Make it Legal

[Jinx_Dragon]

To me it is a matter of choice.

We don't own anything in this world, not really. Your house can be taken from you, burnt down or repossessed. Your things can be destroyed or stolen in a heart beat. The government, the greatest thief of all, has many ways to just take whatever you own should they deem it. The only thing we truly have is what we where born with... these physical forms. What we do to them... that should be OUR CHOICE!

I don't like the idea of the government being able to have any say over our possession of our own bodies and mind. That they should have the final say of what we can and can not experience with them, more so when no harm will come to another person. On that note, the consequences of which we should have to live with, not throw onto some chemical structure that can't think for itself. It is very backwards, the way the law currently is. We are not legally allowed to but have no responsibility if we do something wrong.

[sarcasm] It was all the 'drugs fault' so don't send me to prison for running over a guy while intoxicated! The government was to blame, it should of been a better babysitter for my body!... [/sarcasm]

The government can just get get the hell out of my body.

 

[Biosophilogical]

HURRAY TIME TO SHARE AN OPINION!!!
I am sick and tired of being told what is and isn't 'proper' F**K PROPER I SAY!!! I have absolutely no issue with people doing low-strength drugs, like marijuana (not things like spped though, that never stops at 'private-use only' I'm afraid. I also have no issue with T.V. being completely uncensored, after all, people mght say that having everything as swearing will make people stupid, but if everything is swearing, people would get sick of it, and the excessive swearing would stop.

Same applies to pretty much everything, if you are able to choose whether a certain substance has an influence in your life, then there is nothing wrong with having the option available.

Alas, my fellow escapists, this is unlikely to happen, seeing as most (if not all), live in a democratic society, and therefore all the majority (Those who enforce these things on us!) end up deciding how things work, when, in a perfect world (where people are truly free, not just this democrtic version of free) only the qualified would be allowed to vote, and therefore, the politicians would be the most qualified for the positions and they would no longer have to play the game of politics, trying to be liked, instead, they could do what is right and best for the population in the long run.

 

[Iron Mal]

I'm sure people have died from cannabis use, just not as many as the adverts try to hint at (I'm pretty certain that too much of anything can be leathal).

Find me a single recorded case in medical history of someone dying from thc overdose and private message me your real address/paypal account/whatever on the forums, and i will personally send you $100 (australian). No kidding.

Too much of pretty much anything can be leathal (you can die of water posioning from having too much water in your body, if water can kill you in excess then I'm sure that cannabis has the same potential).

I'm not saying that death from cannabis overdoses are a common occurance, just that it is more than likely that it has occured on at least one occasion.

I don't have to provide evidence because the laws of averages would dictate that for all of the people throughout the world and throughout history that have used cannabis, there will be at least one who will have died from exposure to the substance itself (you can keep your money).

 

[Michael S. Azrael]

I believe if the only person it is hurting is you and you made the choice with a sound mind, there is no reason for it to be illegal.

 

[turbosloth]

I'm sure people have died from cannabis use, just not as many as the adverts try to hint at (I'm pretty certain that too much of anything can be leathal).

Find me a single recorded case in medical history of someone dying from thc overdose and private message me your real address/paypal account/whatever on the forums, and i will personally send you $100 (australian). No kidding.

Too much of pretty much anything can be leathal (you can die of water posioning from having too much water in your body, if water can kill you in excess then I'm sure that cannabis has the same potential).

I'm not saying that death from cannabis overdoses are a common occurance, just that it is more than likely that it has occured on at least one occasion.

I don't have to provide evidence because the laws of averages would dictate that for all of the people throughout the world and throughout history that have used cannabis, there will be at least one who will have died from exposure to the substance itself (you can keep your money).

Technically i think you can die from having too much urine in your body, although its sometimes refereed to as 'water poisoning', and it only happens in extreme or unusual circumstances.

Secondly, while I'm sure there is some theoretical concentration of THC in your system that would kill you, unless someone purified it out in a lab and started injecting you with massive quantities of it or a similarly extreme scenario occurred, you would find it physically impossible to reach. I don't care how much of the stuff you smoke, its not going to kill you. And if you tried to ingest enough to kill you in brownies or something, you'd die from the sheer volume of food consumed long before you would of THC overdose (or you know, just stop eating)

Not only has nobody died from this, but without some serious technological know how, it would be impossible to kill yourself with even if you were trying

 

[Iron Mal]

Technically i think you can die from having too much urine in your body, although its sometimes refereed to as 'water poisoning', and it only happens in extreme or unusual circumstances.

