It's official - California's gone to pot.

I was not answering your question - just filling in some information that you were missing in your emotive response.

No, a simple legalisation is not the answer. Indeed, there /is/ no one specific answer - it depends on many factors. There will always need to be balances and compromises, and these will be different in different places. It is, however, simple to identify /wrong/ answers - anything involving phrases like "war on drugs" or "zero tolerance" is an automatic failure.

In Norway, drug usage is no longer a crime. It is classified as a health problem. IMHO, this is a big step forward (it is marred by the lack of clinics and limited treatment - but it is the right idea). Drug sales are still crimes (marred by weak enforcement here).

But if you want to deal with a problem, you first have to /understand/ it. You need to break it down into parts. Ask /why/ people take drugs

- if you don't understand that, you can /never/ stop it. Consider all the different reasons - and work at dealing with these. Do people understand the risks involved? Maybe better education campaigns are a good idea. Ask where people are getting the drugs - what can be done to limit the supply? Ask what the consequences of that might be - if you cut off supply of one kind of drug, will others fill the market gap and leave you just as badly off? Ask where the real health risks are - if we accept that people are going to take drugs, can they be made safer? (In Denmark, there are rooms where heroin addicts can go to smoke the drug - by moving the addicts over to smoking rather than injecting, they have greatly reduced the overdoses and health problems from heroin.)

You have to accept that this is not a "war", it is not something to "win", and "zero tolerance" is just another phrase for "zero thought". People /will/ take drugs to feel better - as relaxants, to get "high", to get a feeling of more energy. You will /never/ stop that. What you want is to reduce the percentage of people taking the drugs, increase the starting age, reduce the quantity they take, reduce the negative impact it has on their lives, cut crime out of the picture, get the profits into mainstream society (legal businesses and taxes rather than criminals), control the quality of the drugs, encourage the least bad choices (marijuana is far less of a problem than most other drugs - even heroin, when clean, is a safer choice than many modern alternatives), and generally reduce the side-effects and risks as much as possible.

That is a lot to balance - there are no easy answers.

Probably the most useless idea is to call it a "war" and use brute force to try to jail everyone involved in making, distributing, selling or using drugs. (Actually, the worst is the Philippine idea of giving police a free pass to shoot anyone they suspect, or claim to suspect, is involved in drugs.)

I wasn't even old enough to vote for the first one, in either of his terms. You'll have to take that howler up with the people responsible, i.e. other cranky senior citizens

America's dangerous drug of addiction isn't alcohol or marijuana, or in fac t anything chemical, but rather religion - not the kind of religion where y ou think about how you behave and what you believe, but the kind you buy wh olesale from the sort of people who tell you how to act, what to think and who to vote for.

/521409/

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

In the extreme case, the entire California legislature could be arrested for conspiracy to violate Federal law.

That would be great.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I usually avoid any off topic posts, but this thread touched a nerve with me. I dont use any "recreational drugs", unless you want to classify alcohol as one. And my drinking is normally zero to 5 beers in a week. (most of the time zero).

On New Years ever I went to a party and it was a mixed crowd of seniors as well as youth. It pretty much ended up with the older people sitting at the bar talking, or using the pool table. The younger ones were mostly in a cabin next door, but came to the bar to get drinks. We were asked to not smoke indoors (cigarettes). As the night progressed and many of the people were pretty intoxicated, they were smoking indoors and no one said anything about it. The cigarette smoke dont bother me, but one of them young guys walked up to the bar smoking something that smelled exactly like a skunk, in fact more like a dead skunk.

I have asthma and as soon as I got a whiff of that crap, I went into a coughing fit and had to use my inhaler. I immediately said "what is that horrid stink?". That guy was told to go outside with his dope. But someone told me that is how all pot smells now. All I can say, is that i'd vomit if I had to smoke that crap.

40+ years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I smoked a little pot. Everyone did at that time. But back then, it had a sweet almost pleasant smell. I would get a little stoned, eat everything in sight and play the stereo loud, but I always knew what I was doing unless I drank too much alcohol too.

I have heard that the pot today is stronger, but I did not know it was

10X stronger. But stronger or not, why does it have such a horrible smell now? I've been asking that since NY eve. I actually thought someone tossed a dead skunk in that room. And that actually sent me home, because that odor lingered in that room, and was bothering me, so I went home.

To smell that bad would indicate to me that it contains something more than just pot. What other drugs and/or chemicals are added to it?

Do they even have the old (nice smelling) pot anymore, or does it all smell this terrible?

I'm sure glad I quit using stuff like that in the mid 70s. I cant see how anyone could smoke this foul stuff....

Lol, ya, a lot of Poles were probably all for the annexation of Austria, too.

Sure, fentanyl and speed and hepatitus and HIV are just good clean fun.

One of these days someone is going to synthesize something really euphoric and absolutely addictive.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

The social problems "come" from the fact that America has socialization problems i.e. the average level of emotional maturity of an American is approximately 8 years old

If you glance thru the number of responses on this usenet group that more or less consist of "You're a poopiehead!" as a rebuttal you might get my meaning

I've heard it's a new variety created by breeding, so no chemicals.

I haven't caught a whiff of the old smell since the 80's. For a long time I thought we had an infestation of skunks because the smell is on the highway all the time. Cops don't seem to be doing anything to discourage that.

Yeah but it should have happened because of sanctuary cities.

But you voted for the bitch in a pants suit, which is even worse. You knew the crook you were voting for.

Frog-marching MoonBeam would be a good start.

That makes as much sense as anything else you've written here.

At least the no chemicals sounds like a good thing, but that has to be some real bad breeding.....

I kind of liked the smell of the old stuff, even after I quit using it.

I now know what I smelled last summer when we were camping and had some rowdy neighbors who did a lot of drinking. I complained to my friends about a skunk. I remember one of them saying it's pot. I thought they were joking and I just laughed and said thats no pot, thats skunk.

I guess our neighbors were doing more than drinking....

If it smells that bad from a distance, I cant see how anyone can smoke it..... YECH!!!

Lol, what if I told you that that there are many many "leftists" who refused to vote for Obama or Hillary? Their rationale being that they were too 'conservative'/not actual socialists or Communists/beholden to Wall Street/corporate interests/etc.

Well I'm not one of them. Guess that means we're buddies now, right? I mean, I'm more right than they are! Right?

You'll never read more savage rippings of "Crooked Hillary" than you will in some of the far-left press. The smarmy prose all those middle-aged squares at Brietbart and Townhall et al jot about her is total amateur hour by comparison. Kiddie stuff.

I'd say you're nuts (but it would have nothing to do with what you just said).

No, you've always been wrong.

Wait, I thought we were supposed to be _against_ the Federal government interfering in people's personal lives. Now you want to go arrest a bunch of state legislators for telling them to f*ck off on behalf of their citizens who want just that. So what is it you want, exactly?