So concludes Lester Black in "A Friday Night with Weed Lube, a Dominatrix, and a Bunch of Horny Plants."
And while we're perusing the oeuvre of Lester Black, here's his new piece about THCa crystalline:
A couple of weeks ago, I did something that looked remarkably similar to smoking meth. I used a blowtorch to heat up a glass pipe, dropped a white crystal-like rock into it, and inhaled a cloud of vapor that sent me into a deeply stoned state. Every muscle in my body relaxed like I was floating on a cloud, and I could feel each mellow beat of my heart. My mind moved from one idea to another in a disorienting spin.Expect lots more journalism like this. Black is writing from Seattle, where pot is now legal, but on the stroke of the new year, pot comes to the most beautiful people in the world:
The crystals I smoked don't resemble the leafy green buds of cannabis, but they're actually a highly concentrated form of weed. What I was dabbing is called THCa crystalline, and it's the crème de la crème of the cannabis concentrate world, where dabbable extracts routinely test over 90 percent THC, but only crystalline reaches the 100 percent mark....
Will anyone find anything intelligent to say on this subject? I don't think pot will help anyone say anything interesting. I expect a fall off in the quality of commentary, such as endless banalities about how Donald Trump is a reason to use drugs.
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64 comments:
I would like to hear government rifles speak intelligently on the topic of nullification, but alas, my hopes are small.
Potheads see Napa and Bordeaux but look like Thunderbird and Ripple.
Once you have decided recreation is intentionally numbing your body and scrambling your brain, you have become useless for social interaction, other than the plus of getting to know hundreds of young and interesting medical personnel you would never have met.
I'm a psychiatrist. I began to notice about 2 years ago that Marijuana was more acceptable than alcohol. When I asked if my patients drank alcohol I got a lot of "Oh, no, never." but marijuana was "Yeah, every day."
The patients who have the fewest problems are those who recognized that weed did not make them smarter, but that it was fun and something to do every once in awhile with friends or a sex partner.
But the people that use it every day (5 to 6 grams a day sometimes) are severely messed up and don't know it. The weed inhibits their ability to recognize that they have a problem. They have this overwhelming feeling that everything is alright - until something doesn't go their way and then they blow up and get themselves arrested.
I blog at EroticChristian.com
It would be too ambitious a project to try and convince the mostly wrinkly people here that there are some enormous insights to be gained, before we die, with judicious, perhaps one time use of certain drugs, ayahuasca in particular.
Humans have been altering their reality via substances back to cave dwellers. I hear much more vapid babble from winos than from cannabis users.
"It would be too ambitious a project to try and convince the mostly wrinkly people here that there are some enormous insights to be gained, before we die, with judicious, perhaps one time use of certain drugs, ayahuasca in particular."
I've written on this subject many times. I think there is much more reason to want access to drugs like that than to marijuana.
Oh for heaven's sake. We smoked crystal T in the 70s. Whippersnappers.
Now get off my lawn.
I need to look up the origin of whippersnapper. Sausage gravy must wait a bit longer.
“ They have this overwhelming feeling that everything is alright - until something doesn't go their way and then they blow up and get themselves arrested “
I was peacefully going along with your story without hackles flaring until this. This would be the character of a person pre-weed, not the result of weed.
It seems like the times, got into the brawndo early.
Will anyone find anything intelligent to say on this subject?
What's to say? It's a largely benign psychotropic with some interesting and not very well researched effects elsewhere in the body that uptight and often authoritarian people freak out about way too much. That's pretty much about it.
I don't think pot will help anyone say anything interesting.
At least half of the entire canon of 20th century cultural and musical history says you're wrong.
But keep on truckin'!
Just go and do it already. Your apprehensive fascination on the stuff has practically become an obsession. You go into a shop in Denver, observe the goods, and choose what to or not to purchase. Entirely up to you. I realize conservatives are fearful of freedom of choice, bodily autonomy and the idea that you can actually choose your own mental state and how to tinker with it, but these are the facts of the grown-up world we now live in. Plus, I get that you're all squishy about it due to the meddlesome legal status. But you're not a professor of law any longer. On the very low probability that the CO fuzz allow you to get "busted" by Confederate General Jefferson Sessions' Goon Squads I can see how you'd worry that might look on the tabloids or an episode of Cops - let alone whatever concern you have about your presumably clean criminal record, but it sounds about as likely to happen as getting hit by a meteorite.
I'm not advising anything either way, Professor. Just find that your long-running stream of consciousness on this stuff reveals a lot about some strange boundaries you've erected around all this rubbernecking you do when it comes to weed.
