Why do you think Marijuana is taboo and alcohol not?

My grandfather owned a bar and literally had customers who got liver disease and other ailments. Alcohol is a real poison. Like put alcohol on gems and it will kill them. Cause liver disease heart issues, high blood pressure, etc. Marijuana seems safe as hell by comparison. So what gives?

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Aim_Deep wrote:

My grandfather owned a bar and literally had customers who got liver disease and other ailments. Alcohol is a real poison. Like put alcohol on gems and it will kill them. Cause liver disease heart issues, high blood pressure, etc. Marijuana seems safe as hell by comparison. So what gives?

Holy roller politicians for decades ran massive propaganda against it. People need to make names for themselves politically with things like reefer madness and up to the war on drugs.

I would hardly call it Taboo unless you live in a very conservative area now.

Technically, everything is toxic. You can literally die from intoxication to water. The only difference is the dosage. Alcohol has a relatively high dosage requirement before becoming toxic to the human body and unlike tobacco, marijuana (and really, anything that's smoked), it has no lingering effects IF you don't excess the toxic threshold (if you exceed it, diseases, contamination and other side effects of toxicity emerge).

Now, smoking is slightly different because of how it infiltrate the structure of the cells (Most notably, mouth, gum, throat, lungs and blood) and can cause mutation in them. The mutation is what is commonly called cancer. Now, not every mutated cells will be able to spread its state (actually, it's very rare that they are able to, which is why cancer can take extremely long to develop even in the case of heavy smokers) and even so, it happens that such cells dies through normal cell decay and replacement. That said, smoking also leave traces in the organism that isn't possible to remove (most notably, when you have black spots on your lungs when you take an x-ray). These are quite nefarious because they alter your breathing capacity (by lowering the capacity of your lungs to absorb oxygen). Also, a number of narcotics will affect your brain function (marijuana is one of them) and you will have lasting and irreversible effects on your capacity to concentrate, focus, retain information and learn as marijuana has been proven to cause premature death of neurons (which is the only cell in the human body that isn't able to be regenerated).

As for alcohol and germs, almost anything can kill germs. Did you know that just letting them in open air will kill most of them?

Smoking marijuana once in a while is unlikely to have a noticeable effect on you until the very long term, where all those casual smoking will add up but even then, it should be pretty small (unless you got unlucky and caught a spreading cancer with little smoking, which sadly, happen even to non-smokers)

Drinking will have had no effect on you unless you abused it. There's even some studies that correlate that alcohol can have a positive effect on the organism (I haven't personally dug into them so it is possible that there's a bias in these studies).

In the US at least it was made illegal as a weapon against "hippies, blacks, hispanics, and other undesirables".

It perpetuated in this way, supported by blatant propaganda like Reefer Madness, fulfilling it's primary mission of removing liberal elements from society while also enriching the criminal system in a multitude of ways (primarily, prisons appreciate the slave labor which is explicitly legal in the 13th Amendment).

It's a dark stain on the country, but it looks like the end of prohibition is getting nigh as more and more states legalize it.

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faerwin wrote:

Technically, everything is toxic. You can literally die from intoxication to water. The only difference is the dosage. Alcohol has a relatively high dosage requirement before becoming toxic to the human body and unlike tobacco, marijuana (and really, anything that smoked), it has no lingering effects IF you don't excess the toxic threshold (if you exceed it, diseases, contamination and other side effects of toxicity emerge).

Now, smoking is slightly different because of how it infiltrate the structure of the cells (Most notably, mouth, gum, throat, lungs and blood) and can cause mutation in them. The mutation is what is commonly called cancer. Now, not every mutated cells will be able to spread its state (actually, it's very rare that they are able to, which is why cancer can take extremely long to develop even in the case of heavy smokers) and even so, it happens that such cells dies through normal cell decay and replacement. That said, smoking also leave traces in the organism that isn't possible to remove (most notably, when you have black spots on your lungs when you take an x-ray). These are quite nefarious because they alter your breathing capacity (by lowering the capacity of your lungs to absorb oxygen). Also, a number of narcotics will affect your brain function (marijuana is one of them) and you will have lasting and irreversible effects on your capacity to concentrate, focus, retain information and learn as marijuana has been proven to cause premature death of neurons (which is the only cell in the human body that isn't able to be regenerated).

As for alcohol and germs, almost anything can kill germs. Did you know that just letting them in open air will kill most of them?

Smoking marijuana once in a while is unlikely to have a noticeable effect on you until the very long term, where all those casual smoking will add up but even then, it should be pretty small (unless you got unlucky and caught a spreading cancer with little smoking, which sadly, happen even to non-smokers)

Drinking will have had no effect on you unless you abused it. There's even some studies that correlate that alcohol can have a positive effect on the organism (I haven't personally dug into them so it is possible that there's a bias in these studies).

Nice. Very informative.

Marijuana can fuck up your brain bad. Real bad. I've seen it happen first hand. I've talked to psychiatrists who have to deal with people with psychotic breakdowns caused by marijuana. Not all of them recover. You know that thing where someone gets high and they get paranoid? Seeing cops all over the place, being scared of their own shadow and shit? And everyone laughs, "ha ha ha, dude, you're so wasted right now!". Well, this might escalate. It might not go away in an hour. It does happen sometime, and it's scary as fuck.

