So that the post on the government advertising splurge doesn’t detour into a discussion about drugs, I’ve opened this post for discussion (and there’s plenty of it happening, if my own circles are anything to go by) of the Andrew Johns drug confession.
Some random questions:
What do parents who have themselves used drugs say to their offspring?
Is wanting to be “the best” the core of the problem?
Will our society ever face up to the sheer hypocrisy of having thriving economies based on drinking and gambling (and to some extent tobacco) while trying to say that all other mind-altering substances are evil?
What are going to be the longterm effects (if any) of what is apparently a huge subculture of cocaine use among urban Australians?
Well I never denied it and I never laid down the law. But I tried to ensure they were as informed as possible about the various highs available.
It is insanity to pretend alcohol is “safe” and pot is “dangerous”. It is also counter productive, since when they find out that pot isn’t as dangerous as we said they presume we’ve lied to them about ice as well. So my approach was to encourage my offspring to seek out good information (I don’t know it all).
So far the kids (all in their thirties) have survived to be well adjusted, productive members of society who at times in their lives have used illicit drugs.
“What do parents who have themselves used drugs say to their offspring?”
My response has been – I’ll tell you all about it when you are 18 . That is with regard to personal use.
Generally I caution them that drugs can distract them from goals they might have.
Smoking is reviled by my daughters but they are both drinking while underage – more due to peer group influence. This is the most powerful influence for teenagers.
“Is wanting to be â??the bestâ?? the core of the problem?”
I can’t see how this relates to most recreational users. Is drug use a problem ? There are as many reasons why drugs are consumed as there are consumers.
“Will our society ever face up to the sheer hypocrisy of having thriving economies based on drinking and gambling (and to some extent tobacco) while trying to say that all other mind-altering substances are evil?”
This is bit black and white as a description of current attitudes . I don’t know anyone who describes all other mind altering substances as evil.
Alcohol and smoking impose tremendous costs on all of us but there is a drama associated with a 15 year old’s death from an overdose.
This appalls and terrifies parents who then drink 6 beers for lunch on Sunday and visit their parents who live in nursing homes because they have peripheral gangrene or problems after a stroke caused by 30 years of smoking.
“What are going to be the longterm effects (if any) of what is aparently a huge subculture of cocaine use among urban Australians?”
Lots of restaurants and bars opening which don’t seem to need many customers ?
Also small boutiques with non perishable goods .
Biker gangs building very luxurious club houses.
Foolish dealers would have increased the number of purchases of expensive cars.
I think if you google this issue coronary artery disease rates will be increased . Rates of development of psychosis might increase.
A more frightening problem is methamphetamine use. Its cheap , it’s available and it’s damage is crippling.
I know, imagine choosing to have bipolar disporder. What a selfish bastard.
Perhaps parents can use it as a teachable moment on the topic of compassion, empathy, honesty and forgiveness.
One of the most significant shifts in behaviour over the last fifteen years has been the massive increase in the number of teenage girls and young women binge drinking. I suspect a lot of it is the result of changes in gendered expectations – when I was at uni twenty years ago the residuum of the view that it was “unladylike” to drink still had a pull. Yet the government steadfastly refuses to regulate ads and other promos that encourage drinking to excess. I’d like to see some statistical comparison of dangerous drinking behaviours and drug use. I suspect that the former would be far more prevalent in the demographic targeted.
Another change, of course, is the middle-classing of party drugs. That’s probably also why some of the angst arises.
The government “talk to your kids” campaign was heavily criticised last time it got a big run (before another election) because of the assumptions it was based on – it’s reasonably unlikely, I’d have thought, that the sort of “happy family” it tends to assume as its audience is the actual sort where kids are at risk of serious substance abuse. Anyone who’s ever been involved with public health campaigns can tell you they are *very* difficult to design – because the link between the message and altering behaviours is normally quite tenuous. There’s a legitimate point of criticism available when the message appears to be designed more to send some political signals rather than actually do anything to respond to the problem it supposedly targets.