I've written on this subject many times. I think there is much more reason to want access to drugs like that than to marijuana.
One barrier at a time. And the potential dangers, at least psychologically, of ayahuasca are probably worse than with weed. Not to mention that I can't see the point of wanting to bring it back into the United Frickin' States anyway. Go to South America, do it the traditional way, as part of a ritual in the rain forest jungles with the natives brewing a stinking pot of plant parts, surrounded by hippies or wanderers or journeymen who have no psychological, legal or temporal relation to the uptight land of General Sessions and his teetotaling Hairpiece-in-Chief boss.
I used to have sex with my girlfriends while high, both of us, all the time and it was great, felt great and ironically lasted longer, or maybe I just thought that it did. However, I understand that it made me a rapist.
But the first part made me think of how male porn actors used to eat celery, I guess in hopes that the turgor would translate.
I just worry about the strength of the pot these days and how it is often adulterated.
I just worry about the strength of the pot these days and how it is often adulterated.
That's just the weed itself talking. It's making you paranoid.
See? An endless cycle of fear and loathing. Reefer Madness!
The Drug Warriors were right. Or were they?
War Over. Drugs Win. (Best headline ever).
All the pretensions of oenophile writers, coupled with the wandering minds of stoners. They put the sheesh in hasheesh.
Which side of the aisle is pushing the idea that if she isn't sober, it's rape, full stop. Mainly, though, the problem I have with a lot of drugs that people ingest into their own bodies as free people is that so many of them end up on the street homeless, now our responsibility, or dead.
But I know that is really narrow minded.
The Toothless Revolutionary w/ the KO @ 8:22a. Kudos. Gee, I wonder if her hero Bobby Zimmmerman ever wrote any tunes on cannabis??
People I know and trust who have carried on the habit tell me that it is different now, and stronger not in a good way. I will take their word over an anonymous commenter who is just looking for any hook to hang an insult.
Mainly, though, the problem I have with a lot of drugs that people ingest into their own bodies as free people is that so many of them end up on the street homeless, now our responsibility, or dead.
But I know that is really narrow minded.
What nonsense. Define "so many of them." I'm pretty sure that homelessness is caused by a number of things and that our conservative care-non-takers/overseers won't do jack shit about anyone living on the streets regardless - preventive or otherwise. To the extent that it's "caused" by drugs, the issue is opiates - more of which kill Americans through "legal" prescription channels than from heroin. But Big Pharma is a legitimate business and American politicians love any businessman in a clean suit who funds their campaigns so let the killing and evicting continue, I guess. A conservative's idea of a party. Reinforces the hierarchy - apart from the fact that now it's white suburban kids overdosing. White Suburban Lives Matter! (But so does the ideal of government inaction, apparently).
Marijuana is now legal in Seattle. Some of the regulars smoked weed before it was legal, of course; the difference now is that no one needs to hide it. Now people come into the bar smelling strongly of the no-longer-illicit weed. They are almost prideful of the smell: they have been smoking the Good Stuff.
I said the difference now is that no one needs to hide it. But there is another difference: the legal stuff is stronger. More potent. Growers are working diligently on this, because there is open competition. Now it is like the proliferation of meticulous craft beers: you are aiming for a choosy market. People care about where the hops come from, say: they are discerning.
It is no longer Sixties Damage Grass, or Forgotten Seventies pot, or Eighties Without Hats weed. It is no longer what just happens to be available from shady guys on the Ave. It is like the steroids era in baseball: everyone wants the stuff that lets you hit seventy home runs. Everyone wants to slowly trot around the bases, kiss their fingertips, and point them at the sky.
The advent of legal marijuana has another effect on some regulars at the bar: nostalgia for the old days. When there was a thrill in buying clandestine goods. Memories of the dude you bought weed from, the shady guy with the limp. Furtive smoking. The time your regular connection disappeared from town, and you were left dry: you can laugh about it now, but it seemed catastrophic at the time. Those Days.
The Ave Kids can't afford this new legal stuff: there are taxes now, taxes that the City Government loves. So they still buy the illicit stuff. Clandestine. Furtive. And the shady guy with the limp stays in business, or at least someone like him. They have no need for craft beer; they do not care about where the hops came from. Fuck Heineken: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Of course, those who love the craft beers turn their noses up at Heineken, too, but you get the idea.
Meanwhile, some of the College Girls at the bar are still trying to score cocaine in the evenings. Clandestine. Furtive. When they are older and suburban they will probably have nostalgia about Those Days. If they haven't turned into crack whores. Always that possibility.
