I've been a pothead for many many years (hence my name), however I stopped smoking weed regularly when I was in my 2nd-3rd year of university. I just stopped liking it, and now I truly hate it. I do love the smell though, but it gets me buzzed so I can't smell it. There are several hazardous effects from weed. This is based on personal experience, not on research that I read on the interwebs. Wild paranoia You get these thoughts in your head that might be unpleasant, and you can't get rid of them, so you're stuck in the moment for a long time and get tormented by them Munchies... you could gain weight You lose your interest / attention in a conversation and prefer to just sit or lie there like a vegetable - this coupled with the paranoia make you a bit more anti social than you would like to be The day after --- the hangover makes you lazy and devoid of any concentration or interest/motivation towards activities The last point affects your school grades and after-school activities. E.g. you might stop playing hockey after school because you just don't give a shit. This can evolve into a full blown problem and turn an active kid into a lazy disinterested individual and even solidify this attitude as a constant way of thinking and a pattern that would be pretty hard to break even if the toking stops The potential to be a gateway drug. It certainly was for me and many of my friends
But did it make you a beter/safer driver... if so... do you thank ther woud be fewer auto accidents if all drivers drove hi on pot.???
Good grief! Nobody should start using pot until they're about 25! You were waaaaay to young to be doing it. Your experience is of no guidance to anyone, except as a warning to keep the stuff away from their kids! These are hazardous effects you suffered because you started doing it when your brain, nervous system, judgment, physical skills, emotions and experiences were still growing! You're the poster child for why kids shouldn't do drugs. And of course we have an entire industry pandering caffeine to them when they should be getting MORE sleep, not less! If kids can't learn the discipline to withstand real life as it is when they're in high school, what are they going to do twenty years later when it occasionally gets REALLY tough???
Weed, like any other mind altering substance including caffeine, affects kids stronger. Agreed. But I'd be impacted in all the ways that I listed (though maybe to a lesser extent) if I'd be smoking weed at my age now. Oh, I've done almost any drug you could think of, including the hard ones, and I turned out alright Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's the acquaintances of mine who ended up dropping out of highschool or college or university who would be the poster child for that.
yes, I wish the hawks in all governments and their militaries would start smoking pot at 25 and earlier, in fact. A little more laid back, focusing on snacks and TV and less starting of wars. I think these people SHOULD smoke pot more. Serial killers too. Keep em home staring at the weird sheen of their knives rather than out using them.
If you're interested in trying it, I think that should be the minimum age. You've had enough physical and mental maturation and enough experience in the real world so that your emotions, judgment, tolerance of pain and disappointment, ability to distinguish reality from fantasy--in other words your understanding of and relationship to the external universe--are evolved and stable enough that you can put the experience in perspective. To be neither overwhelmed by the experience (good or bad) nor to be seduced by it as an escape from reality; to be able to integrate it into your life if you choose to do so, without knocking your life out of alignment. Every drug is different--the physical, mental and emotional effects. Some can alter a child's physical, mental or emotional growth, some can impair the judgment of even a young adult, and some are so powerful that even an older person needs a strong grounding in reality to avoid losing his grip on it. And of course some are highly addictive with dreadful withdrawal symptoms, requiring an iron will to avoid falling into the trap. So I assign a different minimum age of experimentation to each of them. I hesitate to counsel individuals about drugs because it's not my greatest field of expertise, but this is what I would recommend to someone who I'm worried is going to do it wrong and needs whatever help he can get: Caffeine: 16 (If children don't have enough alertness and energy it's because they don't get enough SLEEP!) Alcohol: 18 (And no driving!) Marijuana, LSD, powder cocaine (not mixed with amphetamine): 25 (I've seen only one bad reaction to pot above this age, and the person had an undisclosed allergy that may have contributed to it.) Mushrooms: 30 Amphetamine, Secanol, Valium and all the weakest pharmaceutical stimulants and depressants: 35 (Young people simply should not need this crap. Walk out of your office at 5:00 every night, put some work into your family and personal relationships, and get some SLEEP!) Opium (not morphine or heroin): 40 (I'll trust your judgment and maturity at this age.) Tobacco: 45 (People who start smoking at this age aren't likely to become chain smokers, and by now they should know the risks.) Morphine, oxycodone and all the stronger pharmaceuticals: 50-60 (Now you might actually need the painkiller, not just looking for a buzz.) These are the popular recreational drugs which I consider to have a reasonable risk-reward ratio. I've left out things like crack cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine, heroin, etc. I don't consider these recreational drugs so much as self-medication, and if you take these without professional supervision the risk-reward ratio is heavily loaded against you. If you think you need that kind of high (very temporary, highly impaired, major disconnection from reality, health risk, high addictivity, terrible withdrawal, etc.) then you're not looking for recreation, you're looking for relief from an emotional illness and/or a bad life. Caffeine, marijuana, alcohol and the other softer drugs can and do help people cope, although everybody's different and there are no guarantees even if you buy the drug in a supermarket. But the harder drugs like crack and meth are a mechanism for escaping rather than coping, and the only way to make the escape permanent is to die. Yes, I know that an era's legal structure perturbs this paradigm. My grandfather was a pharmacist who sold Heroin (a Bayer trademark: "It makes you feel like a hero!") over the counter. In his observation it was less likely to ruin his customers' lives than alcohol. It can certainly be argued that the reason heroin is such a destructive drug today is that it is illegal, making the price so high that people resort to crime to pay for it.
