DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Legalization of Weed and other drugs.

Legalize all of it. The end.

Sugar, caffeine, nicotine (which occurs naturally in many veggies), pepper…all mind altering.

We don't like facts around here. stop it.

Mind altering? - Like teaching children to fear the invisible being in the sky so that they conform to what you say is the right way to act and live. If so then yes please stop the mind altering.

Oh and BTW, I don't believe in recreational drug use and I don't like so called legal "for profit" drugs either.

Once when I was smoking pot I saw God and we had a conversation. He told me to quit smoking pot.

lol Wow

Did you?

To be fair, you set yourself up for that.

besides, didn't Jesus turn water into wine? You're saying Jesus is wrong?

The wine Jesus made and drank was un-fermented (Grape juice) Jesus did not approve of drinking ... The bible tells us what alcohol will do to us (Proverbs 23:29-35) and that a drunkard cannot enter heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)... I know you won't quit arguing so I won't reply again because either you believe God's word or you don't (Matthew 10:34-40)

Colorado had almost 700 million in pot sales in 2014 and 76 million in taxes with 300 recreational pot stores open. Your theory that people will still buy from the cartels is not true.

When it was on the ballot in Colorado, I voted for it. i don't use it. If someone wants to smoke it in their home, I could care less. If someone causes an accident because they are high, then there should be a tough penalty.

My company doesn't do random drug testing. Legal team is still working on the wording of official company policy. From the sounds of it, policy will be they don't care if you smoke on your own time, just don't come to work high.

There's a difference in being a drunkard and having a few drinks of wine.

For ANYONE who believes that drinking was not accepted, try putting grape juice in a wine sack and carry it around in the heat for a while. Guess what? It will turn rancid. Without refrigeration, you can not preserve unfermented fruit juice. Not without the preservatives used today.

NOTHING in the scriptures even suggest that it was grape juice, nothing. Juice could not have been preserved to be carried in the heat during that period of time. Common sense alone dictates that the scripture means exactly what it says. Too often people use their own belief systems to distort and confuse very obvious points in the Bible.

"Potheads" don't typically buy at the store. Retail is for occasional smokers, tourists and activists that want to support the movement. Still plenty of tax dollars there.

Cartels? Cheapest? No way. That junk weed is not smoked in the legal states. Doesn't matter how cheap. Cartel Mexi-Weed goes Back East and to The South. Harsh growing laws are the reason for that industry. No need for it out west.

Potheads in legal states buy fresh, top-notch stuff from their friends and neighbors. We don't need a store or a cartel. Just let us do our thing!

Jut legalize it as a medicinal use for everyone. Then, when everyone has a medical marijuana card, the tax payers can pay for it for them. Solved. Smokers need not buy it, it will be provided and paid for by the tax payers like many other drugs.

Alcoholics and addicts crush their (tax payer paid ) drugs for other purposes up and snort them up their nose. This entire, system is a perpetual vicious and losing cycle.

When taking an old text like the Bible, then translating it from ancient language to ancient language, then again to modern languages, then once more into our own interpretation of what it means; all while not losing nor altering in anyway the original messages it was meant to convey is extremely implausible.

Add to this the fact that humans tend to twist information to justify their own beliefs and or actions, compounded by the fact that there is a huge disconnect of time, culture, realities and technologies between the original authors and modern man; then ultimately stating that you know without a doubt what was meant by any verse or chapter is simply a farce.

So Pastor Marc, even though I support your right to religious freedom, I absolutely cringe when you post your thoughts (as fact) based solely on your modern day christian interpretation of the bible. The logic is completely ridiculous to me.

That's why my point, while not based on the Bible itself, is a common sense way of showing that grape juice simply would be impossible for people to carry on journeys to store at the time. Logic dictates it had to be wine during those times.

Why would taxpayers have to pay for something that grows wild?

