Well, I developed a psychological addiction to marijuana, I was smoking every day (granted, I was using other drugs as well, nitrous especially, which is a dissociative drug), but I used marijuana so often that even when I wasn't actively high, I was muddled in the head from having smoked so much the day before. I eventually developed the persistent feeling that nothing was real, and I was seriously disconnected from reality. The specific dissociative state began after a big smoking session with my friend, I went into a deep trance part way through, and when I came back an hour later everything felt seriously wrong, and somehow I ended up convincing myself that the reason everything felt so weird (and it continued to feel weird for the next three days) was that I was a freshly born soul, and my old soul had left my body because it was tired of living, and it had invited the new one to move in, leaving it all the memories it had from before in order to help orient itself. That is one of the things I remember most vividly, is how strongly I felt at the time that none of the memories I had from before were my own. I didn't feel like I was the one who had lived them, and it made talking to the people who were important in my life really upsetting, because I felt like I was obligated to pretend to have the same relationship the old me had had with them, but I didn't feel like I was the one who had had that relationship with them.Latinidiot said:Kpt._Rob said:'I believed that my original soul had left my body and been replaced with a new one that had access to all of the old one's memories.'SleepsAnyWhere said:- Marijuana is not as harmful as it is portrayed. In fact it's one of the most useful natural medical and fiber products known to man, not to mention a terrific bio fuel.
- Music has been proven to induce different effects on plants over extended time.
- Violent video games cause no effect other than desensitizing.
What the....
I am very interested, yet kind of scared. Would you care to elaborate?
I don't disagree with you, my goal here wasn't to say that marijuana should be illegal, in fact, I do feel that it current legal status causes many more problems than it solves. I simply wanted to point out that the OP was making an irresponsible claim. Of course marijuana can be used responsibly, but I think that people have to take the claim that it can be used responsibly with a grain of salt. Having tried a number of drugs myself, and having come into contact with more than a couple other drug users in my time, I've made a couple of observations in regards to drugs.joekickass said:To play the devil's advocate (except in California {prop 19Kpt._Rob said:I used to be a rabid marijuana smoker, and let me tell you, it can actually be pretty damn harmful. Granted, physiologically speaking there are much worse things you could do to yourself, but in psychological terms marijuana can do a lot of damage to you. You're free to disagree, but I once spent three days in a dissociative state in which I believed that my original soul had left my body and been replaced with a new one that had access to all of the old one's memories. Needless to say, experiences like that weigh on you for the rest of your life. Canabanoid abuse can seriously affect the relationship you perceive between yourself and reality.SleepsAnyWhere said:- Marijuana is not as harmful as it is portrayed. In fact it's one of the most useful natural medical and fiber products known to man, not to mention a terrific bio fuel.
- Music has been proven to induce different effects on plants over extended time.
- Violent video games cause no effect other than desensitizing.
I grow a lot of plants, so I actually looked into that second claim of yours at one point. There were some studies that indicated it was true, but most of them were run on a small number of plants, and all the plants in the studies were the same types of plants. A claim like that simply hasn't been verified in any real way as of yet.} )
Marijuana while it does have side effects long term, studies have been done, in fact i found out about them today, it rated alcohol, heroin, cocaine and yes marijuana. Now it should be noted that it took both the effect the drug has on relation-ships and the community, as well as the biological effects on the individual, the most dangerous one... alcohol.
