The Cannabis Catastrophe (Pot softens brains: Stoners don't care)

The Daily Mail [UK] ^ | January 26 2003 | Melanie Phillips

[quidnunc]

As David Blunkett contemplates the chaos and fury triggered by his decision to downgrade the law on cannabis, he could do worse than consider the case of Dominique Lansdowne.

Eleven years ago, when she was 18, the former care assistant from Swindon started smoking cannabis once a week. ‘After a couple of weeks, I found it was addictive’, she said. ‘As soon as you start you get the feeling you’re completely relaxed and calm, but then you crave it. I used it more and more until I was smoking it every day. Then I couldn’t work because I was too stoned all the time. I was so paranoid I couldn’t leave the house.

‘I haven’t worked for the past six years. I lost all my friends and nearly lost my family. I couldn’t afford to pay my mortgage, my house was repossessed, I had to live in a hostel. I was in hospital three times, and couldn’t cope at all in the community. I had no social skills left. My life was in tatters. I didn’t stop completely until two years ago.

‘I still take anti-psychotics, antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, and will probably have to take medication for the rest of my life. I’m positive cannabis was the cause; I became paranoid as soon as I started smoking it. I’ve known hundreds of people who smoke it; all of them have some kind of paranoia or a problem, whether they recognise it or not.’

All of which makes it truly extraordinary that this Thursday, cannabis will be downgraded from a class B to a class C drug.

The Home Secretary’s move has delighted the drug legalisers — but astonished and horrified those like Dominique, who know the truth about its effects.

Tory leader Michael Howard has boldly declared that a future Conservative government will reverse the policy. Yet Mr Blunkett’s so called ‘reform’ has already caused many people mistakenly to believe cannabis is now legal or safe to use.

Despite ministers’ desperate insistence that it remains illegal and dangerous, putting cannabis in the same category as slimming pills, painkillers, tranquillisers and anabolic steroids sends the inescapable signal that it is not very dangerous after all.

Dominique Lansdowne knows what nonsense this is. Before she used cannabis, she had not even smoked tobacco; afterwards she also tried speed, LSD and ecstasy. ‘I would never have touched hard drugs if I hadn’t taken cannabis. Reclassification is really dreadful and sad because the government is saying cannabis isn’t that bad and so people are going to take it thinking it’s not going to do them any harm.’

-snip-

[muawiyah]

Why not equate "child rape" and being a doper. It's all the same. When they've consumed a tad too much they'll rape a child, or their mother, or somebody walking down the street, should they decide that it's time for sex.

Doesn't mean they'll succed since serious torpor is a common element at the time they come to those conclusions.

[Monty22]

For all I know they get a taste for long pig too!

Just kidding heh.

[muawiyah]

That's in Germany, and maybe Denmark if we believe the cannibals they've caught.

There are films of this!

[tacticalogic]

The difference is that there is actual evidence readily available that Gates, Sagan, et al are doing well. The article makes lots of claims, some of them seemingly contradictory. Absent any supporting evidence, why should I believe them?

[Billthedrill]

Precisely. The Assassins were, after all, a heretical sect wiped out by other Muslims who didn't take kindly to the knife-in-the-ribs thing. They smoked hashish, to be sure, but the drug used by them as a sacrament wasn't hash. Laudanum, maybe. Nobody's sure. Anyone wanting to find out more about this really interesting group of Shi'a terrorists might enjoy Bernard Lewis's The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam

The whole Moslem tangent of this thread is a little irrelevant - drug and alcohol use is proscribed in Islam and they do it anyway. So do we. The guys who rode the jets into the WTC weren't high, they were just freakin' nuts.

[muawiyah]

A couple of them were hung over too!

[LibertarianInExile]

Exactly. You can bet that the WCTU squad on here will be stretching to demonstrate 'deaths by cannabis' in the months ahead.

[Billthedrill]

Yeah - I dunno, I remember a certain sake-and-scotch hangover where I'd have considered flying a jet into something myself...

[tacticalogic]

I've heard Ouzo hangovers are like that.

[Billthedrill]

Retsina too. A catalog of my travels in terms of the aftereffects of overindulgence in alcohol may be my legacy to humanity...

[mac_truck]

Check this out. Maybe the dumbest article on marijuana I have ever read.

I doubt very much you read this article beyond the exerpted section. If you did perhaps you wouldn't be so smug.

"People who are well off may use it to chill out at the weekend. Kids here don’t have that luxury. If you feel powerless and everyone is out to get you, it reinforces that. It also disinhibits them; it takes away their sense of morality or the consequences of their actions. The link with mental illness is patently obvious. It infuriates me to hear people say it’s not proven; it’s as if their souls have been taken away.’"

There's plenty of real science mentioned in the article that supports the causal relationship between pot and mental illness. Maybe you should try refuting that, rather than simply scoffing at someone else's misfortune.

[tacticalogic]

Everyone needs a hobby.

[Huck]

That paragraph was written by a moron.

[mac_truck]

The article makes lots of claims, some of them seemingly contradictory.

Name one.

[mac_truck]

are you a mental health expert?

[Huck]

In fact, I think that is the dumbest paragraph in the entire article.

[Huck]

Oh my goodness. Am I now to be subjected to voidire? (I've seen My Cousin Vinny countless times!) Dude, this isn't debate club, ok? I am not obligated to quote sources, form arguments, present facts in a logical sequence, or qualify myself to speak. It's a free country, it's a public forum. I am speaking. I think the article is dumb. You don't. Why is that a problem? Why not just leave it at that?

[mac_truck]

As i suspected. Another mouth without a matching intellect.

[Huck]

The whole Moslem tangent of this thread is a little irrelevant - drug and alcohol use is proscribed in Islam and they do it anyway. So do we. The guys who rode the jets into the WTC weren't high, they were just freakin' nuts

Blame me, Bill. I picked that scab.

[Huck]

Sticks and stones, mac. Sticks and stones.