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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.

This feels like it rhymes with the argument that because most gun deaths are suicides, it's net negative for my own well being to own a gun.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

Of course it may justify it, there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds - like with myriads of other illegal drugs and many other illegal activities, that limit your liberty to make many choices. What are you talking about.

The fact that "there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds" is not a justification. The government limits my liberty in many unjustified ways.

If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.

For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.

Perhaps legalizing marijuana would have an impact on modern reefer madness rates if there was more of a free market to allow for non-insanity-inducing weed?

To point towards the gun analogy, the market has space for everything from wood-stocked single-shot shotguns and .22-caliber plinkers, all the way to semi-auto .50-caliber rifles and ATF-baiting niche products. Who's to say that the weed market cannot also sustain a range of products with different enough CBD levels to make things safer?

Now, granted, you might still be right that a thorough decriminalization might be enough to achieve this, but we must consider the possibility that the market may have an unaddressed demand for healthier product.

It doesn't though, legal pot markets push for the highest THC content possible. Nobody smokes because they enjoy the flavor- that’s for pipe tobacco.

I have had this thought too. If weed was fully legal but THC was capped at where it was in the black market in the late 90s rather than the ultra-potent strains we have now, most people would just buy what was legal rather than relying on the black market.

I pretty much gave up on smoking weed because all the legal options are way too strong. One of these days I'll grow my own weak weed.

Dutch weed is around the 8-15% THC range and it’s nice in Amsterdam, you can enjoy it without becoming a vegetable like on current US strains.

Well, that's terrifying...

Amsterdam weed was the first and only time I tried it, and ended up feeling how my IQ is dropping in real-time, and having a rather disturbing disassociative experience. Someone later told me I may have had too much for my first time, but if that's the "light" variant... damn...

You might have bad luck with genetics. In most people ingesting marijuana inhibits neurotransmitters related to anxiety, nausea, etc and has a calming effect, but for a minority of the population their brain chemistry is wired to react in the opposite manner and starts firing off on all cylinders.

Dosage and tolerance on weed is kind of ridiculous and all over the place. Low tolerance and low dosage can take you places high tolerance users simply cannot reach anymore with any amount of THC.

I’ve always figured that weed is a drug that imposes a heavy underclock on your brain and allows direct access for parts of your consciousness that aren’t meant to talk directly to each other.

Alcohol, by contrast, just removes some impulse control and makes motor functions more difficult, but those things turn off “silently” by comparison (and re-enable themselves quickly by comparison, whereas weed has a day of latency).

You don’t think slower on alcohol, you just have a harder time executing. Stoners, by comparison, are very apparently down-clocked.

Eh, I don't think weed causes much cross talk. More like putting a thick layer over everything. Psychedelics on the other hand? It's cross talk central.

First time smoking weed is like being a kid and getting drunk for the first time, it happens on two beers or a glass of wine. You build up tolerance to a much higher baseline pretty quickly.

Yeah, I can imagine. Still:

  • I don't know if I want to fuck around with that stuff after my experience
  • It's still terrifying to realize I got the equivalent of black-out / vomit-all-over-the-place drunk, on what you're telling me is the equivalent of a single can of Bud Light. I wonder how I'd react if my first hit was the stuff you have in the US.

My province caps THC at 30%, that is generous for flower but is too low for concentrates to make any kind of sense. Ultimately people consume more of the less potent stuff to compensate, or go find the potent stuff outside of the legal market. That's how it's been for me when I was partaking and letting my tolerance build up. I could always reach the same level with flower than with, say, THC crystals, I'd just have to chain vape for 3 hours to get there (easy with the degenerate setup I had).

I think a different standard should apply for vape oil or whatever and I agree true degenerate stoners are always going to get their fix (same with true alcoholics in places where they make booze hard to come by, like Greenland), but I think if weed was cheaply and easily available in dispensaries but capped at 12-15% (and vape carts etc at proportional levels) most regular people would stick with that.

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

In b4 “but what about alcohol” yes that’s also bad but much harder to restrict given yeast and fermentable carbs are omni-available

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

What valid use does this website have? It's largely recreational and a drain on user's productivity, a bit like weed. Should the government ban the Motte?

I don’t think weed and internet usage are comparable or analogous at all for a variety of reasons

Of course they are different but the logic that it's ok to ban things as long as they lack "valid uses" (according to whom?) is seemingly applicable to both.

Guns have valid uses, do they not?

Alcohol has a pro social use as well.

And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

This feels like sophistry. No negative social consequences that result from alcohol will result from people home brewing weak berry wines. The bad stuff, alcoholism etc, happens because of readily available distilled liquor and beer in volume.

Beer of course is not distilled. Even spontaneously fermented beer can have ABVs above 6% (which is a pretty normal beer abv), so you don't even need special yeast to hit this ABV.