Note also the way it fits nicely with broader conservative themes of “family responsibility”.
I await the quarantining of family tax benefit for those parents whose kids having received “the talk”, still use drugs.
Or not. That’s only for welfare recipients and Aboriginals isn’t it?
This campaign is a combination of breathtaking political cynicism and a one-eyed ideological view of family and social life.
At thiry, one would have thought Andrew Johns’ had got over experimenting with drugs. But no doubt bi-polar disorder is a very mitigating circumstance.
Most of these young footballers are at the age that kids experiment with drugs, and most of them will grow out of using pot and ecstacy, as most kids do.
What worries me about ecstacy is its potential long term damage and the rare deadly overdose. Hydroponic grass can induce schizophrena, nothing like the bush grass I used to smoke when I was a kid (18-25)so one has now to worry about its long-term effects. Most kids would be aware of the dangers of heroin and one would hope, ice. In my hippie days we used to say ‘Speed kills.’ And what’s happened to LSD? You never hear of it nowadays
What’s the basis for this, suz? Is there such a subculture?
People use different drugs for different reasons and often it’s associated with class inflected subcultures. Kids from Logan and Ipswich are less likely to be taking E in clubs than kids from Kenmore, for instance. And more likely to be smoking dope, probably. Some of these things shift quite radically over time.
In order to assess these sorts of issues, it’s very important to have good data about the extent of different drugs used, and on the sorts of milieus in which they’re used, and the sort of people who use them.
“One size fits all” – just talk to the kiddies – messages are likely to be extremely ineffectual for that reason.
There is another pertinent question that is not being asked in the Johns saga.
In sport recreational drug use and performance enhancing doping go hand in hand, why is no one asking Johns about what other pharma products he might have taken?
Oh, and why won’t anyone think of the kittens. Drugs are bad mmmmmkay.
Mark on 2 September 2007 at 12:26 pm
Dont let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good.
Howard’s war on drugs has been a qualified success. It is of a piece with his war on child abusers. It would be nice to think that liberals are keen to take greater care of children at risk, even if it means standing on the same side as Howard.
Who cares if Howard uses a blunderbuss to get the message accross. Mark’s dainty concern with targetting the message pales into insignificance against the pressing concern of getting something done in the here and now.
Same deal with child abuse. Enough with the “process” and the “consultation” and “ownership” blather. We had had a generation of socio-babble like that and went backwards. At least Howard is making a start.
And I am pleased to see Howard getting some political mileage out of this. In a democracy a politician is rightly rewarded if he successfully puts accross a populist policy.
Also, what is wrong with the conservative theme of “familiy responsibility”? It sure beats the “constructivist” theme of “family irresponsibility”, evident in the broken families and broken lives that littered the drug-addled mean streets of our cities not so long ago.
It is clan and cult minorities who are most at risk from drugs. As usual, the intersection of pre-modern multiculturalism with post-modern sub-culturalism is where the ethnological rubber hits the toxicological road.
Instead of endless socio-babbling blather what is needed is some good old fashioned common sense and a tough on crime approach. As it happens Howard has some runs on the board in this respect.
Mark would do well to reflect on the moral enormities that we have been spared through Howard (and Carr’s) decisive actions. They have saved hundreds of lives.SMH reports:
There is a deeper fundamentally moral issue at stake. Hard drugs of the addictive type are self-evidently evil. They damage and destroy the core of human moral agency: consciousness and free-will.
Our cognitive and volitive powers are what distinguishes us from the beasts. Anyone who advocates legalising these substances is perforce disabling moral agency.
Soft drugs such as marijhuana are weaker doses of the same toxin. We dont really need more dopey overweight teenaged couch potatoes do we? Intoxicant means poison. ANynoe who has a guardian role will tell you that it is a good idea to keep poisons out of childrens hands.
A rich person’s cat on rich person’s drugs. Who’d have thought.
I liked this bit — ‘the cat was too anxious to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’ — which I inititally read ‘the cat was suspiciously eager to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’. They just don’t train cadet journalists in the avoidance of ambiguity any more.
