Posts by Kong
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A proper vaporizer does a better job, btw. The crackpipe method works but it's an art that does take a bit of time to learn, and it's easy to overheat and thus burn the stash, which means smoking some of it. The downside to vaporizers is that the electric ones take quite a while to heat up, no good for a quick session. Also they require a power socket. I think there are even more expensive gas powered ones, which would be fully portable, but really, no one wants to carry a vaporizer around - they're a strictly at-home affair. With that in mind, there are some very easy alternatives. You can put your stash in a sealed microwave bag, give it a buzz in the device, and suck the vapors out of the bag. You could just put it in a pot on the stove with a tight lid, and stick a straw in to suck out the vapors.
It all works, but the problem is that when you find a really good way of having your stash, you end up having a lot of it. If you're vaporizing for health reasons, you're still missing the point that health-wise, you're better off not taking any pot at all.
Which brings me to my final thoughts on legislation - if you really are coming from the harm minimization angle, then you've opened the door to the idea of prohibition. There is little question that the stuff does you some harm. Only total dreamers think it's utterly harmless.
Which is why I don't think that this 'softly softly' approach to trying to get the uninformed masses to accept legalization in tiny steps, starting first with medical dope, then maybe decriminalization and health programs for addicts etc, will ever work. Fundamentally, it's still buying into the mindset that the state is there to protect us from harm to ourselves. Which makes it a schizophrenic position, IMHO, so totally appropriate for a pipe-dream. There will still always be the totally compelling point (for people who have bought into that mindset) that the stuff is still potentially harmful. It is, that's a fact.
To me, the most glaring point about it is that it shouldn't matter if it is harmful to oneself . That's what's so stupid and wrong about the current laws, that there are so many goddamned things that are perfectly legal which are far, far more harmful than pot. If you open the door to the idea that it's about the balance of harms, then far from opening the door to legalization, you're really opening the door to more prohibition of those other things. To even be discussing the subject in those terms is the very reason that pot is banned.
It was, after all, the reason that piss was banned, all those years ago - because of the harms it caused to users and society. I have never really bought into the idea that it was unbanned because the harm caused by prohibition, in terms of crime, was greater. If that were so, then the equivalent harm caused by the war on drugs would have been a compelling argument to end that. But it is not. The real reason is because piss drinking is so widespread, that lots of people actually remembered the other side of the moral equation, the pleasure people get from drinking piss. And they realized that that actually matters. But for drugs less widely used, or less frequently used, it's easy to forget that, or never to have taken account of it in the first place. Then it's all about viral finger-waggling, a vicious cycle in which you can revenge yourself on others not by hurting them, but by taking their pleasures away. Humanity at it's finest, puritanical, and sad.
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Vaporizing dope is really easy to do in a $15 P pipe and a $5 jet lighter, but it looks so ghetto. Not quite as ghetto as the popular alternative for crack smokers, a broken light bulb. The main problem with vaporizing is that the leftover browned leaves still have some latent power, so people keep them. Then when they run out of green, they revert to smoking the vaporized ones, and they're at square one again. Of course if supply was assured, then running out wouldn't happen, and the brown stuff could be chucked out or just given to guests you don't like.
Of course you get wickedly high the first time you try it, because it's so unlike smoking that you overdose. But one of the neat things about dope is that no-one has ever died of an overdose, the most that happens in extreme cases is that you might fall asleep. Very quickly you learn to spot what the vapors look like, and it's just like smoking, but without the burned throat, stinky smell, risk of cancer, holes in the lungs, inhaled lighter fluid, etc. It does involve shonky looking apparatus though, and it is more 'wasteful' than smoking, in that it does take more pot to get you the same high. It's silly that such a concern figures so highly, that people don't want to waste $5 worth of dope during a night of fun so that they can massively reduce the harm and pain to themselves. That's the same price as a beer, which most people would happily shell out for another one of, and wouldn't have the slightest qualm about tipping out if it got too warm. But beer is a lot easier to get than pot.
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My point was that 100% of you cocaine dollar funds murderous criminal gangs, whereas the same can not be said of oil.
