420

12/14/2008 11:23:20 AM

weed is whack. it kills people everyday. with a gun. and a knife.

12/14/2008 11:29:58 AM

I, too, am sick of hearing about people busted for weed.

it's so completely easy to not break the law.

12/14/2008 11:33:25 AM

Quote :

"it's so completely easy to not break subvert the law."

or so I'm told. by other people. who are not me.

12/14/2008 11:34:59 AM

it's so easy not to get caught...don't be a dumb ass.

12/14/2008 12:05:10 PM

Alcohol is so dangerous its frightening to consider the bargaining and bribing that must have gone down to allow its legal acceptance. I'm almost more alarmed at its social acceptance. Amazing that the general society has no problem with social drinking.

12/14/2008 1:02:14 PM

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/03/23/alcohol-tobacco.html

Quote :

"Alcohol, Tobacco Worse than Pot, Ecstasy: Study New landmark research concludes that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study. In research published Friday in The Lancet, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances. 'The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary.'— Study's authors Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction, and the impact on society of the drug's use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD. Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs' overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other, but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances. Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy. According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a British parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain's drug classification system. "The current drug system is ill thought-out and arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom's practice of assigning drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for harm. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet. Classification debate Tobacco causes 40 per cent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services. Nutt hopes that the research will provoke debate within the U.K. and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by Nutt's study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities. "This is a landmark paper," said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. "It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs." He added that, based on the paper's results, alcohol and tobacco could not reasonably be excluded. "The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol," wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary. Hall was not involved with Nutt's paper. While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved. Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day.""

Science, and myself, tend to disagree with you eleusis. Alcohol is a more harmful drug by any standard. What I'm suggesting is simple legislative fairness. If Alcohol and Tobacco can remain legal, it is simply illogical and unfair to legislate Marijuana as an illegal substance based on harm. The choices and actions of the government in regards to Marijuana laws were not conducted by means of any underlying principle or logic, but by whim or some other decidedly illogical formula. Hence, they are unscientific.

[Edited on December 14, 2008 at 1:26 PM. Reason : -]

12/14/2008 1:21:20 PM

are you fucking obtuse? That article and you are both comparing the dangers of alcohol and pot and trying to use that as the only justification for why weed is better for society than alcohol. You can't look at one aspect of the argument, find one document to back up your stance, and use that to claim science is on your side. Science has proven the medical benefits of alcohol, yet you keep ignoring them.

This is so typical of your average pothead - Rag on the abuse potential of other substances to justify your own drug abuse. If the only thing we had to judge a drug by was it's negative side effects, then chemicals that serve such a useful benefit to the medical community such as opiates and NSAIDS would never be allowed to exist.

12/14/2008 3:47:02 PM

maybe I should take your argument and apply it to why methamphetamines are safer than alcohol. If you saw how methamphetamines have less overdose potential than alcohol, would you want to argue in favor of their decriminalization?

12/14/2008 3:51:25 PM

I think the whole point of the article was to show that the way drugs in Britain and in the US are not classified due to their effects. But legislated based on the current leaders in power and their particular ideology.

12/14/2008 4:08:08 PM