Had a bit more time to think about this one. The current crop of recreational drugs, including grass, all seem to be much more dangerous than those people like me were exposed to in our long ago youth. And yes, football heroes are setting a very bad example about drugs to our kids.
But they do more than that. Week after week they expose our children, especially the boys, to acts of mindless brutality masquerading as sport. Young men are taught violent behaviour is the norm and the subliminal message is punching someone in the head, giving them the elbow, head-butting them, or gouging out some-one’s eyes is the norm. Sports commentators go tut-tut, but the cameras dwell lovingly on every detail of the violence and screen it over and over. Sure the offenders are brought before a tribunal, let off, barred from a few games, fined, but with a wink or a nod. Kids, this behaviour is ok. These are real men.
Off-field, they swill grog like the pigs they are, treat women in an abusive fashion, get into pub brawls, and then get hauled before tribunals, lots of ‘how terrible it is’, but still they’re let off with a bit of a wink and a nod. Even when some woman has the courage to charge them with rape, our football loving coppers never seem to be able to find enough evidence to proceed to court. Now that’s what I’m enraged about. That’s the example to our children that is disgusting. Not that some poor sod with bipolar disorder admitted to taking recreational drugs for years. But the fact that these mainly inarticulate morons are held up asw an example to children at all.
Robert K Merton is partly responsible. He came up with this very bad idea of the ‘role model’. Australian media has embraced the nonsense big time and when some jock gets sprung for drug taking, MSM enjoys a bit of increased readership. By all means, if that’s the public bent, ‘be in awe’ of a spectacular athletic abilty. Just leave it there and have no other expectations.
It’s the clergy and politicians.. cough, cough.. whose job it is to maintain their own high moral ground. Let’s leave it to them and accept that ordinary folks are just going to be ‘the way they are’. They will somtimes get up to naughty stuff, drug taking included, when they get the opportunity; often regretting it, other times not.
“I liked this bit — ‘the cat was too anxious to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’ — which I inititally read ‘the cat was suspiciously eager to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’. ”
Wow, that’s the best laugh of the week for me. Superbly executed! With a little market research, you might turn this into the title of your bestselling riposte to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
The hypocrisy around so-called ‘role models’, current laws and policing, and the inevitable human frailties and flaws, is weirdly interesting.
For all the anti-drug hype we see from some.
Australia is one of the worlds biggest users of legal stimulants (See MJA article), and everyone thinks it’s fine to get kids to pop happy pills to keep them quiet and inline at school.
Or maybe in some cases someone actually gets helped by taking them.
Many of these kiddies, that receive their own ‘drugs’, are supposed to look up to these role models and now figure out why their drugs are OK, but his aren’t.
As the ads run, a culture of drug consumption (legal or not) is further developed in the kids, only the legal ones make money for pharmaceutical companies, for better and worse.
Looks like WA is the place this phenomena is greatest, and then they wonder why a footballer might not start to think that drugs actually can make you a better person.
Which is wrong, unless of course it is prescribed by your doctor.
As a society (and maybe as humans) we love drugs (on which we spend an enormous amount), we also have prejudices about them. Maybe some more than others.
Licit psychostimulant consumption in Australia, 1984–2000: international and jurisdictional comparison
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/177_10_181102/ber10505_fm.html
Results:
For the 10 countries from 1994 to 2000, total psychostimulant consumption increased by an average 12% per year, with the highest increase from 1998 to 2000. Australia and New Zealand ranked third in total psychostimulant use after the United States and Canada. Australia consumed significantly more than the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, France or Denmark. In Australia, from 1984 to 2000, the rate of consumption of licit psychostimulants increased by 26% per year, with an 8.46-fold increase from 1994 to 2000. Western Australia ranked first, with nearly twice the consumption rate of total psychostimulants as New South Wales, which ranked second. Methylphenidate is the main psychostimulant consumed in the US and Canada, and dexamphetamine in Australia.
