Nah, but you can get sentenced to slavery for mere possession.

What is the situation with legal highs in the US?

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...deaths-alcohol

Tom, what's with the hate on mary jane? Don't you like music, TV, etc.? Seems like the majority of our entertainers toke it up, and most will credit it to helping with their creative process. Sure we have to put up with their politics, but thats life.

And to people who drink a lot, it "seems" like everyone drinks a lot, but that isn't true either.

The drugs that are worth doing do precisely this. Psychedelics universally promote compassion via hypofrontality, and it isn't transient. You were doing so well before you named a drug that EVERYONE should ABSOLUTELY be taking on a regular basis in order to make the world a markedly better place to live. See reply to post above.

Yeah that's an interesting case- I'm sure "the best music" would be a lot ****tier if nobody got high. It's a career that benefits from extremely high variance because only like the top .0001% "succeed" in any meaningful way. If you had some movie-grade radioactive waste that killed you 99.999% of the time and gave you freakish athletic ability the other .001%, almost all of the NFL would be on radioactive waste, but that doesn't really mean it's a good idea. Obviously getting stoned and wasting time making ****ty music isn't on par with dying, but it's bad, and it's mostly hidden. The decision to go down that route is almost certainly -EV although people do luckbox it just like a lottery.

Ok, you can go live in the world where everybody is on coke and meth. I'll pass.

Watch them. Read what they say. You get examples here. They're overwhelmingly total morons here. They're overwhelmingly total morons in real life. And they frequently present in almost identical fashion. It's basically brain damage- rewiring your brain to get new connections between **** and calling it some kind of enlightenment and looking at everybody who doesn't see these kinds of connections as a bunch of muggles... without realizing that the reason normal people don't have them is BECAUSE ALMOST ALL OF THEM MAKE NO SENSE AND/OR ARE COMPLETELY USELESS. I guess this assortment of feels-associations and inability to process logic SEEMS better than just being a boring derptard, but I'm going to disbelieve it's productive in the vast, vast majority of cases.

High science ITT.

In the case of cannabis, I always find it funny when it is treated like it magically appeared on the Earth in 1936. "Sober" people do that. Lol.

So I gather you're a teetotaler?

You're living there, except everyone's on alcohol, tobacco and junk food.

Coke is a salad compared to alcohol. As for meth...will be harder to access through a regulated system. Nowadays, you don't even need to be 18 to access it. Just speak to a friend of a friend.
While we're at it, of what use is consuming entertainment or indulging in escapism at all?

It certainly yields no direct effects on others' welfare. Doesn't mean there aren't indirect effects. Your use of the concept of utility throughout, has been about as loose as a clump of leaves tied together by a shoe-string on a windy spring day.

NOT everyone comes from a first-world background of privilege and top-of-the-line education. Swimming through shhhiiittt all day, sometimes demands more intense forms of escapism. Your all-inclusive judgements of these people's decisions are stuck in the dark ages.
While true for some, for others its not so much about avoiding the judgement of being a 'boring derptard'. For some its about experiencing that fleeting moment of joy, in an otherwise sober life that is largely characterized by meaninglessness and aimlessness.

I don't doubt that more people would benefit getting off drugs, but from experience, those lucky enough to do so - to meet the right people and get into the right circles - often look back on their base and playful days quite favourably. I also don't doubt that more people would benefit by regulating the drug market, rather than illegalising it and letting the drug dealers regulate it.

Do you know how hard it is to get prescription opiates and pain-killers here in Australia? We regulate legal drugs as well as the Church regulates its (lack of) taxes.

There's escapism that doesn't rewire your brain to **** (well, as much, given how bad some entertainment is).

And yet most people in the worst circumstances somehow get by without ever doing anything of the sort on any kind of regular basis. Self-defeating escapism is just the worst.

So jerk off, leave your brain intact, and try to make something good happen. Or just get on with it and kill yourself and end your hopeless loser existence. Being exceptionally unhappy with your situation and actively sabotaging your chances of making it better is totally stupid and shortsighted.

Everybody romanticizes stupid **** they survived/got away with.

Totally agree. I knew a guy who died in a meth lab explosion. An acquaintance's kid was one of the early Fentanyl deaths around here. And now people are dying from elephant tranquilizer mixed in. That **** should never happen.

Love how you seem to think all drug users are exceptionally unhappy with their situation. :')

Grunching:

I don't have anything to say about the ethics of drug use (w/e that means) but in my view the war on drugs is the well-spring of a corpse laden river of blood that has the marvelous attribute of not working. I think it's a lost cause trying to save people from themselves. If drugs were legal at least there'd be resources to offer quality treatment on demand and fully fund child protective services.

As for the lives ruined I'm thinking my personal safety is more important. I don't worry about being mugged by an alcoholic, for example. Somehow they manage to live w/o murdering each other to an unreasonable extent and it's likely drug users would do the same.

Yeah, Tom's problem seems to be with drug abusers, who make up precisely 20% of druggies according to my scientific personal observations. Everyone should be smart and always take a moderate amount of drugs to avoid ****ing up their brains with too much sobriety.

Saw this today online...

Kind of ballsy that they'd actually say this tbh.

+1000

Refer to Tom for example of why this is important.

History has also shown us many sobriety-promoting individuals, and health freaks, who end up in tragic accidents or terminal cancer at 30 - losing all their faculties immediately. How does your strong aversion to personal drug experimentation account for this? Is it even a factor to you when deciding between new experiences?
It must be nice and convenient to be intellectual enough to have principled reasons that can justify one's lack of empathy for those less capable of self-determination.
You trivialize subjective experience and substitute it with a scientific lens of cognitive biases and behavioral economics. Yet, however you choose to 'classify' or 'reduce' your subjective experience, your sense of free-will and self-determination somehow remains. Rather peculiar.
Fortunately, decriminalization and/or legalization is only a matter of time. Not too long ago, the International Council on the War on Drugs declared the war to be a failure, after 40 years of evidence collection.

We're actually engaging Tom as if he isn't hopelessly biased, ignorant, and misinformed. lol us.

Lol us indeed.

Bad information doesn't equal bad intentions every time though. Folks were drenched in stereotypes for decades.

With no filter for the brain altering effects of prohibition and it's information, the brain altering effects of X drug on a population without prohibition is not yet accounted for. What is accountable is the information from prohibition and the accounts of each individual user as offered. We'll get there one day. Prohibition wrecks some people up though.

Take cannabis . The approach of prohibition is to treat it like an intruder. The intruder bias.

Another is to measure cannabis by standards of a product of chemistry made for an intention, rather than a plant which occurs in the human environment since way back. I call this the pill bias.

And there is a historical bias one like that assumes that because the information is recent that is has better quality rather than taking the whole range of information and checking for man-made errors regardless of age.

Then plain cultural bias. No way those people use cannabis for motivation. My culture says it makes them lazy.