Possession of pot will lead to a lower domestic violence rate! It's all so simple!

[tarr]

I saw this in the Rocky Mountain News, and have to say I'm pretty disgusted:

Pot backers won't halt domestic violence ads

Comments

[kleiosgirl]

Also, marijuana causes paranoia in habitual users. I'm sure that nice little side affect will cut down on domestic violence.

[kadaria]

Not only that but pot can be abused just like alcohol or any other kind of intoxicant. And after verifying with http://www.nida.nih.gov:
-You can become dependent on marijuana and experience withdrawl symptoms
-You can create a tolerance for it
-And the disturbing statistic that 80% of cocaine and heroin users began with marijuana. I also saw an argument that this is just a coincidence but I find this hard to believe in the instance of habitual users (given dependence and tolerance). When you're burnt out, you move up.

While I agree that it has medicinal purposes and should be used as such (it would be given in a pill form) and would like to legalize its use in medicine I can't agree that replacing alcohol with pot is going to reduce instances of domestic violence.

[booklington]

I'm not sure if I've said this before, but I love your icon. And I was similarly shocked that someone in feminist (did I stumble into another community? I asked myself) was using that kind of "logic". Bah.

[booklington]

Also, even if marijuana did definitely absolutely lead to doing cocaine, it's still a choice that people get to make for themselves. Guns = legal, marijuana = illegal just makes zero sense to me.

[booklington]

Yeah and that whole "dependent on and may experience withdrawal symptoms." Unless it's actual physical addiction, like with coke, it just doesn't count. Oh you can develop "emotional addictions". If I'd been involved in this anti-dope movement, I'd have known not to date my ex-boyfriend, I could have avoided all those problematic withdrawal systems. Damn.

[dysgr8mystake]

What's interesting is that the data doesn't show causality at all. Like, studies and everything show no real causality, simply that things like that happen.

However (and I'm not using this for evidence of anything, just throwing it out there), there is a woman in my health class, she's about 42 or so, who believes wholeheartedly in the gateway drug theory, because she believes it happened to her. She started smoking pot, did a whole lot of that, and believes that pot made her decide to take the other, harder drugs, in the sense that "If I've done pot, I can't just not do other stuff." Try to tell her the gateway drug theory doesn't work. She gets all bristly. That, and my area of Illinois had some pretty massive meth problems (there were four labs in my area that I knew of, and I'm fairly oblivious to drugs; one across the street, we think, from where I live), and everyone I know who really got into the meth was into pot first

[dysgr8mystake]

Fantastic reply.

I always figured they focused on pot so much because it is the illegal drug easiest to obtain. They can't focus on alcohol because the alcohol companies are huge, because the gov't won't focus on alcohol anymore. Sure, Prohibition didn't work, but it's always nice to give kids some real education on the subject, allow them to make informed decisions about which stimulant/depressant/etc they want in their body.

Then again, given educated choices, the kids would probably head right for pot.

I agree with your point about alcohol abuse. There are so many kids here (I go to Southern Illinois University-Carbondale) who are commiting alcohol abuse, and would never admit it, really never even realize it.

[morgan_dhu]

I also know people who've never done anything else, just smoke pot on a sunday afternoon after work, all that. But compared to those who've moved ont o harder and more dangerous things, it's a tiny percentage.Do you have hard data for this? Something that shows that the total percentage of people who have used pot and then moved on to become habitual users of stronger drugs is much greater than the total percentage of people who have used pot and have not become habitual users of harder drugs

[dysgr8mystake]

I was making no case for this to be an overall thing. It's a purely anecdotal note, and something that may hold true only for the specific group of people I know, it may hold true only for my area of my state, or it may not hold true at all when tested.

It's only something I've noticed. Habitual to me seems to be used as a synonym for "heavy", and I'm not stating that the people who seem to be moving onto harder drugs are heavy users. It's simply that I've noticed that a much higher percentage of this little anecdotal group become regular users of harder drugs along with pot. Perhaps they're only doing ecstasy every other week, but it's become a regular thing, and that's what I was noting.

Another interesting ancedotal thing is that percentage of pot smokers who drink regularly; it's a lot smaller in my group than those who use what I consider "harder" drugs.

[savestheworld]

"What's interesting is that the data doesn't show causality at all. Like, studies and everything show no real causality, simply that things like that happen."
100% of crack users started with air
make air illegal! hahah

[booklington]

It stands to reason that people who have less of a problem doing marijuana have less of a problem doing hard drugs. That doesn't mean they're causally related. How about the stats for the percentage of marijuana users who DON'T regularly do harder drugs?

[kiaramoon]

I'm one of those:) There are probably more "only smokes pot" people then heavy drugs users. I mean, if you are addicted to coke you are not going to pay coke money for a "kiddie drug."

[booklington]

Yeah me too, and exactly. Pfft. Gateway drug.