Uhh, Christopher Pyne? The federal minister in charge of drug policy. A moralistic, foaming at the mouth, control freak, bald faced liar. He actually said that cannabis was more dangerous than heroin. Good way to build up credibility with the kids, Chris. Not.
With the possible exceptions of smoking tobacco, and to a lesser extent AIDS, the evidence in support of the effectiveness of public health campaigns is almost non-existent. It is actually one of the great unspoken failures in public health.
And bald faced lies about drugs and their use. See above comment.
Some contentious claims, based on methodologically very weak evidence. At most (at most) cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia by about 5%, and that is almost certainly just triggering or exacerbating it in already vulnerable people. Hardly of earth shattering, society threatening importance, at a population level, though a tragedy at an individual personal level.
Crack cocaine and ice amphetamine are clearly more dangerous. But can you provide reliable evidence for that claim about any other illegal recreational drug, especially cannabis?
Despite many attempts by some pretty hardcore anti-cannabis people to find some, there remains no evidence that low-moderate levels of THC exposure, even over long periods, causes any serious health issues. None. THC, and cannibinoids in general, are not in any way toxic to body cells, they cause no acute or chronic damage. Compare and contrast with the mountain of solid evidence against acute and chronic cell toxicity of tobacco and alcohol. Furthermore, the toxic cellular effects of alcohol in particular are largely permanent, they generally do not diminish after giving up drinking, especially damage to the central nervous system. The opposite is true for any negative effects of THC exposure.
The main warnings children should get about cannabis are, 1) don’t use until at least your late teens, 2) use moderately (like all recreational drugs), and do so in a physically and socially safe environment, 3) don’t drive when stoned, and 4) that the main risk from low-moderate cannabis use is an unjustified social-legal one.
If the authorities were really serious about the adverse effects of recreational drug use, they would crack down on tobacco and alcohol much, much harder, especially alcohol, which is easily the most physically and socially destructive (widely used) recreational drug. It will never happen, for alcohol at least.
(The ABC TV show, ‘Difference of Opinion’ is discussing alcohol use in Australia, next Thursday.)
And that is not even mentioning pharmaceuticals.
For the record, I am not a user of illegal recreational drugs, though I was when much younger, and don’t regret any of it.
Not half as dangerous as football itself. Has anybody calculated the cost to the taxpayer of retired footballers on disability pensions because of the way they continuously smashed up their bodies while younger? Not that I think they shouldn’t get those pensions. I’ll never be one to support even a smidgin of JWH’s welfare reforms.
Htdroponic grass is more dangerous than bush grass. Ther’s sufficient record now of its ability to induce schizophrenia even in adolescents who would not be prone to the disease. I guess one way to discourage our kids from taking drugs (including alcohol) would be to teach them there’s nothing more valuable than your mind and learning how to use it. But I fear as a country we may not value intellectual and artistic achievement enough nowadays for the kids to take any notice. Sadly, its a long time since I’ve come across a young person who gets excited by looking at the contents of a bookshelf.
Welcome to the reality of the Queens of the Stone Age:
“Nicotine valium vicadin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol
Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine…”
In the past eight days I’ve consumed 5 of the 7 drugs mentioned. I’m 31, and my experience is not unusual among my group of friends, which ranges in age from early 20s to early 50s. And the above doesn’t refer to speed/ice/general amphetamines (other than ecstasy).
Interestingly, it’s the prescription drugs that aren’t on my consumption list or that of my friends. Andrew Johns and Ben Cousins (for example) are far more typical of my generation than many people would like to accept. And their ability to live “normal” lives – within the confines of being sports-lebrities – puts the lie to propaganda that drugs destroy lives, as Lisa Pryor notes in yesterday’s SMH.
link
The increasingly common suggestion that ice/meth/rock/crystal (as we alternatively call it) is a problem because of its lower cost relative to, say, coke is laughable in WA, however. Over here, they both go for $350-$400/gram. Coke’s simply harder to get hold of, which allows meth to be sold at a comparable price because it’s easier to get. And believe me, it’s easy to get if you want it. Now, if we could deregulate the trade in cocaine, there’d be a helluva lesser problem with iceheads – $200 cocaine would do more than anything to cut the number of ice users!
