find any, so they went to a judge, who granted a body-cavity search warrant. The cops wanted the search carried out by medical professionals, but they had to go to two hospitals before they found doctors who were willing to cooperate.
Tim Lynch has the rest of the story.
“First, the doctors took an x-ray of Eckert’s abdomen, which showed no hidden drugs,” he explained. “Next, they forcibly probed Eckert’s anus with their fingers, which again uncovered no drugs. Undeterred, the doctors inserted an enema and forced Eckert to defecate in front of the officers: again, no drugs. The enema search was repeated twice, and still no drugs were found. Another x-ray was taken: no drugs. To cap off Eckert’s nightmare ordeal, the officers had the doctors sedate him and perform a colonoscopy, probing his anus, colon, rectum, and large intestines. No drugs found. All of this was done against Eckert’s protest, in a county not covered by the search warrant, with part of the search done after the warrant had expired.”
That was a response to suspicion of possessing a tiny amount of marijuana!
Stepping back, there’s the question of what the law ought to be. And it seems to me that there’s a choice before Americans. Do they want to be the sort of society where armed agents of the state occasionally probe the rectums or vaginas of innocents in search of drugs, or the sort of society where actual drug dealers can, with forethought, occasionally conceal a tiny amount of illegal narcotics from police officers?
The right choice in a civilized society seems clear to me.
Yet it is not the choice that Americans have made. I am constantly astonished that a nation of people who are too libertarian for national ID cards or strict gun control permit a status quo in which agents of the state routinely penetrate the most private of parts.
Yet it is not the choice that Americans have made. I am constantly astonished that a nation of people who are too libertarian for national ID cards or strict gun control permit a status quo in which agents of the state routinely penetrate the most private of parts.
This is the part that gets me, and I’m actually on the side of “too libertarian for ID cards or strict gun control” part of the equation. Yet people who are there as well have no issue with these sorts of things (along with security theater and the like). I guess as long as it happens to Other People it doesn’t count. You know, until YOU are Other People.
I’m always baffled by this too. How people can pretend to be libertarians but then not entirely reject this kind of absurd violation of rights.
I mean, i understand how cold want to support cops. Cops have tough jobs. They are, for the most part, good people.
But supporting cops didn’t mean excusing them when they do terrible things. Hell, excusing bad cops for shit like this just makes it harder for the good cops to do their jobs.
It’s pretty easy actually, just accuse anyone else who claims to be a libertarian of not being a true libertarian.