Can using Marijuana damage social relations, yes BUT and i can not stress this enough, it affects people on a case-by-case basis, remember when you and your friends had your first drink at a party, if you look back at lets say your year 8/9/10 class, out of everyone you knew, someone out of everyone had a drink and got very drunk first, at first it was looked down upon, but then everybody starting doing it, much in the same way, if people knew what to look for and understood how it works and what it does, then maybe these new found 'hostilities' from people would be buffered or annihilated by a wave understanding, not a wall ignorance
[the drinking example can work for most things, who in your class first had sex, at first disgust then understanding and reason, i can only hope that humanity one day understands this]
And yes it is true that the potency of 'THC' one of the active ingredients in a weed 'high' IS in fact going up, and yes PURE (sorry again) 'THC' is an addictive substance, but how many of you drink coffee or tea daily, your already drinking addictive chemicals such as caffeine, now take all this into account and remember this, marijuana DOESN'T contain 100% THC, the highest (sorry for the pun) levels of THC in this plant have been around 30%, and at that it is a incredibly hard/rare thing to find, so why is it used so frequently in sensationalist arguments, because it sounds REALLY,REALLY EVIL
{average being between 9-14%}
one a slightly related topic, what another 'poster' was talking about 'weed fiber' and bio-fuel, is in fact true, in 1940 ford (yes the car company) made a prototype that was 70% hemp fiber and was incredibly strong when compared to a sledgehammer, it also ran on a hemp bio-fuel.
Marijuana CAN mess up your life, the individual will only have abuse issues with it if they have an addictive trait within their personality, it isn't as if once you smoke a joint your brain goes to mush, it isn't some spiral that destroys your life, UNLESS the person can't manage to see themselves and realize that certain things in life are important, like an education.
So yes, marijuana can damage your life, in the same way driving at 90 mph off a cliff could be considered the most fascinating debate ever conducted between gravity and Newton's three laws of motion (this is a joke, pretense was sadly shot and killed by unknown text murderer)
p.s i would like to know what caused you to go into a dissociative state for 3, as in did you 'consume' any other substances before hand, was the 'skunk' laced with something, etc. What i am trying to ask is, how an earth did you manage that. You must have been consuming a extremely large amount at a almost constant rate to achieve a dissociative state for not 1 or 2 but 3 days.
p.p.s if i have made any spelling/ grammatical mistakes please forgive me, i am tired (it probably shows) and very exhausted. If i have upset any person or persons, i am very sorry, for this, and would like to talk to you more on the topic.
-Jk
The first is that as a general rule when people do a drug they either have a terrible experience and decide never to do it again, or they have an amazing experience, and even if they told themselves they were just going to try it once, they want to do it again (exceptions are, of course, made for people who aren't affected the first time they take it). I started off using responsibly, and I know lots of other people who use way too much now, but who started off using responsibly. The more good experiences a person has with drugs, the more they want to use, and no one tries a drug hoping to have a bad experience.
The second observation I would make is that even though there are plenty of people who try marijuana a couple times, and then never do anything else, there are very few people who use harder drugs that didn't start with marijuana. If I hadn't started with marijuana there's not a chance in hell that I would've ended up a couple years later tripping research chemicals, combinations of harmala and mescaline, and when I hit rock bottom even diphenhydramine (Benadryl). I came really close to trying pure MDMA once, and I'm really lucky I didn't, because I think that would've sealed the deal, and in all honesty I'm fairly certain that instead of being clean right now, I'd probably be using heroin and meth right now if I had taken it and had a good experience, which I almost undoubtedly would have. I can't blame marijuana for that, but I can say that if I had never tried marijuana, that I never would have even considered trying any of the other drugs.
The final thing I would say is that even if you get clean, after you've been an addict you carry it with you for the rest of your life. I still want to get high so bad some nights that all I can do is just curl up in a ball and ride it out. I've had flashbacks, and I have a more literal conception of existential terror than I could ever have had without using drugs. I still have days where it's really difficult for me to differentiate between what is and what is not real, because my perception of perception itself has been so fundamentally changed. For all the good experiences I had, I wish I could go back and never have had any of them in the first place. This is one case in which ignorance truly would be bliss.
It's fine to say that marijuana can be used responsibly, and that when it is used responsibly it's probably the safest drug you could use. What's not fine is to treat it as if it's not without its risks. You're right when you say that how marijuana affects a person will vary from person to person, but you don't know if you're the person who can handle it or the person whose life it will set on a path to ruin until its too late.