That poor cat is doomed to star in some nasty kitty snuff pr0n.
Drugs? Just say miao.
Youie: Interesting tactic you suggest of flooding the market with one substance to destroy the market for the “more” harmful. I just can’t see the pollies going for it for some reason.
Otherwise: I was reading the proganda booklet I got in the mail the other day from JWH about drugs and how to talk to my non-existant kids about it. Under the section dealing with “why do people take drugs?”, it fails to deal with clearly the number one reason people do. That is it makes people feel “better” for some period of time.
As Renton says in Trainspotting “we might be stupid but we are not that @#$ing stupid”.
No. Johns said that he resorted to ecstasy as an escape from the pressures he was under for being the best. It was the pressures he was under that was the cause.
Don’t answer a question you haven’t been asked.
There is no evidence for any long term damage.
There is also no evidence that one can overdose on ecstasy. The deaths due to ecstasy use are due to overheating caused by dancing all night. The problem can be solved by drinking water.
Drawing rather a long bow with this one.
The mind altering properties of a wager are what, exactly?
Interesting questions, suz, and as I imagine my answers to them would be obvious, I’ll address some points from comments.
Amanda:
I’m not sure if you’re referring to my hyperlinked comment, but I certainly never said AJ was selfish, and I’ve certainly not condemned him in any way. As you can imagine my opinion of him has only grown in the last week.
Phil:
I’m not so sure about this one, and I’d be interested to hear more. Seems to me that recreational pharma and sporting pharma are two fairly different beasts, appealing to quite different mentalities and appearing to solve two very different problems. I doubt that people like Wendell Sailor and Ben Cousins and Andrew Johns powder up because it’ll make them better athletes, they do them because they’re fun. Conversely, I don’t reckon Alex Vinokourov has ever had a minute’s fucking joy in his life, chemical or otherwise.
Paul Burns:
‘Experimenting with’: that’s another great euphemism for ‘having stacks of fun with’. It’s second in my favourites list after ‘battle with’. Third is ‘being trapped in a vicious cycle of’. Heh.
And now, back to my own personal ordeal with a cold stubbie of beer—perhaps two or even more—and a seat on a sunny verandah. It’s a tragic tale of epic scope.
Someone call New Idea.
Once again, Paul, where is the evidence for both those claims? I have looked closely at this issue before, and there is no solid scientific evidence for either of them. That is not just my opinion, it is also the opinion of some very senior researchers in this area. The most that can be said is that cannabis use can probably trigger and/or exacerbate schizophrenia in a very small number of already predisposed individuals. There is as yet no reliably demonstrated primary causal link between cannabis use and schizophrenia.
Tilt: it’s a glorious sight to see.
You’ve got a point, though, SATP. The assumption that gambling and drinking and drug taking all come from the same well of human misery and vice is a very counterproductive hangover from Temperance.
Different itches, different scratches.
Indeed. My tongue was in my cheek, obviously. The point I was trying to make is that in the absence of a preferred drug, people will turn to something else that gives a kick if the price isn’t prohibitive. (See the swing in the late 90s/early 00s from heroin to speed.) This allows the sellers of the more available substance to charge more for their product, all other things being equal. Prices don’t drop until there’s a critical mass of demand – be it through “mutually beneficial” individual relationships with dealers (friends, usually) or a bigger, broader societal trend – that leads to greater competition for business.
Knowing that I can easily drop $100-$200 on a night out on the grog, the prospect of spending that same amount on other substances that don’t leave me with a hangover, don’t cause me to slur my words, don’t make me more disposed to the violent solving of a problem, and don’t cause me to stumble the streets looking for a random taxi, but that make my company more attractive to like-minded females and that offer a simple thrill by ignoring the supposed taboo of taking illicit substances is compelling.