- james james
People I know and trust who have carried on the habit tell me that it is different now, and stronger not in a good way. I will take their word over an anonymous commenter who is just looking for any hook to hang an insult.
It is a lot stronger. So what? When you legalize a market you make greater options more likely - including and especially less potent options. Basic economics. Less to lose with the purchase so why intensify the experience that much? Or you could just do less of it. Either way, thanks for the somewhat trivial concern trolling.
From my 'back in the day' experiences, I learned that, regardless of how profoundly creative one's pot-induced ideas were at the time, they never stood the light of day. Things that were gut-bustingly funny when stoned fell flat when straight.
As I have posted before, a good friend's husband, a teacher, became psychotic after using marijuana, was hospitalized for a few weeks and then, when out, committed suicide.
It can be a pleasant recreational experience with friends but any expectation of enhanced creativity or insight is a false one. And for some, it's a one-way ticket to Loonyville.
“ I've written on this subject many times. I think there is much more reason to want access to drugs like that than to marijuana “
Yes, that’s an extremely good point.
Speaking on behalf of drug experiences is hard. But I’m a wayward child with a strong CV, still have my wealth, health and adventurous spirit at 61, and I’m a strong (yet mostly unspoken) advocate of a few things.
To be relevant to your point and the type of readers here, there are only a few drugs worth taking safely and out of curiousity at our age, IMO.
The top of the list is ayahuasca. But because of the recent popularity it’s become hard for new people to find an authentic experience. The truth is that the correct dosage, circumstances and accelerants of the real experience are so utterly harrowing no one would do it if they knew the truth of what they were in for. So the trendy retreats don’t offer anything like that. It would be terrible for business.
The upside is you don’t die, in fact the opposite. I can’t explain it. Life is unseen without it.
Tim, Indeed cannabis is stronger, but if you buy it in a dispensary it is organic, unlike the weed bought in the 60's. And, the THC levels are stated and CBD levels are listed as well as the type, sativa, indica or hybrid. If you want a lower THC level that is available. They even have unofficial effects. For indica, which is best for pain and sleep, they give you the "couch lock" effect. indica makes you stoned, sativa makes you high. The hybrids have a combo effect. Sativa is used by chemo patients as it is better @ increasing the appetite. If anyone w/ a heart goes to a dispensary and sees an emaciated, hairless, chemo patient @ a dispensary their ignorant views would change. Again, having a brain AND HEART is required for that epiphany.
My 8:45 comment was inspired by Althouse's "Will anyone find anything intelligent to say on this subject?"
But I hit Publish anyway.
- james james
From my 'back in the day' experiences, I learned that, regardless of how profoundly creative one's pot-induced ideas were at the time, they never stood the light of day. Things that were gut-bustingly funny when stoned fell flat when straight.
Change your name to John Lennon or Paul McCartney and re-evaluate.
Some people (older teens) predisposed to schizophrenia will develop it sooner. Many more who would die of the prescription opiate overdoses our deregulators have foisted upon us will not. Sounds like an easy trade-off to make, as long as we're going to legislate based on the weakest psychological link - something conservatives would never do when it comes to all the guns they allow us to be massacred by every day.
The long term health effects are going to "surprise" people 10 to 20 years down the road. We've now given large numbers of people the green light to smoke as much Pot as they want.
Its not going to end up well - health care wise.
If you want to to know the effects of chronic pot use just read what many of the usual suspects post here.
Having grown up and worked in a major metropolitan area I have seen the effects of a lot of different drugs. Before I graduated high school several classmates died of heroin use. Some OD ed and some were murdered.Purely anacdotal, I know, but it does tend to color ones opinion of drug use.
The long term health effects are going to "surprise" people 10 to 20 years down the road. We've now given large numbers of people the green light to smoke as much Pot as they want.
Yes, I know. Let's pretend science never had access to such research subjects ever before.
I don't know how many homeless drug addicts you run into, but it seems to me that they are shooting up heroin and fentanyl, not co-tylenol or whatever. Based on the the needles laying around, etc. That isn't "big pharma"
Others seem pretty clearly mentally ill, or seem to me anyway, developmentally like children. Street drugs never seem far from the picture though.
"Life is unseen without it."
Lol. Sure. No true Scotsman, I mean, no true life can be lived without the illusion of meaning provided by a certain drug! Not everybody has an empty hole in their life, just saying.
I lost one of our young men to pot.
He was a Salvadoran kid with a brain and a heart, got himself out of the LA barrio, gangs, broken home and all, did community college and trade schools and got halfway to an engineering degree at San Jose State. He was the sort who would find problems and stay all night fixing them. He had a future, this guy.