A smoker can grow his/her supply with a small yard or even a window.

we even have co-ops out here for medical patients. they can grow it together in a shared space and share the harvest, even re-sell some to cover what little costs are involved (fertilizer, lights).

Illegal drugs in this Nation, like guns in cities where they are banned, are still easily gotten by anyone who wants them. Laws make no difference.

Then why are we discussing where the better market is to buy? Hops and barley grow too but we pay for them. Someone has to buy it to smoke if they don't grow it. Actually, I was comparing medical marijuana to health care and other drugs misused and paid for by tax payers.

you realize we pay to buy medical weed right?

I understood that. We agree that taxpayers should not be paying for it.

My state has medical (and recreational) marijuana. Taxpayers aren't paying for it. Its the opposite. Weed is taxed.

I know people that could get prescriptions for Oxy and other pain killers, instead they choose cannabis. If more states allowed it, there would be less abuse of those harsh, addictive pills.

Yes, people don't even realize how harsh those prescription meds (especially Oxycotin and similar pain meds) are addictive. It's dangerous, so if the same outcome could be achieved with medical pot, it's a win for the patient in my book.

In the absence of God, that translation is implausible.

But, he is discussing an All-Powerful God that created the universe. God can write, translate and deliver a Divine Book. God can make the grapes last 1 million years. These aren't dilemmas for a God capable of creating the universe.

I respect your beliefs, whatever they may be. I also understand and share your views about proclaiming to know these as facts. But within the theory, an accurate translation is quite plausible.

You know... you're right! After reflecting on it for about 2.67 milliseconds I decided that in theory, since we are talking about a mystical magical fairytale like omnipotent supreme being, reading the bible might actually be like having a direct connection into the mind of such a being. Although I can't see how human beings could possibly be this beings greatest creation, nor can I see why this being would feel the need to give us a book to learn about them when they could just put the knowledge in our heads to begin with... And while being just but jealous or kind and loving God (whichever mood they wish to be in), why be so mysterious about how we are to act? Why give us free will to begin with if we have to act any certain way?

I don't need answers to any of those questions because I have mine. But when we get into conversations that go in circles and never have an end, and these conversations which sound like utter nonsense are about how we should live our lives, especially when people who believe they can make sense of these circles of nonsense want to make laws that force their views on others... I have to speak up and call BS.

Yes, I am correct. An omnipotent, supreme being could easily write a book. That's not a circle. There is nothing to debate.

You ask a valid question about free will. That one can definitely lead many debates in circles.

Yes you are.

Repeated for truth.

We don't have a drug problem, we have a social problem.

If that sentence seems preposterous to you, substitute the word 'drug' with 'gun'.

If it still seems preposterous, I guess we disagree.

Nope. Jesus told me you are wrong.




And he's one seriously smart Mexican.

I think Jesus would have a lot more to say to you than just that.

Always about religion on this board. Man. . .

You apparently never read the line below that...

Maybe they are talking about Jesus the gardener?

Well Pastor, I wasn't smoking pot when we talked and I didn't hear his audible voice. But in our conversation I quieted myself long enough to hear the "Still, small voice" that convinced to go to rehab.

And in rehab that's where I discovered my relationship with God and we've been talking ever since. That's 1987 to present.

I'm not perfect. But I'm forgiven and feel protected through life's daily trials. I continue to listen for that still, small voice. It's never a paragraph nor even a complete sentence. That which I hear, again, not audible, is a usually simple phrase that if I don't discount it but instead consider it, it usually enlightens me.

Not quite. They've been approved where now they must collect 305,000 signatures. If they do, it'll go on the ballot in November. Link Here

Personally, I hope it makes it to the ballot and passes. Hard to imagine that at this time next year it COULD be legal. But they have to get the signatures and then they have to get the votes... Almost everyone I meet thinks it should be legalized, but I think if it came down to a vote, it'd be a lot closer than that.

I don't think ResponsibleOhio will have any difficulty getting those signatures. I'm pushing for them, they have a strong support network.

