My view on almost everything is you can swing your fist as much as you want until it hits the tip of my nose. If you want to get high in your own home I don't care if you're shooting up heroin. My problem with drugs is it causes addiction which then impacts the community with homelessness, social service burdens, and crime. If you do get high for God's sake don't drive! I don't want you killing a member of my family because you were wasted and needed some Twinkies.
I smoked dope from about 17 to 22. Not steady during those years but sometimes pretty heavy. I can tell you nothing good ever came of it. Some friends were arrested and my school performance sucked. Once I stopped I was able to get some great things accomplished. Getting my Master's in Geology was hard. Years of high-level mathematics, chemistry, physics, and of course geology classes. As a grad student, you had to keep a 3.5 GPA. There's no way I could have done it while smoking dope.
My son never smoked or even drank much. You can't be a party animal and become a mechanical engineer.
Unfortunately Steve, your posts sound like you are lumping everyone that smokes into a bunch of heroin addicted homeless people begging on street corners or breaking into houses for a joint. It's simply not true . I know many people that smoke on a regular basis, and most are very successful in their jobs. The ones that don't do it? It's because in their state it's still illegal and it's not worth losing their job/house/criminal record over.
Everybody reacts differently to stuff, whether it's pot, cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, even food. Some people can't eat dairy, while others drink gallons of milk. Some people can smoke a cigarette once or twice a week, for others one cig turns into a 2 pack a day addiction. For me, kissing a smoker is enough to trigger the urge to light one one up again. Just look at ads for drugs with their warnings, some of which basically say "This may cure your sniffles, but there is a good chance it will kill you, talk to your doctor now about Enditall".
As for pot being addicting, I say no, it is not, and that's from personal experience with both it, nicotine and a substance that used to come in soda. Pot, stop on a dime. Soda stuff, took some work but beat it. Nicotine, there's a reason they equate quitting it to giving up heroin, but only without methadone, it felt like the marrow was being pulled from my bones. . Yet it's 100% legal in every city, state, and most countries.
My posting about GW smoking a doob on a book cover in HS? The article said the tobacco manufacturers at the time already had the growing farms, machines to roll into products that could be packaged. And the article said the price at the time (early 80's), would remain the same, because half would be price of pot, and the other half tax. And they'd make enough off the "sin" tax (what we call it on alcohol and tobacco that doubled the price of it) that theoritically,(we all know it'd never happen), it could erase the need for all other taxes.
And for the record... I can't smoke it anymore due to health reasons. And gummies don't work.
I will say a good friend who ran a repair shop in California had to close it down over pot. The area where his shop was located was designated the "pot processing" part of town. His landlord had an offer he couldn't refuse on the building, kicked him out "sue me, I'll still be rich". and moved to another location with less than desirable tenants. He finally had to move out of the state because the smell of it was getting him sick.