With respect to this claim (which I do not wish to ascribe to anyone here) that footballers, of any code, are “role models”:
The argument seems to go like this. First, here’s an analysis of the claim that footballers are role models for children – at least, here’s what it is supposed to imply. If a footballer is a role model for a child, then that child is, all else being equal, likely to attempt to emulate that footballer.* And now the argument gets going: Footballer F is a role model for child C; F takes illicit drugs; so, given what it is for F to be a role model for C, C is more likely to take illicit drugs. (And C knows that F takes illicit drugs).
But, as the saying goes, one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. Consider this argument. Footballer F is a role model for child C; F takes illicit drugs; but, because C has a negative attitude towards illicit drugs and those who take illicit drugs, C ceases to regard F as a role model; so, C is not more likely to take illicit drugs.
The question here is, why should the argument run the first way and not the second way? This seems to be an empirical question, yet all I’ve seen are broadly a priori arguments which purportedly count in favour of the first argument. What we need is evidence which shows how likely a child is to continue to regard a footballer as a role model if they discover that the footballer is taking illicit drugs. I see no a priori reason why a child could not possess sufficiently strong negative attitudes towards those who take illicit drugs that, upon finding out that their role model footballer is taking illicit drugs, they would cease to regard that footballer as a role model – rather than continue to regard that footballer as a role model and attempt to emulate their behaviour.
*Instead of this you might think that what it is for a footballer F to be a role model for a child C is for C to regard whatever F does, all else being equal, as (morally) permissible. And so on. I don’t think it matters so much what analysis you substitute.
I read on another site that the success rate for people giving up heroin is somewhere in the order of 1% per year. I cant seem to find the link but i think it was in relation to methadone use.
Best argument I ever saw against drugs was a girl I used to work with, she got herself clean and well again. I asked why she had done it and the look of near lust on her face as she said “it was the greatest feeling ever” was shocking.
She had been traded by her junkie boyfriend to his dealer mate in return for wiping some debts. She was forced into prostitution (she was 15 he was about 30) to pay off his debts and maintain her own addiction.
The same bloke has done this over and over again.
I dont know what the answer to the drug trade is but I doubt flooding the market with “the best feeling ever” will leave much more than a lot of wasted years by a much larger group of young people than it does now.
Youie
You have a great point about the effects of the morning after on the grog. The mining industry has seen a massive shift away from cannabis and grog onto speed and eccies due to their lack of noticeable side effects (for casual users) and short time in the bloodstream.
Dope gets picked up anything up to a month later in urine tests while speed and co are usually gone within 12-24 hours.
Thats caused the problem of drugs which are considered more dangerous (operating heavy machinery etc) becoming the drugs of choice because of relative undetectability. Almost a flip side to the availability conundrum you mentioned between heroin/speed in the 90′s.
Depends, moley. If you figure the people who recreationally use heroin and manage to maintain a perfectly normal, wage-earning suburban lives, and are never ever counted in the statistics of drug use, as ‘failures’, maybe. I seriously doubt the figure, though.
Then looking at it from any reasonable point of view, everyone’s problems would be better solved with less criminal punishment for adult drug use, safer conditions and supply for users, and a bullet for the white slaver.
Mole: precisely. The lack of side-effects for casual users is a point that seems to be lost on those who think they know better on these matters. One drink doesn’t make an alcoholic; one line or pill doesn’t make a monster. So the slippery slope begins… And does anyone really care to think why WA has the highest proportion of drug users of all the states? People aren’t dumb. The number of times I’ve heard friends/acquaintances/randoms say no to a bong but yes to a line for the same reason you mention beggars belief. But who am I to criticise..?
I’m a slalom man myself. Though some prefer the moguls, the super-G, or the jumps. Wheee!
You’re a shining example of generosity, Youie. Bless you, my child.
DD: what goes around comes around.
The Devil Drink
I should have been more clearer, Im sure that figure is waaaaay low, and if it was stated in relation to methadone use it would miss many, many users.
Id agree with the bullet and white slaver, but I would be afraid of the effects of normalising the currently illicit drugs on the community at large.