It'll pass it's just a matter of time.

Sweet! I figured Ohio would be much later in the movement, but 5 states are down already.

The legalize movement is taking a page from Koch Politics. Target a few states at a time and overwhelm them with outside money. Not a fan of the process, but it is working.

JC

Thought this was an interesting perspective piece.

I was a Republican pothead: What I learned about drug-war hypocrisy from my brush with disaster

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/jeb_bush..._with_disaster/

Jeb Bush, presumed Republican presidential candidate, was an enthusiastic pothead for much of his youth. This is not criticism, because many of my good friends are current or former potheads, as is a certain current president I admire. As a younger fellow, I’ve enjoyed a blunt or three, any one of which could’ve had serious repercussions on my future (more on that shortly). Athletes, religious leaders, right-wingers and lefties, the cool and nerdy alike have gotten high, even as marijuana remains an illegal drug with serious penalties in many jurisdictions. We treat this societal duplicity with a wink, chuckle, an inside joke or a bag of Cheetos, at the same time as people are being shot dead in the street and lives are irreparably ruined. If we lived in a just society (we do not), any politician or public figure who has ever put chronic to lips needs to either back complete marijuana legalization or present him or herself to the authorities for public punishment. I think we should bring back stocks and public flogging.

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Like so many tokers, I have my own story of a close call with weed. In 1994, I was a 21-year-old Coast Guard enlisted man, stationed in North Carolina as a rescue boat crewman. I hadn’t touched the stuff in over a year, because the Coast Guard had a “zero-tolerance” policy. But my wife and three-week-old son were away visiting our family back home in Nevada, and the opportunity came up. I was off duty and smoked half a bowl, and then I went home and fell asleep. Sinister, I know.

The next morning, I pulled into the parking lot of Coast Guard Station Cape Hatteras, and there was a tan van with government plates in the guest parking spot. It was the medical van from the base up the beach, which meant a drug test. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I had visions of being kicked out of the Coast Guard, perhaps a dishonorable discharge, which would be treated very similarly to a felony in many states. My life would be forever marred by a few hits of weed, and I brought it all on myself. I ran to the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water, trying to cleanse my system. Yet the panic was all for nothing. After a half hour, my boss, a crusty old chief boatswain’s mate and one of the biggest assholes I’ve met in my adult life, canceled the test on a whim.

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“We got too much to do for a piss test today,” he told the medics, and sent us all back to work. It sounds contrived, but it’s not. It was the only time I’d ever seen one of those tests canceled in my seven year Coast Guard career and constitutes the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever witnessed. By blind, stupid luck, I was spared. I was never tempted to smoke again for the duration of my enlistment. Unlike Jeb, his brother George W., or any of the other untouchable wealthy, I had no family money or connections that would have saved me. It was one of the moments that pushed me further from the moralizing right wing and into a ten year flirtation with libertarianism.

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Marijuana legalization is an issue that has stayed with me through my political evolution from conservative to liberal. Even as a conservative, I could never understand the politics of pot. In high school, a few buddies smoked, just as did I on very rare occasions, but I never gave much thought to the social and legal repercussions until it almost cost me my military career. Like any and all war, the drug war features a parade of victims, unintended consequences and senseless tragedy.

Even though the end of the drug war is in sight, we will see many more victims before it’s over. At end of every war there’s always a last casualty. One guy or gal, a private or sergeant, who gets killed in a helicopter or shot by a clueless former enemy. It’s the worst type of senseless death—the killing of misunderstanding. That’s the moment we face at the end of this monumentally stupid, hypocritical and racist drug war. It’s all over but the crying. It might take ten more years to get this all sorted out or even another twenty, God forbid, but every incarceration, lost job or even minor inconvenience, just adds to the toll of our historic national dysfunction.