Yes i agree that 25 woud be a beter age to start smokin pot than 12(?) like my nephew... he graduated to alchole an many other drugs an is now pushin 50 wit a mentality much like a 12 year old.!!! However.... that a 25 year old has enuff life-esperience that recreational drugs ant likely to effect 'em in a over-all negetive way mite be debatable.!!! I dont thank any drug shud be illeagle... but only if the public is educated wit factual informaton about what hapens to people who use dope.!!!
So you get these effects from pot? Stay away from LSD or Shrooms as they will totally be amplified. The effects you get are because you have very little control of your mind - this could be a sign of potential mental illness or just bad self-control. Controlling your thoughts is a skill that takes time to develop, exactly as strong muscles take time to grow. If I get the thought "The cops might be coming!" there are two scenarios 1. Act upon the thought and become anxious 2. Observe the thought, and forget about it as it's unreasonable #2 takes time. #1 is where you are. there is plenty philosophical debate one the links between emotions, feelings, and thoughts. From my personal experience, if you can control thoughts you can control the rest.
Like a hero, huh? Not quite. Heroin will destroy a man regardless if it's free or not. One can barely control one self when using, and needs to eventually start increasing dosage. Once you do that after a while, the glands/receptors in your brain that absorb heroin grow and get modified and numb... and that doesn't change, I think, even if you stop using. It decreases your appetite and sex drive so you lose weight and minerals and you don't even care about spending time with people so you lose friends and girlfriends, renders you unable to do any analytical or physical work so you don't do homework or can't function at your job whatever it may be, and enslaves you. Street heroin isn't so expensive per-use once you start. It's more expensive than coke by weight, but $40 of H can last you for up to a week (when you start), whereas $40 of coke lasts you for a few hours.
I took shrooms 3 times. It always ends up the same -- The first half of the trip is amazing, and the last half I get horrible hallucinations. It's on my personal banned list. As for LSD, I took it a couple of times but it never actually worked on me. Now I lost interest and aren't looking anymore. lol - that explains it! I'm pretty good at doing that when I'm sober. OK, pay close attention: Do Not Think About A Pink Elephant!!! I guarantee you when you try to do that you won't be able to think of anything other than a pink elephant Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I had absolutely zero reaction to both. Very disappointed. This was not something my grandfather ever observed in his customers. Perhaps the fact that they were obtaining it from a professional pharmacist who regulated the consistency of their doses prevented them from increasing it. As for "barely controlling," that was certainly not his observation. Heroin users in those days included physicians, dentists, attorneys and other professional people who were routinely in the company of others who would notice aberrant behavior, and whose actions would have disastrous and easily noticed consequences if they were erratic. Apparently heroin was available for both oral and intravenous administration in those days, and not being aware of that I never asked Grandpa if he sold one or both. They are absorbed differently and have somewhat different physical and psychological effects, but I'm not enough of a biochemist to understand that section of the Wikipedia article. Given the choice, I'm sure most people in any era would go for oral. This reduces the effect of most drugs, requiring a larger dose. Criminalization shifts a product to the black market, inflating its price by as much as an order of magnitude, which encourages customers to be more economical in their usage. After heroin was banned in 1924 (it lost the capital H in 1919 when Bayer, a German corporation, gave up its trademark under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles), I would expect heroin users to shift from oral to intravenous administration. Depending on what that article is trying to tell me about the difference in effect between the two ways of delivery, this could explain why modern heroin users have different experiences from my grandfather's customers, and could be yet another example of the deleterious second-order effects of prohibition. If anybody can read that chemistry lecture, get back to us.