Yes but you can't get it in volume from the local corner store, which was the qualifier I put on it. Nobody drinks 64oz of spontaneously fermented homebrew and beats his wife.

We know this because even in countries with significant illegal alcohol problems, no illicit alcoholics are drinking homemade wine or beer in a problematic way. They're going blind from moonshine or bathtub gin.

Making alcohol illegal results in more distilled liquors and less lighter stuff, for the same reason illegal opiates results in stronger opiates being preferred.

Sure, but that makes the argument about "alcohol can't be outlawed because you can just ferment berry juices" rather silly and sophistic as a point of comparison. Sorta like what shinzo Abe zip gun is to gun control. Like yeah you can do it, but gangs in gun controlled countries aren't and haven't been killing each other with gizmos.

I'll always just return to my actual experience: as a teenager weed was illegal period while alcohol was illegal for me. I could text any of half a dozen people and get weed within a day. Getting alcohol was a process.

Counterpoint: legal cannabis has resulted in higher potency products. Highly concentrated cartridges and resins easily available, and higher potency flower as well. Granted, the higher potency flower has been the trend for longer than we've had legal cannabis in this country.

I've both make my own alcohol (cider) and grown my own cannabis. Both have some challenges and different aspects that make them easier or harder than the other.

For the cider I get the apples from a local orchard's roadside stand where they crush the apples into cider and put it in milk style jugs for you. I've processed the apples myself in the past but its a pain. Once I have the soft cider I use a few of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5Z78SC/ fermenting bottles with yeast from the local wine shop. Takes about two weeks to ferment. You can easily screw it up and make revolting vomit cider if your equipment is contaminated. I give some of it to my father in law who makes apple jack out of it. I drink very little personally so 3 gallons last about a year. You can make it at any time of the year but I do in the fall, as that's when the local apples are up. This is the only alcohol I consume.

Cannabis is dead easy to grow and process if all you want is dried flower. You can put effort into preparing the soil, using fertilizer, staking the plants to encourage multiple flowering runners etc. You can also just literally throw handfuls of seeds at your yard. Cannabis is an extremely hardy, robust plant that can overcome some pretty rough conditions. I've seen seeds sprout in wet carpet near a window. With even a small amount of prep: tilling the soil, checking on the seedlings a couple of times, maybe giving them a generic garden center fertilizer, they will do the rest of it on their own. This assumes outdoor growing. Indoor setups are a whole other beast and largely driven imo by prohibition and the need to hide it. I put a fair amount of work into my outdoor plants. I grow them from seedlings in planters inside until they are about 6-8 inches tall them transplant them outside when the weather is foretasted to be nice for a week of so. I prepare the soil well with a tiller and fertilizer, stake them up, and check on them regularly. Its legal in my state so they are just beside the house. 5 plants per person is the limit, so my wife and I grow 10. Curing is easy, I just cut the flowers off in the fall and hang them in the barn for a week. I live pretty deep in the country so I'm not really worried about passers by bothering it. Everyone in eyesight of my farm is a family member anyway.

The cannabis is ostensibly more work, but not that much more. Not really any more than growing tomatoes tbh, which I also do, and peppers and some herbs. What is a bit of work is that I process the flowers into hash oil, which requires specialized equipment (https://www.dabpress.com/products/4x7-rosin-plates-diy-heat-machine) and has a learning curve. Of note, 10 outdoor plants produce a tremendous amount of product for personal use. Each plant can easily output 1.5 lbs of dried flower. With high quality seeds and care, before it was legalized, this was like $30,000 worth of cannabis per year. Honestly its still worth that much now, IF I was part of the legal market, which I'm not interested in. Prices really haven't gone down for the high end stuff. I give about 2/3rds of it away, as wax or oil. For personal use I ingest it in cookies/gummies etc. I haven't actually smoked dried flower in years, I may occasionally vaporize some of the oil.

The cider is less work, but mostly because I produce so little. In equivalent dosage it would probably be more work overall.

Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.

Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.

Having done this, it might be possible to make an alcoholic beverage this way, but usually some degree of intentionality would be required or you’ll produce vinegar, not wine.

Your mileage will certainly vary based on the microbiome in the air and on the berries. There are styles of beer that are spontaneously fermented and can be quite tasty (e.g. lambic), and I've visited family in the countryside that literally just blend berries picked in the woods and make a kind of fruit wine from them that's also pretty tasty. However in my spontaneous fermentation experience at home, off flavors are much more likely.

I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.

No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

How exactly do you get fruits/berries without seeds, soil, sunshine, rain, waiting etc?

You buy them from the supermarket. Obviously.

Recreation is not a valid use? Why? We have a long list to go through if we just start crossing off anything that's not at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid.

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