I hate it... it's silly imo. Lot of people die from it, not directly but indirectly

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

But buying them in itself is illegal.

I suppose you've never kicked a ball in a ball-game-prohibited area?

My drug use never hurt anybody. Conversely I've upset lots of people when I've been drunk.

Quote from chanoman315 :

I hate it... it's silly imo. Lot of people die from it, not directly but indirectly

Yeah that is an issue. But if cannabis was legal then legal enterprises would spring up to provide the supply, and would take away that revenue from the criminals who are currently involved in it, saving those lives.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I suppose you've never kicked a ball in a ball-game-prohibited area?

My drug use never hurt anybody. Conversely I've upset lots of people when I've been drunk.

Meh, got me there. But taking your drunk example, what's to say people won't take their new found liberty too far, and create more of the same problem?

Quote from f4sttr@ck :

I dont understand why smoking pot means you need to grow up. It is actually good for you and makes you feel good while you do it. What about those who drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes or other things of that nature? Do they need to grow up too? Considering both are more dangerous I would suggest that you tell them to grow up and smoke pot like an adult.

I was just thinking this, I can't see the correlation at all. People smoke to relax, get to sleep easier, lower blood pressure etc. If I was to smoke it wouldn't be for childish reasons at all. Though I don't see how pot is good for you, unless you have a vapouriser smoking pot is still damaging your lungs. But yeah pot is so much safer than alcohol in many ways.

I have no problem with people that smoke occasionally, I hardly ever myself though.

Quote from f4sttr@ck :

I have studied marijuana from every angle for hours on end

Hmm, I've also studied marijuana for hours on end. Except, I've only studied it from 2 angles, the angle of getting rolled up into a piece of paper, and the angle of the smoke being expelled from my lungs...

Quote from Kev, the LFSForum druggie :

I've always sworn off crack, long before it came to the UK, and in the end I went out to meet it in the USA. I remember one morning waking up and finding a bunch of people who came home with me (who I'd previously considered quite sensible people - except the guy who'd brought the crack rocks and the pipe) were smoking crack in my kitchen, so I kicked them out. It seemed the USA has a more relaxed attitude to crack than we do, because it's more common over there, but stick heroin infront of them and they're mostly too wary of it to go anywhere near it. Whereas heroin's been around in the UK forever, so it's seen as relatively safe.

Interesting.

As I've been away from the party scene for a very long time now, I've heard that heroin is very big in my area. It's just a little town on the outskirts of the big city (Pittsburgh being the big city.) It wasn't like that when I was around. We had some coke, but it wasn't all that popular either. We were just town full of pot smoking fools basically. Pot and acid, until I got older and away from the partying. That's when the coke and mostly the heroin came to be.

a weed thread on LFS forum.

<3 weed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6gu7wGwyYI&fmt=18

Don't legalize; decriminalize.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

what's to say people won't take their new found liberty too far, and create more of the same problem?

People are already smoking weed, loads of them. I don't know of anybody (among the habitual weed-smokers I know) who's ended up in trouble over it (save for my schizo friend Jonno who I mentioned earlier, but he wasn't a danger to anybody but himself, and that's not my assessment, it's from the social worker and doctor who routinely sectioned him). Drinking certainly seems to cause more aggressive behaviour than smoking pot does, in my experience.

Quote from RossUK :

I was just thinking this, I can't see the correlation at all. People smoke to relax, get to sleep easier, lower blood pressure etc. If I was to smoke it wouldn't be for childish reasons at all.

I'm not a big weed smoker at all, never was, I don't even smoke if there's a joint being passed around and I never have, I just don't dig the buzz that much and I don't like my mouth feeling all dry. But I did once buy some buds when I was going through a messy break-up and it was good to calm me down and make me think a bit more rationally about the situation, especially because I was going through some serious depression at the time (probably the main cause of the break-up). If I hadn't done that, I probably would've been drinking fairly heavily instead, and I doubt that drinking would've helped be think very rationally!

Edit: Thinking about it, that break-up led to me meeting the girl who I've been living with for the last 8 years, so it can't have been all that catastrophic.

Quote from mrodgers :

Quote from Originally Posted by Kev, the LFSForum druggie :

...

Thanks Mike!

In all honesty I've done pretty much everything under the sun except crack and various uninteresting pharmaceuticals, and in my expert opinion the only thing worth doing* is shrooms.

