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I posted this because I’m concerned about a young man who is really trying his best to continue his sobriety after months in an intensive addiction program to fight cocaine use. With the anxiety (job stress - working to save money, baby-on-the-way) he’s smoking a lot of weed. There’s a belief that its non addictive and the article notes dependence and addiction. Recently he displayed some unusual paranoia, and of course I wondered if the pot he smokes is laced with something etc. And then this article cited ER visits from pot dependence/addiction.

I know that some FReepers descend on threads like these to post their boilerplate denunciations of ANY concern about weed. They blurt other things are worse, we still have alcohol etc. but the documented mental health and societal issues some of us post about are ignored.

There’s a vast, well-funded push to flood the US with fentanyl, meth etc. and there’s a push to legalize pot everywhere, and I believe they’re part of the same effort.

There are oceans of pro-pot articles purporting to ‘prove’ pot is good, and imply that the only problem are pot’s detractors who are bad, ignorant, prude, bigoted etc. Incredible amounts of money have been spent to ‘win’ the right to force every state in the nation to accept week like a glass of wine after dinner, so the society costs/losses continue to grow.

In this article the ER visits for pot addiction and dependence point to a massive issue which can only have gotten worse since the article was written. But there will be no discussion of that issue - instead there will be false attempts to equate alcohol with pot.

The societal impacts are very different - pot is not equivalent to alcohol. Just one example - the kids in states which legalize pot skip school more or are too high to function on school grounds. The pot lobby is way ahead of us - they arranged to have school resource officers NOT REPORT high, incapacitated students to police or parents, but instead keep them on campus until they ‘come down’. For that reason, there are some schools which have diving actual attendance to academic courses because while the students are there, they can’t function. What would a 15 year old rather do? Attend school and study geometry, or get high and sleep/snack it off?

This new policy enacted to conceal incapacitated pot users on campus protects the public from realizing what a horrible problem they have on their hands with minors incapacited minors focusing on weed instead of working toward graduating from high school. We are paying for student attendace (federal funding of schools) and dthat’s probably why they keep the kids on campus, but school policies protect the students from actually having to attend class, or notify their parents.
That ‘protect-the-pot-smoking teenager’ policy is new, even though alcohol has been around for a LOOOOONG time. The kids weren’t being kept on campus in large numbers ‘too drunk’ to function, but they ARE being detained at school for being too high to function. No one pro-alcohol worked like the pot lobby does to protect pot use in minors from being exposed.
Many factors contribute to the disparity of societal impacts, but using the high school example, alcohol requires more time/volume of intake and can be smelled on the breath easily, and can be determined through blood alcohol tests. Courts use blood alcohol tests to determine things like ‘public drunkeness’.

By contrast, pot users can consume less product with a bigger ‘high’. Weed now comes in many, many variants that don’t smell like traditional weed, and then add in vape devices with their concoctions and the corridors become a thick fog of odors that make it hard for me to breath.

Imagine the public outcry if highschools detained on campus significant numbers of students just there to get drunk. What might parental and public sentiments be surrounding the ‘don’t-notify-anyone=if-students-too-drunk-to=function.

This article details mental health issues re pot use, but the justifications ignore the point of the article. Comments posted attack the implied content of the article, based on having read only the title of the thread. Inevitably, some on any pot thread turn it into a debate on alcohol - that’s not an accident. The pot cartels distribute talking points - this thing is FUNDED to roll over any public awareness or objection, because ‘the spice must flow.”