I am acquainted with people who firmly believe the Devil's Plant is terrible and shouldn't be legal anywhere — what then?
Before legalization, one of the biggest reasons for arrests was marijuana offenses. Not only were police the biggest expenses on many towns' budgets, but many municipalities relied on revenue from those marijuana arrests to balance their own budgets. Now cops are scrambling to manufacture other victimless crimes in order to justify their budgets and compensation, as well as keeping their employers afloat.
I guess we need baby steps but idk if social sharing is enough. A big problem with the current drug world is not getting clean and pure substances and in predictable doses. I didn't see anything about like lsd labs and stores or mdma production being allowed in the bill. Did i miss something about making higher quality drugs more available to regular people?
Decriminalizing, to me, is just having an industry tell you they don’t want to be regulated or illegal, and that’s absurd!
A big step for research though!
I'd really like to know if this is bullshit or not lol https://www.bluelight.org/xf/threads/what-is-wrong-with-the-...
You can’t sell corrective eyeglasses without a license.
You can’t buy (or sell) penicillin without licenses.
I could go on.
California has thousands of ridiculous, out-dated, laws.
Yet, I see no groundswell of support for getting rid of them.
My point is, this isn’t about generic ‘decriminalization’ or libertarianism or personal liberty.
Rather, it’s about intoxicants.
It is worth stopping and wondering what is behind this trend of increasing the number of intoxicated people (whether it be through recreational drugs or prescribed drugs.)
I don’t know the answer, but you’re whistling past the graveyard by telling yourself it’s simply about cleaning up or reforming the criminal code. If it were, we would be starting with truly harmless activities such as taking money to put a weave in your girlfriends hair without a license (misdemeanor).
Ending the WoD prohibition and decriminalization is the way to go to stop incarcerating poor and minorities, ending violence in many countries, and decriminalizing personal choices.
PS: Ketamine, acid, and shrooms are on my bucket list.
Suspending one's mind into an altered state while being aware of the grave consequences that would result if getting caught –effectively defenseless while high– makes me think hypervigilance is almost a rational response to that situation.
I've seen heavy users succumb to conspiracies but such cases were ultimately a symptom of schizophrenia. There has been research into use of drugs and mental illness.
Alcohol intoxication on the other hand, doesn't share the taboo, but paranoid ideations seem plenty. Intoxicated people misread signals, pick up malicious intent wherever and the paranoia that results blows back on the people most important to the person.
These substances can make you more susceptible.
David Icke, was he writing or speaking about conspiracy before he encountered psychedelics or after? What about Terence McKenna and his intriguing Timewave Zero nonsense?
Edit: satirical joke
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/08/07/tenderloin-hero...
Anyone know the probability that this will make it all the way to becoming law?
Amazing! I’ve been curious about LSD but it’s kinda hard to get. Also glad to see ibogaine, ketamine, and MDMA on here in addition to psylocibin as they all have great medical potential.
Really hope this is signed in to law!
https://www.verywellmind.com/does-cocaine-have-any-legit-med...
Cocaine has very useful medical effects which is why it's a lower category.
> This bill would repeal those provisions.
Does this mean that the bill lets California start promoting unlawful use of drugs and alcohol? What is the purpose of this change?
> I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with no difficulty at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I’m not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you’re high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don’t advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done.
Limiting the speed cars can drive is a much better mitigation, along with better city design to avoid car use, and minizmize fast car use.
The approach of "what if the driver's attention is impaired by <thing>"
Has to be rehashed for every instance of <thing> and is never going to fix the root of the problem - that cars are dangerous
I imagine the ratios are similar for alcohol, cannabis and tobacco. Subjecting the 95% to threats of fines and jail time for the 5% is wrong. But it would make sense to use this new tax base as a platform for addressing our homeless and mental health problems.
Also the parent commenter on “tax base” is misguided. We’re not talking about legalizing and taxing drugs, just not locking people up for victimless crimes.
The way this comment is written makes it sound as if 100% of people will be using psychedelics after decriminalization goes into effect.
100%? Of course not, but some who are susceptible will likely be in that percentage of people who decide to give it a shot.
I'd assume they're already on psychedelics regardless of whether they're legal or not.
Very few people take psychedelics for long periods of time. If anything they are "anti-addictive".