* Kids: Don't do shrooms. You might have an allergic reaction to them and end up in a mental hospital for months, followed by several years (a lifetime?) of rehabilitation. I knew a guy who had that reaction to LSD and it really messed him up, and although I don't know whether the same thing can happen with shrooms I wouldn't want one of you to find out.

Summation:

Cannabis resin: Dead-headed feeling. I find it generally unpleasant.
Skunk bud: Trippy and a bit more lively, but still a bit dead-headed.
LSD: Hilariously trippy but the chemical feeling (hard to explain) can be distracting, and it can cause nasty mental side-effects.
Shrooms: The most hilariously trippy you can get (doubleplus), no nasty chemical feeling, instead a lovely warm organic fuzzy tummy feeling and a predilection to find everything hilarious. I've known someone have a bad trip on shrooms and he's sworn off them since, but I can't imagine it happening.
Ecstasy: Buzz is a bit too hyper, not trippy enough for me, the heart rate leap is pretty unpleasant and distracting. Also tends to make me projectile vomit after every pill - OK if you're ready for it, but not if you're not!
Speed: If you literally can't afford to sleep, get another job - don't do speed. It's just unpleasant. Effects last for hours and can cause run-on consequences for days. Also causes total loss of appetite - imagine the consequences of being awake for days and not eating.
Coke: Massively overrated, just don't bother. And highly addictive.
Heroin: I can understand why people get addicted to it. Very comforting. Avoid, especially if you're already feeling down. It will ruin you.
Lemmon quaaludes: Dealer told us strictly one pill each, she went to the toilet so we all had three. I don't recall what happened in the following three days but I felt fine afterwards. Hard to recommend!
Peyote: Was very trippy but I think I fell asleep - stick to the cheaper and more accessible shrooms, you won't fall asleep!

Not sure what I've missed out. There are large chunks of my memory that I have difficulty using.

once a week or more. lately has been every night before i go to bed

I haven't but I wouldn't mind trying.

Kev- You forgot to add Jenkem to your list. From what I hear it has become pretty popular for its long lasting highs.

Quote from Rappa Z :

Kev- You forgot to add Jenkem to your list. From what I hear it has become pretty popular for its long lasting highs.

Hehe. I've never heard of that before. Thankfully!

I did forget to mention Ketamine and PCP, which I thought were pretty similar. They're not really trippy as-such although you do get weird trail-y vision, and they tend to make you feel a bit out of it and vulnerable. Not the sorts of drugs you'd want to be on if you had to cross a busy street.

On the positive side they tend to wear off quite quickly, unlike LSD or shrooms which will keep you busy for between 6 and 12 hours, although much of that is a long and often tedious come-down where all you want to do is sleep but it's impossible.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Thanks Mike!

Any time!

Quote :

* Kids: Don't do shrooms. You might have an allergic reaction to them and end up in a mental hospital for months, followed by several years (a lifetime?) of rehabilitation. I knew a guy who had that reaction to LSD and it really messed him up, and although I don't know whether the same thing can happen with shrooms I wouldn't want one of you to find out.

I've never done shrooms.

The most interesting thing was my first time with LSD. By the late evening, we made it to a college campus and was walking around in shorts and T-shirts. It was hot. After an hour of roaming the college campus, hot in our shorts and T-shirts, I realized something. Everyone else was walking around bundled up in heavy winter coats, some wearing hats, and most walking like it was freezing out. We were mind boggled over it because there we were in our shorts and t-shirts wondering why everyone was so bundled up when it was so hot out.

Do not under any circumstances, drink or eat any of your favorite foods while on acid. It will ruin your favorite food/drink for eternity because it will never taste the same to you again.

Quote from mrodgers :

Do not under any circumstances, drink or eat any of your favorite foods while on acid. It will ruin your favorite food/drink for eternity because it will never taste the same to you again.

I was always really bad at eating on acid. Things would just randomly fall out of my mouth and I couldn't really figure out chewing - I couldn't tell what was in there!

Smoking on acid was funny though. I remember trying to put out a cigarette in a glass ashtray that was sitting on a friend's bed. Of course little red embers split away from the tip, presumably contained by the ashtray but they seemed to leap out and sink into the covers - we all went nuts patting out a non-fire.