One needless marijuana murder haunts me and is a sad example of the price we’ve paid as a nation. A young college student named Trevon Cole was shot to death by an incompetent Las Vegas cop in 2010. Cole sold a dime bag to an undercover cop, who then got a warrant to bust down Cole’s door with a SWAT team in the middle of the night. The operation went wrong and that same officer shot Cole in the head after the cop’s “tactical” flashlight failed. The follow up investigation found that the officer confused Cole with some “big-time” drug dealer with a similar name. Cole was 21 with a wife who was nine months pregnant, and he’d never been arrested or in any trouble before. We tend to chalk up these tragedies as the cost of “doing business” in America, but we shouldn’t. Trevon Cole was a human being, an expectant father. And his life was stolen.

As an accident of birth, I was born white, an important difference between Cole and me. I have not mentioned his race up to now, but you knew he was black, didn’t you? Because that’s the familiar refrain in these instances. If white kids were gunned down in the same rates as black kids, the war on drugs would already be over. If Jeb Bush had to pay for his crimes in the same way that Cole did, the drug war would not have made it past the ‘70s.

People who look like Jeb and me are not murdered or sent to jail for a bit of weed. Black people smoke pot at roughly the same percentages as white people do, but African Americans are arrested and imprisoned at twice the rate of white guys. I’m now much older, balding, and (still) white. I could probably snort a line of cocaine off the hood of a cop car and not get arrested. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” makes a strong and infuriating case that mass incarceration has supplanted the racist injustice of Jim Crow of the south with a very similar system of mass incarceration, for which marijuana prohibition plays an outsized role. It is one more compelling, if not the most important reason, to end this national disgrace.

Aside from the obvious racial component, the war on drugs is a war on poor people. The latest example of targeting the poor is the idea of drug testing food stamp recipients. There is nothing more disgusting than targeting people who have no power and cannot fight back. No one is proposing targeting people like Jeb Bush, because he has access to every benefit and break the planet has to offer. If I were made president tomorrow, I’d immediately release from prison any person convicted of a nonviolent drug crime, even dealers. The prosecution of these people has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with the class from where they originate.

Barack Obama, whom I like in general, has been terrible on this score. He commutes and pardons less than any other president. Yet, as a kid, Obama smoked weed with Bob Marley-esque enthusiasm, all admitted to in his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Anyone who has ever smoked but still insists on “punishing” people for the same thing has surrendered any semblance of moral credibility. Obama also has a very bad habit of joking about it or moralizing. After his own youthful enthusiasm for weed, he’s lost his right to make jokes while people are killed or sent to jail. Obama only redeems himself a little bit for letting marijuana legalization move ahead in some states.

Progressives, libertarians and even some conservatives support the end of the drug war, but it is happening too slowly. People are suffering and dying, and the political class has the unmitigated gall to joke about it while fighting the inevitable. Piecing together the reports about Jeb Bush, it’s clear that I’ve never smoked as much weed as he has. I never even smoked enough to qualify as a true “weekend warrior.” Meanwhile the whole of Washington D.C. is awash in recovering pot heads and coke fiends. On top of it all, these reprobates have blocked community efforts in D.C. to enact drug reform locally. This seems to indicate that the single most important qualification for congress is to lack the fundamental humanity to do the right thing.

In a recent Vice interview, Obama asked, almost rhetorically, if we should stop at marijuana legalization. He cited the serious dangers of meth, cocaine and “hard” drugs. After legalizing weed, my answer to this is absolutely decriminalize all other drugs and move them into the realm of public health, where they have always belonged. American needs far fewer prisons, and it’s tragic that the only things we manufacture anymore in American are criminals and hypocritical politicians.

For what it's worth............

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/04/ohio_voters_favor_legalizing_m.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- More than eight of every 10 Ohio voters support legalization of marijuana for medical use and a majority favor legalizing it for recreational use, a Quinnipiac University Poll found.

The poll, conducted simultaneously in three presidential swing states, found that 84 percent of registered voters in Ohio said a doctor should be able to prescribe marijuana to a patient for medical uses. Fourteen percent were opposed.