A lot of people smoke, often in great quantities, and they get away with it. Some don't. Even if you don't go bonkers from it, it still fucks with your motivation and changes your amygdala, which is the emotion processing center among other things. If you smoke regularly, even in small quantities, like once per week, it will have an effect on you. It might be subtle, but this can be tricky too - you might not even notice it. If you smoke a lot, it also impairs your memory. I happen to know quite a few people, some were classmates, some were childhood friends, who smoked a lot since their teens, and I got to see them grow noticeably dumber over time, up to a point where some of them looked semi-retarded.

It's nowhere near as harmless as people present it to be.

That being said, alcohol is probably worse. Why is it allowed, while marijuana is banned? Good question.

On one hand, alcohol was banned in the US during the Prohibition. The mafia flourished, people continued to drink, perhaps even drank more than before, nothing good came out of it in the end. On the other, countries and states where marijuana is decriminalized seem to be doing quite well for themselves. Portugal went one step ahead - they decriminalized ALL drugs. They had a serious drug issue before. Now, they don't.

The data we have up until now seem to indicate decriminalization is the way to go.

What I unequivocally dislike is the misinformation. Everyone knows about the dangers of alcohol and cigarettes, that's public knowledge. Marijuana, on the other hand, is being presented as this magical substance which could do no harm - it's a herb, dude! it's medicinal! (yeah, if something has a noticeable medical effect, it also has side effects - basic rule of thumb) and so on.

This is far from true. Marijuana isn't harmless. It fucks with your brain. It may not be as bad as alcohol, but it's not a magical herb either.

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faerwin wrote:

Technically, everything is toxic. You can literally die from intoxication to water. The only difference is the dosage. Alcohol has a relatively high dosage requirement before becoming toxic to the human body and unlike tobacco, marijuana (and really, anything that's smoked), it has no lingering effects IF you don't excess the toxic threshold (if you exceed it, diseases, contamination and other side effects of toxicity emerge).

Yeah, I dunno about that. Me and my ex-wife ran a bar for quite a few years and I've been around a couple of people that almost died from alcohol poisoning and they didn't drink as much as you'd think they'd need to. It depends on various factors like type of alcohol, body size of the person consuming it, ethnicity (in the case of asians, look into "asian flush") and tolerance (or lack of).

You also don't have to get to toxic levels for it to be deadly, just take the dumb fucks who drink and drive for example.

As for the health risks of pot that you've brought up, you don't have to smoke it to get it's effects. Vaporizers and edibles are a wonderful thing and have much less of a health risk when compared to smoking. (maybe less so for vaporizers, you can get too high and forget to turn the thing off and burn the house down)

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pneuma wrote:

It's a dark stain on the country, but it looks like the end of prohibition is getting nigh as more and more states legalize it.

Heh, I'll bet you Louisiana is the absolute last state to come around. We're the only state to go so far as to ban 30+ decorative plants that could potentially get you high. lol

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Bars wrote:

You know that thing where someone gets high and they get paranoid? Seeing cops all over the place, being scared of their own shadow and shit? And everyone laughs, "ha ha ha, dude, you're so wasted right now!". Well, this might escalate. It might not go away in an hour. It does happen sometime, and it's scary as fuck.

Can vouch for that first hand. One of my friends from school would get dangerously paranoid on pot. I've seen lots of studies on this and it's all pretty inconclusive, more than likely it's just taking a preexisting condition and making it much worse. The jury is out though, the US government makes it near impossible to get approved to do any meaningful research.

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Bars wrote:

This is far from true. Marijuana isn't harmless. It fucks with your brain. It may not be as bad as alcohol, but it's not a magical herb either.

I'll agree with that, with one exception. There are certain medical conditions in which it is a magical herb where the benefits FAR outweigh the possible side effects. (just look on youtube where they are using high CBD/low THC strains to treat seizures/spasms and various other conditions that modern medicine hasn't made much progress with)

I'm not endorsing marijuana use, but it is the lesser of two evils IMHO.

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Shovelcut wrote:

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Bars wrote:

This is far from true. Marijuana isn't harmless. It fucks with your brain. It may not be as bad as alcohol, but it's not a magical herb either.

I'll agree with that, with one exception. There are certain medical conditions in which it is a magical herb where the benefits FAR outweigh the possible side effects. (just look on youtube where they are using high CBD/low THC strains to treat seizures/spasms and various other conditions that modern medicine hasn't made much progress with)

I'm not endorsing marijuana use, but it is the lesser of two evils IMHO.

Sure, I'm not disputing medical marijuana use. It has well-proven beneficial effects as far as I know. It should be noted, however, that medical and recreational marijuana are quite different. Also, I was merely saying pot is being presented in this extremely positive light in pop culture right now, and this isn't right.

Marijuana makes people sluggish, lazy, hallucinogenic, paranoid and dumb. Alcohol makes people aggressive, brave in a stupid sense and dumb. You loose with both substances, if you exaggerate. Tho alcohol will kill you off sooner than weed.

Me and my friends were abusing both substances in our teen years. Most of my friends were heavy on smoking pot, I did it only on weekends. I've seen friends becoming more "dumb" (at least apparently) over years, from weed abuse. They couldn't even concentrate for studying, if they weren't high. Which was most of the time. OTOH, alcohol really fucked up people's lives in a more direct manner (suicide, accidents while driving drunk, etc..).

It was fun for a few years. But if you don't want to end up a fucking looser, stay away from both alcohol & marijuana.

Well if you know your history you know that it varies by society and by time. My guess is, to cover it most broadly and simply, the reason that marijuana tends to be more taboo is because from an evolutionary standpoint, drinking things is natural, while smoking things isn't. When something is unnatural, or less natural than an alternative, society and religion especially have a tendency to denounce it.