Cocaine was prescribed by doctors against the common cold at one time... Heroin was eventually banned, right? I think it was because of those observations that professionals had made... that habitual users of heroin were not really ok after continual usage. I "know a friend" who both shot and snorted H, and the effects were identical. The difference was with the onset and length of being high -- via IV it hits you all at once, and you sober up quicker. I think most H users do it through IV.
Tincture of opium was a favorite sleeping aid for many little old ladies at one time. Many folks enjoy opium tea or the occasional pipe bowl without any harm, as do the many South Americans who drink coca tea or chew the leaf. Cannabis has proven efficacy for easing brain inflammation and the progress of diseases that involve same. Alcohol is associated with lessened chance of heart attack and some cancers. Nicotine increases metal alacrity in seniors. For every bad and destructive usage of a substance, there are benefits to match. I agree that it is the prohibition and the resulting black market that is the real problem. When things are done out of sight it is not possible to assure the purity of the product, the honesty in the packaging or the relative fairness of the price. Can't tax it either. Public trade in these contraband items would give the opportunity for manufacturers to promote safer delivery systems that are already around, like vaporizers and patches to replace inhalation of burning vegetable material. Moving the venue from law enforcement and interdiction to health care and guidance would drop the price to society of even the strongest of these substances vastly. Ex: the British Moorepool experiment.
Not at all. The crusade to ban all recreational drugs was simply part of the "temperance" movement that manifested most notably in alcohol prohibition. Opium and its derivatives, like many drugs, was outlawed for non-medicinal use in the 1920s, at the behest of the self-appointed nannies who believed that if anyone, anywhere, was having a good time, then there was still work to be done. Alcohol was decriminalized during the Great Depression because the government needed the tax money in the days before the income tax reached its current confiscatory level. Alcohol tax increased federal revenue by something like 40%. The other drugs didn't have as large a market so there was no incentive to take on the nannies and re-legalize them too. Shooting and snorting are essentially identical methods of administration. The nasal membranes are so thin that chemicals are absorbed into the capillaries by osmosis and go more-or-less directly into the blood. When swallowed, the drug must first pass through the stomach where it is processed by all the acids and enzymes. The result is a change in its chemistry. Some drugs like tetracycline and THC emerge from this process unscathed, but not all do. The intestinal membranes are equally porous. Another way of administering drugs directly into the blood stream which, for some reason, is not nearly as popular Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!, is by enema. I've read that in East Asia, it's more commonly snorted. In my grandfather's time, cocaine was not snorted. It was administered either by injection, or orally through solutions like original-formula Coca-Cola.
Supposedly use in the US, especially amongst younger users, has been shifting that way as well. This is supposed to be because the quality of street heroin has improved enough for snorting to be effective, and it represents a much lower psychological bar than injection.
The problem with snorting a solid is that most of it falls right back out and is wasted. Only the little bit that's dissolved in the moisture on the nasal membrane is readily passed through by osmosis. I should think that both heroin and cocaine could be much more efficiently absorbed if first dissolved in water, as if for injection, and then sprayed on the membranes as a nasal mist. This of course is the principle behind the drug enema. Your colon's only purpose in life is to extract everything it can that's dissolved in the fluid it surrounds. I've heard of people doing this with alcohol. You can't snort alcohol (I don't know why because I've never tried it but I'll just go ahead and take everybody's word for it) so this is the only way to actually get an "alcohol rush."
Oh yes you can. Not that I recommend it. You can also huff alcohol by heating liquor to the point where the alcohol boils out, but not the water.
POSSIBLE HAZARDS OF DOING XANAX - in the top five prescribed medications. Notice that many of the side effects of marijuana reported, often in the less than one percent category after the listed items.