I think that was the night we figured out we were all God, and then decided we should play Brit Quiz which was lying on top of our host's wardrobe because, in the words of my drummer-at-the-time, "If we're all God, we should be pretty good at Brit Quiz".

It actually kind of sucks that Cannabis is so violently criminalized.. I saw "Chasing the Dragon" and I saw that people were arrested for minor amounts of Cannabis, I saw that and was kinda laughing, over how petty the cops had to be.

Here in the UK they've dropped weed to a class 'C' drug, which means that most people found in possession aren't charged, but they're planning to put it back up to class 'B' next year, apparently based on this report.

Again, they're stuck with treating cannabis as one drug and basing the law on how strong skunk can be.

The classification system is pretty ludicrous anyway, given that they're all illegal. To quote Ali G; "Does 'Class A' mean you are guaranteed top quality?"

One of the troubles of criminalising/decriminalising the 'lighter' drugs is that its incredibly difficult to do given the legal status of alcohol.

Pretty much everyone will agree that health-wise, not doing pot is better for you than doing it, which is supposedly the rationale being keeping it illegal, however saying 'it's bad for you so it's illegal' while keeping alcohol legal is nigh-on impossible to do without coming across as a massive hippocrite. If alcohol had only been discovered recently it would be a Class A drug.

I have had first hand experiance of cannabis related mental illness, and it ain't pretty.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Whether the schizophrenia was present but undetected before he started using a lot of skunk nobody knows,

That's the interesting point about the effects of mind altering drugs. Do they cause mental illness, or simply unlock it ?

I've know hundreds of druggies in my time, some are perfectly normal rational people, some have had mental health problems only when they've been taking the drugs, some have had problems that have persisted even when they quit the drug, and some have died of overdose's. Some have ended up being sectioned just from smoking dope (resin) and one guy i knew took acid and somehow managed to convince himself he couldn't bend his left knee. There was nothing physically wrong with his left knee, but it would take days after he had dropped a couple of tabs of acid for his brain to convince him he was ok . Then come the weekend, he'd go through the whole process again. And he had a full time job too. Another friend of mine was a very nice, pleasant, bright, middle class girl with a good education and a very supportive and well respected family. She met a guy (a heroin addict), fell in love, got married, had a couple of kids, became a junkie and was found dead, all alone in a train station a couple of years later. It was so sad to see someone with so many prospects and potential literally fall apart infront of your eyes. But she wouldn't accept any help from anyone. "She knew best, it was her life, and no one was going to take her heroine away from her, or tell her what to do"...sad, so sad.

I guess the moral of the story is a bit like that Forest Gump quote "Life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get". You never really know how drugs are gonna effect you in the short and long term until you actually try them. You might get lucky and have no adverse effects at all, or you may turn into a nutcase or even drop dead on you first go. Question is, is it worth the risk ?

If you have an addictive personality then the chances are once you try a drug and like it, then you'll become hooked, and once you're hooked who knows where it might lead.

For me, i stopped taking illegal drugs about 15yrs ago and the only ill effect i have noticed is a really wierd memory. I can barely tell you what i did yesterday and i havn't the faintest idea what my own telephone number is, but i can remember how tall my first girlfriend was and the registration plate of my old geography teacher's car, i'm useless with name's but i never ever forget a face, even if it was someone i met only once on a bus back in 1972.

As for the legalisation of drugs i've got mixed emotions about it tbh. Perhaps in certain circumstances like pain relief for MS sufferers it's ok, but i wouldn't fancy getting on a plane or a train with the thought the pilots/drivers might be sitting up front legally puffing on a huge reefer.

I had most of the symptons you described in your opening post. Took me years to solve half of them, the rest are for life.

I was reading the OP talking about his personal experience not involving any of the listed/published traits, and using that to justify marajjuana. My personal experience is different.

On the plus side I got to meet some interesting people, most of them imaginary of course. I have a period of well over 5 years of my life where anything that I remember I dont know is real or not. Some stuff is obvious, I know I didnt talk to the Queen in my living room... Some stuff is more subtle and I cant tell it apart from stuff that is real. I try not to think too much about it these days as there are no answers to be found in whats left in my mushy stuff up top so why focus my life on looking?.. None-the-less the aftereffects of all the drugs I did I will live with for the rest of my life.

