AP vs Cheat

#81
I believe the only valid gateway drug rationale for marijuana is that it is illegal. When you start using it you have made a decision to use a drug that is prohibited by law. Once that bridge is crossed you are much more likely to consider using other illegal drugs. A simple remedy to this is to legalize the use of marijuana.
 

aslan

Well-Known Member
#82
tthree said:
I believe the only valid gateway drug rationale for marijuana is that it is illegal. When you start using it you have made a decision to use a drug that is prohibited by law. Once that bridge is crossed you are much more likely to consider using other illegal drugs. A simple remedy to this is to legalize the use of marijuana.
Right! I think that is what AM was saying in part, and I agree. Also, it can become a cultural thing. In my day I'd was a counter-culture of people who were anti-establishment-- beatniks and hippies. I don't know what you call today's version of this age-old phenomenon? Civil disobedience and worse is characteristic so that this feeds into AM's other point regarding criminality. I'm not trying to put words in his mouth however. He stated his thoughts quite clearly above.
 

aslan

Well-Known Member
#83
The occupy wall street movement is reminiscent in some ways of those days of old. It is no wonder Obama and Qfit (if I can use their names in one breath) see them in a favorable light; since they represent a good portion of this generation's young liberals. Whereas I may view them as a few good and sincere liberals amng a multitude of rabble, they might see them as small amount of rabble among a multitude of good and sincere liberals. I don't wish to debate the point one way or another, nor do I purport to speak for either of them. It's just my probably colored observation. The politics of this is best discussed in the Zen Zone.
 
#84
aslan said:
However, marijuana is not referred to as the "gateway drug" for the reasons you mentioned, even if those reasons are valid, but for the fact that it introduces a person to the practice of taking chemicals into their bodies for the sake of an effect on the nervous system (for want of a better way to describe it). This, it is believed by some, will lead them to experiment with other more potent and more dangerous chemical substances, and will also put them in proximity with people who do use other drugs. The gateway idea is probably true for the weak minded in a sense, but I don't think it is necessarily a valid generalization. Marijuana does not lead medically speaking to taking other drugs, no more than alcohol does, and many people never take drugs beyond marijuana. Even if it could be shown that marijuana users usually experiment with other drugs, which it probably can't, there would still be no causal relationship to taking other drugs to my mind. Marijuana from what I see is just another drug, milder than most, and arguably, not a dangerous one, although I think the jury is still out on that. It probably affects different people different ways. You said marijuana plus paranoid schizophrenia was bad; I suppose paranoid schizophrenia and nearly any drug, including alcohol, is probably dangerous, but I have never studied it, and I don't know. I suspect that two brothers of mine actually became paranoid schizophrenics from the use of marijuana, not the other way around, but I have no way of proving that. I do know that schizophrenia and Lupus are mutually exclusive diseases, and I do have three brothers, two of them diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics and one diagnosed as having Lupus, and all three were heavy marijuana users. How certain substances may trigger the advent of different diseases is not a clearly understood matter, but I do believe marijuana has been linked with affecting the auto-immune system.
Some people seem to do well on it, but I think he ones for whom it is dangerous are more numerous more likely to become dependent on it. Mark David Chapman, Breivik, Jared Loughner were all long-term heavy users. When I used it, it was addictive for me but fortunately I quit before I got any schizophrenic symptoms, at least any that I could recognize.

I'd say if anything is a gateway to cheating, it's poker collusion.
 

aslan

Well-Known Member
#85
Automatic Monkey said:
Some people seem to do well on it, but I think he ones for whom it is dangerous are more numerous more likely to become dependent on it. Mark David Chapman, Breivik, Jared Loughner were all long-term heavy users. When I used it, it was addictive for me but fortunately I quit before I got any schizophrenic symptoms, at least any that I could recognize.

I'd say if anything is a gateway to cheating, it's poker collusion.
The only way in which I disagree with you is that to me poker collusion IS cheating.

As for the schizophrenic connect, it most surely exists, but whether it is a cause or a trigger, I don't know. It could be that certain people have a predisposition to schizophrenia and all it takes is marijuana use to trigger it. That's what I theorized with my brothers, one of whom once was a heavy user of pot and other drugs and became schizophrenic, but now has lived pot/drug free and schizophrenia free for many years. Still, the days of devil-may-care drug usage took its toll on his mental faculties. :(
 
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