But pot, he could not get away from. He failed a required drug test and we had to let him go.
He was one of those that it kick-started schizophrenia. He started becoming delusional, until it became unsafe for his next employer to let him continue to work on physical plant.
He got himself some IT certifications, and he always had employment, but just short gigs because he would regularly get fired in a few months.
I hear he did a drug program and got clean, but we lost contact with him.
I don't know how many homeless drug addicts you run into, but it seems to me that they are shooting up heroin and fentanyl, not co-tylenol or whatever. Based on the the needles laying around, etc. That isn't "big pharma"
Thanks for the anecdotal, uh, evidence.
Anyway, make sure to let these guys in on the real picture:
Since 1999, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and heroin) quadrupled. From 2000 to 2015 more than half a million people died from drug overdoses. 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.
We now know that overdoses from prescription opioids are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths. The amount of prescription opioids sold to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, yet there had not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans reported. Deaths from prescription opioids—drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone—have more than quadrupled since 1999.
BTW, fentanyl is a commercially available manufactured pharmaceutical.
Right now I am sitting in a Madison cooffehouse overhearing a folksinger singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” to a bunch of children.
I mean covfefe house....
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix....
I can never hear that song any more without thinking of ol' John Kerry, mimicking joint-smoking in an old news clip while he nodded along to Peter Paul & May performing it.
"Mary" that is
Based on the people I've known, it seems like there is a correlation between depression and chronic pot use. Not occasional use, ut the guy or girl who is using most every day. I don't know which way the relationship runs - I suspect it's that depressed people are attracted to pot - but either way it's not good. That self-medication makes them feel good for a while, but it wears off and then they feel even lower, and aren't seeking the real help that they need.
Not so different from being a chronic alcoholic, I suppose, but far more socially acceptable these days.
Pot users love to declaim on the subject of the non-addictive nature of their recreational drug of choice. However, whenever discretion is urged they always launch into a contretemps on why their smoking pleasure must not be interrupted or delayed. Quaestor does not permit smoking in his home, including his own. I have been known to enjoy on a very rare occasion a nice Cohiba or H. Upmann smoke, but never indoors. I have a gazebo for that purpose and others. And I never smoke or drink alone. Those not so innocence pleasures are reserved to be shared with intimate friends who are fully satisfied with one elegant cigar and who can drink absinthe without ever showing the least sign of intoxication.
On Xmas Eve I had a number of friends and relations call on me — only normal. Most of them are not users, but there are a few. One of them is a business associate who seems to like me much more than I enjoy his company. He brought with him his favorite libation, Blanton's Single Barrel, which he commenced to empty by degrees. After about an hour my friend felt the urge to "mellow" his inebriation with some hydroponic grass. I objected. I reminded him that smoking was forbidden within my doors and of the outdoor shelter I built for that purpose.
"But it's cold outside," he whined.
Then don't smoke, I replied.
"Why don't you like pot? It's completely harmless."
Call it a matter of taste.
"So why don't you like pot?" (This guy is Towlie in the flesh, or terrycloth, or something.)
Well, for one thing, it stinks. (I hadn't the heart to tell him what a crashing, repetitive, inanely giggling bore he becomes under its influence.) Besides, a friend would respect my wishes in my own home.
"A friend wouldn't make me go outside to smoke alone in the cold." Blah, blah, ad infinitum.
..........
It seems to me that pot is supremely addictive in the most profound sense of the term.
I have mixed feeling on legalizing, but overall I see it as a positive.
Negatives:
Schizophrenia is an issue with high pot use
Paranoia can be an issue
I have seen that people can be real pot heads.
The higher thc content is real.
Positives:
I see it as a 50 state experiment.
The federal regulations are overboard on marijuana.
Criminalization has been a problem.
Illegal pot being full of nasty pesticides
Taxes
Has some medical benefits
Research into medical use can finally happen
Stops funding drug gangs
Criminalizing has not worked to reduce use, so time to try something new.
Funny how your "scientific" evidence conflates heroin with other opioids, almost as if to hide the true numbers in a fog in order to strengthen their rhetorical position. There is plenty of fentanyl and carfentanyl coming into this country illegally, BTW.
I am not saying that there isn't a problem with prescription pain killers, but humans are humans. It would be interesting to see the number of overdose deaths due to taking legally prescribed drugs compared to heroin and fentanyl. My friend works in a hospital and he told me that on a single day, they had nineteen overdoses and nine deaths among them. Carfentanyl. Don't put that on your knee-jerk whipping boy "big pharma."