Secondly, while I'm sure there is some theoretical concentration of THC in your system that would kill you, unless someone purified it out in a lab and started injecting you with massive quantities of it or a similarly extreme scenario occurred, you would find it physically impossible to reach. I don't care how much of the stuff you smoke, its not going to kill you. And if you tried to ingest enough to kill you in brownies or something, you'd die from the sheer volume of food consumed long before you would of THC overdose (or you know, just stop eating)

Not only has nobody died from this, but without some serious technological know how, it would be impossible to kill yourself with even if you were trying

Fair enough for correcting me on the true nature of water posioning, I'm not a medical expert (although urine is mostly made up of water and unused nutrients so it would still technically be the result of too much water in your system that would kill you).

Agaian, I repeat my point of it has to be possible for one person to have overdosed or otherwise had an adverse reaction to the substance itself, I'm agreeing with you to a point (it's extremely unlikly that an individual would or could overdose but this is not to say that it is outright impossible, every foreign substance has the potential to seriously harm or kill the body, the likelyhood of this actually occuring varies from substance to substance).

Ockham's razor supports the idea that there has to have been at least one leathality as a result of an overdose from Cannabis, almost every stubstance on Earth that is known to man and science has the possibility to kill us yet for some reason a single plant (which has an effect on humans) can't quite do it?

Either we're looking at a miricle plant or we've overlooked a few unfortunate people (just because they weren't reccorded or reported it doesn't mean it never happened).

 

[turbosloth]

Technically i think you can die from having too much urine in your body, although its sometimes refereed to as 'water poisoning', and it only happens in extreme or unusual circumstances.

Secondly, while I'm sure there is some theoretical concentration of THC in your system that would kill you, unless someone purified it out in a lab and started injecting you with massive quantities of it or a similarly extreme scenario occurred, you would find it physically impossible to reach. I don't care how much of the stuff you smoke, its not going to kill you. And if you tried to ingest enough to kill you in brownies or something, you'd die from the sheer volume of food consumed long before you would of THC overdose (or you know, just stop eating)

Not only has nobody died from this, but without some serious technological know how, it would be impossible to kill yourself with even if you were trying

Fair enough for correcting me on the true nature of water posioning, I'm not a medical expert (although urine is mostly made up of water and unused nutrients so it would still technically be the result of too much water in your system that would kill you).

Agaian, I repeat my point of it has to be possible for one person to have overdosed or otherwise had an adverse reaction to the substance itself, I'm agreeing with you to a point (it's extremely unlikly that an individual would or could overdose but this is not to say that it is outright impossible, every foreign substance has the potential to seriously harm or kill the body, the likelyhood of this actually occuring varies from substance to substance).

Ockham's razor supports the idea that there has to have been at least one leathality as a result of an overdose from Cannabis, almost every stubstance on Earth that is known to man and science has the possibility to kill us yet for some reason a single plant (which has an effect on humans) can't quite do it?

Either we're looking at a miricle plant or we've overlooked a few unfortunate people (just because they weren't reccorded or reported it doesn't mean it never happened).

While it's quite possible that someone has died from cannibas exposure, the only possible reason for that would be if they had an individual unusual negative reaction to it, i.e. a severe allergy or something similar. Are you suggesting that we should reconsider the legality of peanuts? Peanut allergies kill many people in recorded cases every year.

And they are not recorded or reported because they have not happened. As you point out almost every substance has the possibility to kill us. And once again, i'm not even arguing that THC is completely harmless and can't kill you, just that you can't possibly smoke the amount that would. To make that point even more clear I will use first a personal anecdote and then science:

Personal Anecdote:
If you must know as well as being quite well read in the area, I know this from personal experience as several times as part of bets or dare's i have sat down and smoked as much weed as i possibly could - i.e. smoked continuously until i was too high to lift a bong to my lips and light it because my muscles would not obey my brains commands to move no matter what i did, then had mates light them for me until i fell asleep. My record was a consumption of 68 cones of high-grade, hydroponic, finely chopped marijuana in just over 2 and a half hours. At that point I was high far beyond the point of being remotely functional, having done the "smoking equivalent" of something like drinking 3 litres of vodka in that timespan or something equally ridiculous, and it felt absolutely wonderful and had no negative side effects at all (well, aside from being a contributing factor to the decline of my short-term memory)

Science:
Ok, I admit this comes from wikipedia (yea, i know, not the most reliable source, but if you remain unconvinced i might be motivated to dig up some better ones) but apparently they have discovered the lethal dose in rats, dogs, monkeys and mice, from which they can extrapolate an estimate that in order to reach its LD50 (the dose at which it will kill half a sample population) a person would have to consume 680 kilograms of marijuana in around 15 minutes (assuming they were smoking it. Apparently it would be slightly easier to kill yourself with it by dissolving into oil and then drinking an unholy fuckload of it, but i think that more or less comes back to "deliberately trying"). Quite honestly, if you consume that much weed somehow, I'm pretty sure it won't kill you anyway for reason of you clearly being superman. I mean we're talking about smoking more than half a TON of grass here.

