Raise the drinking age

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Replacing alcohol with marijuana would be a big improvement. It's not lethal, doesn't ruin your liver, I've heard that it doesn't give you lung cancer, and people get mellow and stupid using it, not aggressive and stupid.

Just for accuracy: if you're smoking it (whatever 'it' is), you'll more than likely get increase your risk for cancer because you're inhaling smoke (which is bad for you). On top of that, most of the time you're (the generic you, not Spexxvet in particular) smoking unfiltered stuff which is, in a lot of ways, worse for you than tobacco.
All that being said, smoke a bong, and a lot of that goes away....

[Happy Monkey]

A bong is still mostly unfiltered smoke. It's just cooler.

[headsplice]

Hmmm...I wonder if you could market a bong with a filter???
Business opportunity anyone?

[Sundae]

Society allows people to increase their risk of cancer via tobacco, so that shouldn't stand in the way of replacing alcohol with marijuana.

Except it won't help the current trend towards obesity....

[mrnoodle]

I'm all for reducing the crime and stupidity that goes with drinking, and if there was a way to eliminate any and all mind-altering substances, I'd say go for it.

BUT YOU CAN'T LEGISLATE THINGS OUT OF EXISTENCE. Not guns, not weed, not booze, not liberals, not emo music, not fat people wearing lowrider jeans.

It just can't ever happen. And the longer we try to make it happen, the more money and time we waste, and the further we get from solving the root cause for people's dysfunctional behavior: idiocy.

[Shawnee123]

I'd like to raise my glass to this thread.

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

if there was a way to eliminate any and all mind-altering substances, I'd say go for it.

Including all the anti-depressants and anti-psychotics? Me thinks you should reformulate that blanket statement

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

I'd like to raise my glass to this thread.

Which glass? The stein or the sherlock?

[Spexxvet]

How about Pot Pills? No lung cancer. Sell them in the liquor store. Alcohol problems will be reduced, just cause of the competition.

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

How about Pot Pills? No lung cancer. Sell them in the liquor store. Alcohol problems will be reduced, just cause of the competition.

It depends...Marinol doesn't really work at all (I have a friend who's both a regular smoker and a recovering cancer patient, and I know what he used when he was really illin'). I've heard that real THC pills from the Continent are fun, but have never tried them.

Well, I think Fargon's mandatory jail time for first offenders is not going to be wildly popular with ANYONE. You're only going to increase the prison population, probably forcing your county to use tax payer dollars to build a bigger jail, and you're going to expose young ppeople to a criminal element that they might not otherwise meet - a bad idea IMO.

Drunk drivers OVER age 25 still kill themselves and other people in huge numbers. Colorado has put some pretty strict DUI laws into effect, and this has reduced the carnage at least somewhat.

I started drinking at age 18, mainly because I hung out with a bunch of older graduate students. It was no problem for me to get alcohol. I suspect that is still true today. Teach responsible drinking as others have said, and strictly enforce the drunk driving laws. That makes the most sense to me.

[mrnoodle]

Originally Posted by headsplice

Including all the anti-depressants and anti-psychotics? Me thinks you should reformulate that blanket statement

I'm tempted to say that I stick by the blanket statement -- after all, even antidepressants, etc. are really just bandaids for bigger problems. Plus, your body sees drugs as poison, and whatever effect you get is essentially your body telling you, "what the fuck?"

Of course, any discussion of this kind is going to get into a bunch of lame chemistry and pharmacological minutae that I don't care about. So. Let's start with meth. Eliminating meth would be a good thing.

Edit: we could probably get rid of anything that results in pages like this as well. I hate talking to people who think they're on a higher spiritual plane than everyone else just because they're on drugs. Although, this is a pretty informative site.

[headsplice]

Not all drugs are poison, and your body doesn't react to the them that way. But, let's not get into biopharmacology. If you don't believe me, then you'll have to prove that that's how all drugs work, but I promise, it isn't. And frankly, sometimes there is a brain imbalance that can only be fixed with drugs (also of note is that the most effective treatment for severe, recurrent depression is both drugs and therapy).
Yes. Meth is bad, bad shit. Stick with pill-based speed
Yeah, there's some stupid stories on Erowid (though some of them are accurate descriptions of what happens to your state of mind and your state of body, even if they don't make sense outside of the experience). But for a single, fact-filled info site on just about every drug imaginable, I can't think of any site better.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by fargon

... had a BA of .26.

Unless you vomit, aspirate, and choke, a BAL of .26 isn't going to kill you.

Mostly that's called "just getting started" or "a really good party."

I have seen folks with BALs upwards of .400 walking and talking. The .500-.600+ range gets a little chancy in terms of possible death, but I've also seen that survived.

It's a damn sight harder to kill yourself with alcohol (quickly) than most people think. Long term attrition, including liver and brain damage can be pretty high.

[SteveDallas]

I was entering college at the time the drinking age in North Carolina was phased in from 18 to 21. Call it anecdotal if you will, but I'm convinced the change just made campus drinking problems worse--it certainly didn't make them better.

In general I'm not in favor of a lot of age-related restrictions on things. For the most part, numbskulls I went to junior high school with were still numbskulls in high school, and in college, and on and on. If we think somebody cannot make a responsible decision at age 21, why on earth would we think they'd necessarily change by age 25? And yes, I realize there's a reductio ad absurdum here where I'd be letting 3-year-olds drive cars and smoke pot. 18 or 21, either way is arbitrary to a certain extent. But you just can't continually argue and say that because there are things a 21yo should be allowed to do that a 17yo shouldn't, then it also makes sense for 25yo vs. 21yo--and there you get the opposite absurdity where none of us would be voting or entering into contracts until we were 110.