That is true. Mining and distributing oil is not illegal, so you don't need to be a criminal gang to do it. But murderous seems to go with it pretty much automatically and on a scale that dwarfs the drug war.
None of that is an argument to criminalize oil, which is simply a good, like cocaine. That it is used to kill people in ways only dreamed of in the 19th century is simply a byproduct of how useful it is. The more useful and desirable, the more people will kill for it. People were enslaved for centuries making sugar and cotton, but everyone can see that the answer to that was their emancipation, rather than banning sugar and cotton.
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Two horses walk into a bar. The first one says "I thought you would have seen that"
The second one says "Why didn't you say something?"
"I did, but I think my voice was a little hoarse"
"Teach you to have that little racehorse just now"
"Your Mama!"
"I wish it was your Mama, she's so fat, she ..."etc.
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Stimulants for the Stimulus?
Growers for Growth! Don't stash cash, buy stash! We'll settle the hash of this downturn. The seeds of revival are home grown! Hydro powered hydro led recovery! Nip the recession in the Bud!
Should a joint as part of good parental relaxation or individual medication be a criminal offence in NZ?
So long as they don't mean joint in the horrid European sense of mixing lovely local herbs 'jointly' with nasty foreign ones.
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If oil were prohibited then I'm sure there would be oil-runners and dealers maintaining the supply to the enormous existing base of petrol-heads. But the petrol would be low octane, or even worse, cut with alcohol, so your car would go slower, and get a headache. Illegal petrol labs would be blowing up all the time. Moralists would point out the millions of people who die in vehicle accidents every year, including innocent children. Idealists would say that petrol fumes are good for you, giving you improved self-esteem and a big stonk.
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I thought that was because the world realized that if it was going to be Depressed anyway, it might as well be Pissed too. But unfortunately there is no such connection between being Recessed and Baked.
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It would take a politician with the cojones of a ram to seriously propose an end to prohibition.
While on the other side, it take absolutely no courage at all to score easy points condemning an end to it. Same goes for all condemnation, come to think of it. Waggling your finger at people doing their thing whatever it is seems to score more friends than it makes enemies. It doesn't matter how many people think the thing is OK, so long as those who think it isn't feel strongly enough, and the rest don't care. Saying you think something fun is cool can always be seen as immoral, showing off some weakness of character. But getting bitter on it is seldom seen as weakness of character, indeed it is showing the strength to resist temptation.
Which is why society trends towards more prohibitive all the time. When was the last time the law got more relaxed on anything? It's one of the things I least like about the Old World - everywhere you turn there's someone waggling a finger at you.
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I don't follow Monbiot's line of reasoning at all, when he says that casual use should remain criminalized, to protect the oppressed Columbians. He makes some unproven connection between decriminalization and massively increased demand, and then without any argument at all suggests that would lead to greater levels of oppression for more Columbians. But he isn't suggesting open season for the actual production of coke, so how/why does he conclude that anything at all would change for the Columbian drug slaves? Their shithouse lives are a product of the already existing demand for the drug, and the fact that it can only be produced and distributed illegally, the most economic place being of course the most lawless place with the most conducive climate and the most impoverished population. None of that is going to change just because of increased demand, even if demand does actually increase, something we can't be sure of.
I guess the missing premises in his argument are that increased demand would lead to increased profits, enabling the cocaine producers to expand their operations, and tempting others into the market. But missing from that is the possibility that decriminalization might also lower the value of the drug, making it less profitable, and would have the exact opposite effect.
So I find his finger waggling at casual users bizarre, especially in context of the idea of treating addicts less harshly. What is it about having fucked up their lives through overusing the drug that makes them less culpable than the casuals?
But I guess, between the lines, he's really saying that the problem isn't the criminalization of the users, it's the criminalization of the production and distribution, and that ultimately the problem is massively political, and the finger waggling is all about getting bitter on people who feel for oppressed third world slaves but still want to take coke, and won't see that it helps that oppression.
What he misses, in his fixation on the oppressed Columbians is the other goods that could come from decriminalization, in the very society in which it is criminalized. He totally ignores that.
So whilst I agree that the war on drug production pretty much causes the harm to the Columbians, I can't agree that halting the war on users would have no good effect. It just might not help the Columbians very much.