Anything as easy to produce as pot cannot sustain much tax before it all goes right back underground. The tax benefits are most likely minimal.
Fentanyl is a legally prescribed drug.
TR beat me to it.
From my 'back in the day' experiences, I learned that, regardless of how profoundly creative one's pot-induced ideas were at the time, they never stood the light of day. Things that were gut-bustingly funny when stoned fell flat when straight.
Husband's ex-wife was and is a long term serious pothead. Her 'profound insights' journal she keeps when she's high (which frankly is most of the time) is both pitiful and hilarious. Example: "There are twice as many minutes in an hour than in half an hour."
oooooh that's some serious insight and creativity there, genius
That self-medication makes them feel good for a while, but it wears off and then they feel even lower, and aren't seeking the real help that they need.
It also makes you ok with being lazy and bored, and you perform at the lowest possible level you can get away with, and who wouldn't then feel like a loser waste of space in your lucid moments if that's how you live? Of course it makes depression worse.
But the people that use it every day (5 to 6 grams a day sometimes
That is an incredible amount of pot. I don't even know if it is possible to smoke that much in a day. The heaviest smoking long term pot smokers I know might smoke that much in a week.
Commune with Gaia.
It seems to me...
The new Trumpist standard for evidence.
Interestingly, recent research has linked a pot belly to the munchies.
Fentanyl is also illegally imported and distributed. Do you have some kind of cognitive disorder that prevents you from understanding logic? How many fentanyl deaths occur under a physician's care? Do a news search on fentanyl. Is it all the same to you if it is used to lace heroin or administered by an anesthesiologist?
Drive through lines at Taco Bell and Mickey D's will get slower.
"munchie meals" etc
Fentanyl is also illegally imported and distributed. Do you have some kind of cognitive disorder that prevents you from understanding logic?
Do you have some kind of cognitive disorder that prevents you from understanding that behind every problem there doesn't have to be a furrner lurking?
We now know that overdoses from prescription opioids are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths. The amount of prescription opioids sold to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, yet there had not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans reported.
You've already embarrassed yourself by revealing the fact that you didn't know that fentanyl was a commercially available prescribed U.S. medication. Go call up the DEA and let them know that diversion only happens through our borders and that physicians can only prescribe medications in ways that never hurt anybody. Whatever.
The above comments to-and-fro re adult usage. I don't have much trouble determining who among that cohort I prefer to deal or not deal with. I\m surprised there is not, however more note taken of a recent California study showing "Pot use by women during the first two months of pregnancy increased by about 7.5% per year between 2009 and 2016, researchers reported this week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn."
We'll have ample researcg subjects soon enough.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-marijuana-during-pregnancy-20171227-story.html
"
I fully support decriminalization of all drugs, but I am under no illusions about the "benefits" of any of them.
I have tried at one time or another pretty much all the illegal drugs you can think of except for the fentanyl class, and I don't think there is a single one I would recommend for regular use while maintaining a productive life- not a single one.
Legalization of drugs, like ending Prohibition, might make sense with the following stipulation: Drug companies should have to pay for rehab for those who abuse these drugs. For that matter, the liquor industry should have to do the same with alcoholics.
Decriminalization of marijuana isn't the same as legalizing cocaine or heroin or meth. It would put the drug dealers/importers out of business but the lack of legal disincentive would probably create a bigger market, more abuse, more chaos.
My libertarian side sometimes wars with my compassionate side on this issue. We do sometimes need to be protected from our own poor judgement. Where to draw the line is problematic.
Moderation is key.
One advantage is buying in a store.
Lot of street dealers provide easy access to other things average pot smoker would not otherwise go looking for.
holdfast, Cannabis is a depressant, as is alcohol. People who suffer depression should avoid both substances.
You assumed that TTR, more cognitive issues on your part. Anyway, it looks like you were already in your cups before you even started here, so what's the point?
holdfast, Cannabis is a depressant, as is alcohol. People who suffer depression should avoid both substances.
I believe I must disagree with you. I seem to recall that marijuana is classified as a hallucinogen and also as a euphoriant, which I don't think there are a lot of. I believe the effects of marijuana and alcohol are quite different and I would have no reason to elect the latter over the former other than its social acceptability.
Bad LT. I did lump all cannabis together which was wrong. Sativa is in in the hallucinogenic realm. But, indica is more of a depressant. The 2 strains have much different effects on the brain. One of the reasons hybrids were created[and there are countless hybrids] is to create a balance between high and mellow.
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