Those numbers, released Monday, were similar to results found in Florida and Pennsylvania by Quinnipiac's Swing State Poll. Like Ohio, 84 percent favored legal medical use of marijuana in Florida. In Pennsylvania, 88 percent supported the idea.

But the support for legalized personal use, while still a majority, was not nearly as overwhelming.

In Ohio, 52 percent said they would support making it legal to possess small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Forty-four percent were opposed.

Several proposals are in the works to legalize marijuana in Ohio. Check here for an update on the status of those efforts.
The results are significant because Ohio could see one or more issues on the November ballot from groups seeking to legalize marijuana in the state.

One of those groups, ResponsibleOhio, has already been given clearance by the state to circulate petitions and collect signatures from registered voters to try to put its issue on the ballot.

Its measure would amend the state constitution and establish a legal marijuana industry in which Ohioans could purchase marijuana for recreational and medical uses from retail outlets licensed by the state.

Last month the Ohio Ballot Board approved language for the amendment, clearing the way for ResponsibleOhio to start gathering signatures. It started the effort the following week.

To get on the ballot, petitioners will have to collect 305,591 signatures of registered voters -- 10 percent of the vote in the 2014 gubernatorial contest -- from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties. In each of those 44 counties, the total gathered must amount to 5 percent of the 2014 gubernatorial vote locally.

The signatures must be gathered by July 1.

In Florida, 55 percent favored legalization for personal use. In Pennsylvania, 51 percent supported the idea.

While the Quinnipiac poll found support for legalization, that did not translate to an expectation of widespread usage.

When voters were asked if they would use it personally, only 14 percent of Ohio voters said they "definitely" or "probably would use it, while 84 percent said "definitely" or "probably" not.

The results in Florida and Pennsylvania were similar.

The polling was conducted from March 17 - 28. Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,077 Ohio voters via telephone. The margin of error in the survey is plus or minus 3 percent.

Similar numbers were surveyed in Florida and Pennsylvania. The margins of error in those states were also plus or minus 3 percent.

The same poll also released results Monday that showed U.S. Sen. Rob Portman faces a tough re-election with the challenge from former Gov. Ted Strickland, who would win if voters decided today.

jc

Kansas Attorney General: Your Vote Doesn't Matter

http://hightimes.com/read/kansas-attorney-general-your-vote-doesnt-matter

The majority of Wichita voters favor reducing penalties for first-time marijuana possession offenders, but State Attorney General Derek Schmidt doesn’t care what the voters think—and he’s making no bones about it.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas’ largest city (population 387,000) went to the ballot box to decide whether to revise the way marijuana laws are enforced within the city limits. By a vote of 54 percent to 46 percent, residents decided in favor of a municipal initiative reducing penalties for first-time marijuana offenses (involving the possession of up to one ounce) to a civil infraction punishable by a $50 fine. The new local ordinance is a stark departure from state law, which classifies the first-time possession of even one gram of pot as a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

But the state’s Republican Attorney General, along with several state lawmakers, are less than thrilled about Wichita voters’ recent exercise in democracy. In fact, the AG has gone so far as to threaten to sue the city of Wichita if it dares to enact the voter-approved law. State Representative Steve Brunk has publicly called the measure “an illegal petition.”

As a result, the city is now looking to the courts to issue a declaratory judgment in regard to whether the voter-approved measure is enforceable and may legally be enacted.

“Due to the Attorney General’s opinion, the city is asking the court to tell us whether the ordinance may be enforced and/or enacted into law by the city,” council member Janet Miller said in a press release. “The City Council’s action, in placing the ordinance on the ballot, was focused on respect for Wichita residents who were concerned enough about this issue to submit a petition with 3,000 signatures. The right to petition the City Council for ordinance changes through a referendum is basic to our form of government.”

________

ahh, the gop.