EDIT: oh, and a further thought on the above personal anecdote: most people who die from "water poisoning" do so as a result of some form of competition that requires them to not urinate for a long period of time, often while drinking large amounts of water. A similar competition (i.e. a 'smoke off') was the reason for my consuming the stupid quantities of weed above, and it had no harmful effects. From this I can say that marijuana is less lethal than water.

 

[Iron Mal]

While it's quite possible that someone has died from cannibas exposure, the only possible reason for that would be if they had an individual unusual negative reaction to it, i.e. a severe allergy or something similar. Are you suggesting that we should reconsider the legality of peanuts? Peanut allergies kill many people in recorded cases every year.

And they are not recorded or reported because they have not happened. As you point out A) almost every substance has the possibility to kill us. And once again, i'm not even arguing that THC is completely harmless and can't kill you, just that you can't possibly smoke the amount that would. To make that point even more clear I will use first a personal anecdote and then science:

Personal Anecdote:
If you must know as well as being quite well read in the area, I know this from personal experience as several times as part of bets or dare's i have sat down and smoked as much weed as i possibly could - i.e. smoked continuously until i was too high to lift a bong to my lips and light it because my muscles would not obey my brains commands to move no matter what i did, then had mates light them for me until i fell asleep. My record was a consumption of 68 cones of high-grade, hydroponic, finely chopped marijuana in just over 2 and a half hours. At that point I was high far beyond the point of being remotely functional, having done the "smoking equivalent" of something like drinking 3 litres of vodka in that timespan or something equally ridiculous, and it felt absolutely wonderful and had no negative side effects at all (well, aside from being a contributing factor to the decline of my short-term memory)

Science:
Ok, I admit this comes from wikipedia (yea, i know, not the most reliable source, but if you remain unconvinced i might be motivated to dig up some better ones) but apparently they have discovered the lethal dose in rats, dogs, monkeys and mice, from which they can extrapolate an estimate that in order to reach its LD50 (the dose at which it will kill half a sample population) a person would have to consume 680 kilograms of marijuana in around 15 minutes (assuming they were smoking it. Apparently it would be slightly easier to kill yourself with it by dissolving into oil and then drinking an unholy fuckload of it, but i think that more or less comes back to "deliberately trying"). Quite honestly, if you consume that much weed somehow, I'm pretty sure it won't kill you anyway for reason of you clearly being superman.

I understand what you're saying and I agree that it is an extremely unlikely occurance and that as far as substances go THC is one of the least harmful (to my knowledge) and the possibility of a fatality is not what would lead me to believe that it should be made illegal (given it's laughably small chance of killing someone this would be like banning the use of bandages because some idiot somewhere could strangle themself with them), there is a possibility if not much of a probability (argueably, the part about every substance being able to kill you is that for many examples it happens to be under rare and strange circumstances but then again, these circumstances do occur from time to time).

Also, about you saying that because something was not reccorded or reported that it did not happen, allow me to introduce you to the sociological concept of the 'dark figure of crime', this is the number of crimes that occur that do not get reported (for example: victimless crimes, crimes where the victim is reluctant to report, cases where the police do not believe the crime warrents their attention among many others). These crimes still happened even if the statistics say otherwise (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

 

[turbosloth]

snip.

I understand what you're saying and I agree that it is an extremely unlikely occurance and that as far as substances go THC is one of the least harmful (to my knowledge) and the possibility of a fatality is not what would lead me to believe that it should be made illegal (given it's laughably small chance of killing someone this would be like banning the use of bandages because some idiot somewhere could strangle themself with them), there is a possibility if not much of a probability (argueably, the part about every substance being able to kill you is that for many examples it happens to be under rare and strange circumstances but then again, these circumstances do occur from time to time).

Also, about you saying that because something was not reccorded or reported that it did not happen, allow me to introduce you to the sociological concept of the 'dark figure of crime', this is the number of crimes that occur that do not get reported (for example: victimless crimes, crimes where the victim is reluctant to report, cases where the police do not believe the crime warrents their attention among many others). These crimes still happened even if the statistics say otherwise (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Oh, i didn't mean to suggest that just because something isn't reported it didn't happen as a general principal, just express my extreme confidence that human deaths from marijuana consumption have never been reported because they have not occurred. I'm aware that many unreported events of all kinds happen every day, including crimes as well as, I'm sure, interesting scientific phenomena. I'm 99.9999999999999999% sure these events have never included a death from marijuana use, however...