Sure ok I did the odd other drug too but cannabis resin was my mainstay, I was doing between 1/8 to 1/4 a day.

The argument that cannabis is not damaging is not a valid one, because clearly in some people it is.

The question of whether that is enough to make it illegal or not, well, i'm not going to ponder it myself. Even when I find myself where drugs are legal I dont touch them anymore with the exception of cigarettes (which I took to smoking as a coping mechanism for cold turkey). I avoid putting myself in situations when I know that drugs are going to be on the table because I know I can't hack it.

From a personal perspective I really wouldnt want to have cannabis as widely available and socially accepted as cigarettes are, for the people who cannabis does effect like it did me, which is a very small percentage, this would be the definition of hell. Infact I often reffer to my time on drugs as my time in hell. That's not to say a more ballanced approach won't work though, we all know about Amsterdam but it's not like people are smoking it in the street. (come to think of it, I used too).

However one thing does annoy me about the cannabis, that is the culture that surrounds it now. I never understood why people who are so into it feel the need to give themselves named like "Stoney" in online games, and paint their cars as a big cannabis leaf and so on. So you do a soft drug which may or may not have serious ramifications for you and your health, big deal? Why shout about it? It's just advertising narcotics which is irresponsible, but more importantly you just look like a twat if your life is now so shallow that the only way you can express yourself creatively is "drug user".

@danowat:
I know, we've ALL seen lerts

My last year of school my friends and I used to smoke a bit of pot at lunchtimes. I only realised later that we must have smelled really really bad when we went back in the afternoons. We also broke out the spliffs every now and again after band rehearsals or nights out in town.

Now while my last couple of school years aren't exactly a recommended lifestyle choice for anyone who wants a successful future, I know it hasn't done me any harm. My exam results weren't related to the dope - music and an uncooperative school were the culprits for that one.

As with any chemical, occasional use is normally alright (assuming you have no crazy allergies). You only experience problems when you use it all the time. Anything that triggers endorphins can become addictive (that's addictive, not addicting, dammit!) so needs to be handled with care.

Well, here you go - one of the popularised sources of most of the scientific facts stated in this thread:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028346/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZdhcNegZgU

Chemical dependancy, no matter what is it, is bad, what I don't like is that some of them are socially acceptable, and others aren't, which I find mental.

A group of lads going out of a friday, drinking 10 pints of pisswasser, is more socially acceptable than someone jacking up with herion, why?, simply because one is legal, and one isn't?, they are both VERY damaging in there own way and both ruin lives.

Just because you think cannabis is "ok", or "cool", it doesn't mean it is, just as everything else, you WILL do yourself irrepairable damage, and you won't know till it's too late.

Quote from danowat :

Just because you think cannabis is "ok", or "cool", it doesn't mean it is, just as everything else, you WILL do yourself irrepairable damage, and you won't know till it's too late.

Nonsense - at most your communications skills will be slightly hindered and you won't be able to finish a

Growing up in the seventies and eighties it was all around me and I never used or was ever tempted, I saw the bonging, popping of pills and the glue sniffing (addicted enough to do it during work). Although I haven't seen these people in a very long time it wouldn't surprise me if they are all dead or living a very poor quality of life.
With everything out there trying to shorten life why push to make it happen faster, people live their own life and can do with it what they want. But why burden the health system unnecessary, self inflicted sickness either now or down the track can't be a good thing. Also think about the innocent bystanders who passively get exposed.
Sorry as you can tell I'm a goodie two shoes.
I'll get of my soapbox now.

Quote from danowat :

A group of lads going out of a friday, drinking 10 pints of pisswasser, is more socially acceptable than someone jacking up with herion, why?, simply because one is legal, and one isn't?, they are both VERY damaging in there own way and both ruin lives.

I get your point, but heroin is a slightly different story. It's a one-hit addiction while most others need a build-up over time.

Both sides can argue until the cows come home, but it won't accomplish anything. The fans will say they know what they're doing and the objectors will say it's not a good idea. Both might be right, it's all up to the individual.

After all, more people have killed themselves on prescription medication or over-the-counter drugs than have via illicit ones.

The thing I dont understand is that drugs dont really need to be legalised. I meen, does anyone here who wants to or has done soft drugs, or hard ones for that matter, have any trouble getting hold of them?

I never had trouble getting gear.

So whats the big deal over legalisation?