Maybe instead the national government can take care of veterans, and we can start having proper mental health care
What is the scenario that concerns you?
I think ketamine's dosage (100s of mgs) and oral activity (low) is not conducive towards secretly drugging someone. To drug someone with ketamine without their consent, you'd likely have to inject them. If someone is injecting a victim with a drug to knock them out, ketamine seems like it'd be a lot safer than heroin and somewhat safer than benzos - both of which would have a higher chance of respiratory depression.
I suspect this "long history" is drug war propaganda - ketamine would be more expensive and less convenient than other similar options for incapacitating someone via injection.
I imagine guns and knives are the most popular choices for subduing kidnapping victims, and they're explicitly legal because they can be used in that way
https://erowid.org/culture/characters/moore_marcia/moore_mar...
Though, I'm sure the risk of ketamine is still better controlled in a legalized environment, hence it's inclusion.
Does this mean all my rhythm game personal best are invalid '-'
But you also need to watch for outliers - laws that are WAY past their prime, and should have been put to pasture long ago.
Basically, the legal system needs a garbage collection mechanism.
Andrew was a man ahead of his time.
Legacies are complicated.
The more "mainstream" ones like LSD and Mushrooms basically don't work if you're taking them every day. You can go on a multi week long Coke binge but LSD/shrooms would have near 0 effect at that rate.
From the list: " psilocybin, psilocyn, dimethyltryptamine (DMT) , ibogaine, mescaline, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) , ketamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)" - I think only MDMA is abusable.
Robin Williams lived a pretty pleasant life, but he died of depression. If Robin Freaking Williams couldn't beat it, what chance do the rest of us have for successful self-treatment?
These drugs should be important in our society, the experience is indescribable and not necessarily fun - but mostly.
If it were not for the culture wars of the 1960s, and corrupt lecherous idiots like Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy scaring the bejesus out of the establishment , many lives would not have been ruined by these outrageous laws.
The same cannot be said for hairdressing
My view was crystallised by HST in his "Looking west from Vegas with the right kind of eyes..." monologue in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (it is in the film, if reading books is not your thing. The film is, IMO, a faithful portrayal of the book)
When it comes to drugs, I am more of a follower, not a imitator, of HST than Leary. Drugs should be fun. When they stop being fun, stop doing drugs. Real simple!
Alcohol is intoxicating because it damages cells but there's very little evidence that classical psychedelics are damaging in this way.
- I don't want an untrained barber spreading disease.
- I don't want a fake optometrist selling incorrect glasses.
- I don't want someone buying penicillin off Amazon to treat their flu, or taking it for 2 days and then stopping so that they incubate a PCN-resistant strain of whatever.
...while still thinking grown adults should be able to decide which recreational chemicals they want to use.
My drugs of choice are coffee and a monthly beer or nice whiskey. I don't have a moral high ground over someone who wants to occasionally use some weed to relax. Similarly, why do I care if someone (not me!) wants to take mushrooms? They don't get to tell me I can't sip a glass of whiskey, after all.
This is a fairly weird statement. For a start conflating "unlicenced" with "untrained" and then jumping to "spreading disease". I'm not sure catching a disease has ever crossed my mind while getting a haircut.
> - I don't want a fake optometrist selling incorrect glasses.
The fact that they are "fake" surely already implies fraud - so how does licencing prevent this?
> I don't want someone buying penicillin off Amazon to treat their flu, or taking it for 2 days and then stopping so that they incubate a PCN-resistant strain of whatever.
People already do this. I guess you're arguing against increased incentives but that's a bit of a leap.
Also, is it a foreign article? The language is weird and hard to follow in places, like it was written by an algo or translated automatically but chrome claims it isn't doing the translation...
I do know an RN who nursed someone who had taken LSD in the late 60's and never recovered mentally, which had quite an impact on my perception of this class of drugs
https://blackbearrehab.com/mental-health/schizophrenia/schiz...
Bay Area: https://bit.ly/2S3VNjW Austin: https://bit.ly/3ccj2zk
If anyone knows a dope (no pun intended) psychiatrist for general purposes in ATX, I could use contact info.
(and, BTW, I agree with the general meaning of your quote from AB)
I personally believe bicameral legislatures - allowing houses to deadlock on a bill - are a terrible idea. Either unicameral (used by one US State, Nebraska) or tricameral legislatures, with 2 out of 3 houses needing to approve a bill for it to pass, make much more sense.
