Alright… how to start this. Basically I’m tired of getting blasted every post I make just because I happened to have posted a couple of times that I smoke weed. So with that in mind, I thought I’d give my thoughts on the subject.
Now let it be known, I am the son of 2 police officers. They are, and have been in the force (RCMP [Canada]) since I was born. For a very long time, up until around grade 11/12 I was dead set against drugs. I had been drinking since grade 10, but like many I did not feel it to be a ‘drug’.
It was aroun 11/12 that I began to really think, ‘What exactly is a drug?’. Alot of my friends smoked pot, and they seemed to be fairly benevolant, indeed quite the opposite from the drunken maniacs any high school teenager encounters during his stint in the hormonal funbin. This led me to alot of research on the subject, I scoured the net looking for informaiton on drugs and marijuana in particular; my curiousity had been sparked in a way that no drunken rant could have achieved.
So, after some debate and flat out teenager rebellion I decided to take my chances and delve into the realm of the potheads. The first couple times I smoked I didn’t actually know how to inhale, and even once I did it didn’t really do anything. I knew this happened sometimes, or so I had heard and so one time I sat down with 2 of my friends and we smoked a rather large joint to our heads and I was blasted into oblivion. The specifics around this don’t matter, it’s useless to attempt to describe the state as it would do more confusion that justice. What matters is that when I went home that night my mom surpised me by being up. I talked with her for quite a while, and to my knowledge she did not know I was intoxicated, I know her better than anyone save perhaps my dad and her siblings, and I simply don’t believe she would deny it, or ignore it for some reason… she’s much too inquisitive. This was important because I knew from then that me and this drug seemed to agree with each for some reason. I never really get that burnt out, and for the most part I get my work done on time and in a fairly intelligent manner.
Drugs are interesting in that they alter the way we as individuals see reality. In this way it is not so much the drug, but the person who will whether the results will be of ‘bennificial’ at least in a subjective manner. A heroin addict may look back on his reign with the drug and say ‘this destroyed my life’, he would likely be correct as this drug as many more downsides than others, but that isn’t to say that a particular person couldn’t look back and say ‘Heroin altered my life, but in a way I (for the most part) expected, and anticipated’. Life altering mistakes with drugs are often a result of ignorance with the subject, for example heroin (not that I’ve tried it ) really is not -that- addictive the first time, you do not automatically become ‘hooked’ instantly (at least not in the majority of people - this is always a possibility with any drug… caffeine, even sugar included). It is only after the repitition a couple of times that the true physical addiction starts to take over. The people that do not know how to pace their lives, or their drug habits will often become fell fledged addicts, but there is a reason that corporate hotshots do not turn their lives to shit every time they shoot up, and that difference is information.
Pot is special in that, by definition is is a special drug. It is part hallucinagen which greatly takes away from its addictive potential; almost anyone who’s done acid will tell you the last thing you feel like doing after a trip is more acid. In this regard the THC’s tendancy to say in fat cells (for quite a while I should add grumbles about b-ball drug testing) is speculated to be another reason it has virtually no physical addictive potential, as reminants of the active componant stick around in the bloodstream for quite a while. It is considered by the majority to be the most versatile drug on the planet, it’s applications include: pain relief, hunger stimulant, creativity inducer and a variety of hand-eye coordination tradeoffs that are handy in the game of basketball to say the least. The physical set backs include lathargy (sp?), fatigue, short term memory distortment and at higher levels, alteration of reaction time in conjuction with hand eye movements. I say alteration because in some ways, there are positive tradeoffs but his notion is too hard to explain right now.
I could talk about weed compared to alcohol but I don’t even feel I need to, no one who smoked purely marijuana has ever died as a result of it in Canada, let alone as an overdose. Alcohol poisoning and drunken driving claim more lives than the majority of other diseases combined. Certain stats decieve the reader by claiming that ‘[A certain %] of people involved in car crashes tested positive for marijuna’ but if we really look at this, we’ll see it’s rather misleading because there to ‘test’ for marijuana, would be to test to see if that person had smoked in the last 4 months. This of course tells you nothing about the accident and timeframe in question. I have NEVER, not once, seem a fight between two stoned guys or girls, I can’t even count how many drunken fights I’ve seen.
The bottom line is that drugs, like anything are a way to consume time. Some people excersize more than they need to, others eat more than they need to. Some go on internet forums and write stuff, some play video games. Some listen to music, some have sex. <---- All these things are an alteration of the senses, of our perception. The means may be different, but the end is always the same in that it is different.
People change, despite what they or others may think. If a woman starts smoking pot and then decides to drop out of university to pursue a different course of action, why should she be treated any differently than a woman who started listening to a particular type of music and then decided to drop out of school. Some things distort our senses more than others… things like drugs, but they are no more distortive than love and hate, but yet they seem to be held in such a low regard. I almost feel sorry for the world in that they truly don’t know what they are missing out on, but before you get mad keep in mind that’s just my opinion, from my POV . If you’re perfectly happy being a virginal, non-substance abuser… who am I to tell you what to do?
Thanks for you time,
-matt