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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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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.

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