Why only one house or three? What exactly would that fix? Sure you eliminate most deadlock, but how does that representation? Also, is deadlock really a bad thing in all scenarios?
CO population increased by 15% in the last decade: https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/colorado-news/color...
It seems like it'd be really hard to defend the claim that the death rate (which isn't per-mile-driven, so lacks the context to actually evaluate it meaningfully) is growing "much faster" than the population.
Edit: Never mind, got 'em. Here's Colorado's own numbers: https://www.codot.gov/safety/traffic-safety/assets/fatal-cra...
Notice that fatalities are up significantly, but so are vehicle miles traveled. In fact, in 2013, Colorado had .0075 fatalities per million miles driven. In 2019, that number was... .0075. In other words, your likelihood of dying per distance driven was almost exactly equal to 2013.
This are the CO government's numbers, not mine or anyone else's.
I don't have a dog in this hunt. I'm not from Colorado, and I don't use marijuana. But it's really hard to say that legalizing marijuana in CO had any affect on traffic safety at all, when the fatality rate is essentially identical afterward.
Basically you respect heroine/meth/coke/etc since you know you can OD and it's doing all sorts of damage to your body but K is "safe" up to the extreme ends so people sort of handwave the risks away.
If I recall correctly about ketamine, the mind altering effects diminish without sufficient restorative period between dosage. This could further be an issue in two ways. Individuals may associate the effects of ketamine to the mind altering effects only, not realising that it affect the body even if they're not getting the same high ("what I can't perceive can't hurt me"). It could also make individuals try higher dosage more often ("maybe it's bad product, it didn't do anything last night, let's try again").
This bill isn’t. I am.
The classic problem with prison is short and frequent sentences that fuck someones life up just enough to prevent them from being a "good" member of society but not long enough to really keep them away from the general population.
There are a lot of violent crimes with shockingly short terms. Including for repeat offenders. This isn't a problem for elites, who can afford to stay away from these problems. It's a problem for common, law-abiding, unexemplary Americans.
"the cause and circumstances of her death are still unknown"
"there are some conflicting accounts related to her disappearance and death"
You're making a lot of assumptions based on your own biases. I'm pointing out (tongue-in-cheek) that a different set of biases can create an entirely different narrative, equally correlated.
Based on an 1998 interview with Moore's Journey's into the Bright World (1978) co-author Howard Alltounian, M.D. he wrote:
"Moore went to visit John Lilly at his ranch in Decker Canyon, Malibu. She was astonished to find that he was, at that point, describing "Vitamin K" (his preferred term) as an "extremely dangerous" substance. Lilly had just been through a massive binge ending in a near fatal accident, and out of his original ten person study group, one had "driven his car off a cliff" (Dr. Craig Enright) and another hd met an "equally lugubrious end" (Carol Carlssen).
"John Lilly's last words to me were, "You'd better be damn strong if you're going to play that game."... As this book goes to press I have once again increased the doses."
Moore disappeared from her house on January 14, 1979. Her husband spent a year searching for her, including journeys to Hong Kong and Thailand, places to which she had traveled in the past. Her skeleton was found in early spring, 1981, in the place where she had frozen to death. She had made a journey at night into the dark world of the forest, a potent Jungian symbol, curled up in a tree, and then injected herself repeatedly with all of the ketamine she had been able to find."
I am not sure if Howard or Karl are assuming things here.
If you don’t have a dog in this hunt why are you posting wrong numbers, falsely stating there was no increase, and ignoring the deaths from 2014-2018?
[1] 481/470 -> 597/545 is a 7% increase.
I had never heard this person's name before today, but I can easily imagine a different narrative: She was self-medicating for depression and might not have lasted as long as she did without the drug. Sounds like we'll never know.
Regarding suicide people could get strange ideas due to ketamine, perhaps it's accidental death - perhaps she wanted to try the biggest dose to get the ultimate revelation and while being in the so called K-hole, the cold got her.
Like a few unlucky souls experimenting with psychedelics, they want to fly to close to the sun and fall down. Zoe7.
Ketamine or psychedelic use can be a form of self-medication. But you'd think that if she had depression it was written about after her death or mentioned in one of her books or articles