Lets say (pulling a number out my bum) 15% of the population lack the self control to recreational use these drugs and instead would become dependent on them to the stage where they are living for their next hit.
At the moment scarcity of money/supply/fear of punishment/fear of social stigma, means only half of those people go on to try the drugs.
Reducing the price and availability to, say alcohol levels would expose a much greater % of those people to harm through over consumption. If as has been argued before it will be prescribed/priced to discourage this then the only effect will be to sustain the illicit trade (albeit at a lower profit level). I would also dread the numbers of people who would actively “opt out” of a productive and “normal” life in pursuit of endless pleasure.
Heres a link to a no-drugs side of the argument.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/myths/myths4.htm
I have no idea what will work, I think the effects of legalisation would be more problematic than the current situation, which is at best a stalemate between what people want (pleasure, release from pain, stress, worries) and the needs of a functioning society.
Passing around to the left han’ side, right Y?
Quite. And for the same reason, I’m not touching ‘em.
Don’t be ridiculous, mole. First, anyone who’s known alcoholics or problem users knows there’s *always* enough money. Second, supply in modern Australia is effectively unlimited, in quantity if not quality, even in prison. Third, fear of punishment? For users? You’re only kidding yourself there. Last is the most interesting one, but the wrong way around: most people start using just *so* they can fit in. For instance:
Having given it a bit of thought Suz, I’d say there were four real bits of advice a parent could give any incipient drug user (aka child). Sit them down and run ‘em through the Talk, Devil Drink style.
1. Don’t get high on your own supply.
2. Your dealer is not your friend: which doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t get along well and see them often. It goes for Sideways Steve the Super Slick Semi-Suave Serbian Speed Salesman from Strathfield just as much as it does that good-looker behind the bar at your local.
3. What goes around comes around (ta Youie). Give your child a thorough grounding in the Very Ancient And Sacred Rules of the Shout.
4. De gustibus non est disputandum. Conversely, don’t be such a snob.
The Devil Drink
No need to be offensive, I assigned a number but could have just as easily said “about half”, the number was there for arguments sake, not a fact. I thought that was made quite clear.
You are effectively arguing against yourself with regards to the money/supply issue. How many alcoholics would prefer to be heroin users is they had similar access to supply at an affordable cost and the social aspects were the same?
How many meth users would switch to coke if it was cheaper/ uncut?
My “half wouldnt use” is new users, not established recreational or addicted users.
What would you advocate as the “best” solution to illicit drugs? Complete normalisation? Prescription only? Death penalty? Compulsory?
It may be nice to snipe at others opinions but youve given precious little of your own bar a few smart arse “be nice to your dealer” comments.
The “shout” you refer to is precisely what gets a lot of young ladies hawking the fork in the first place. The “slave trader” referred to in my previous post does exactly that to get his ladies, as do many others.
DD: is it your shout or mine?
Strike one for drug culture: it doesn’t matter whose shout it is; whoever’s got/buying the gear is morally, if not legally *snicker*, obliged to at least offer some to present company. Who can say when it’s next going to be available or when someone’s going to “get done”. Shit happens eh?
High shcool *insert pun and acknowledgement of deliberate misspelling here* student project: compare and contrast the obligations of the common marijuana dealer (whose supply is not usually measured in tenths of a gram) vis-a-vis those of the purchaser of so-called Class As… And let’s not wonder how the term “Class A” was invented or by whom…
“The too-anxious cat ” – silly me, I’d assumed it was code for a Liberal Party backbencher.
& whoever came up with the idea that young men between 18-30 whose life talent involved hurling around a leather object & running really really fast, who would be paid in excess of $250 000 a year, who would be constantly lauded for being able to hurl said ball & run really really fast, & who saw “The Footy Show” as the peak of cultural elan in Australia, whoever decided they would make good role models was a nong.
Still laughing over the Tele’s Sat headline “We Failed Him”. I think we’ve failed the kids living at Yuendumu but Andy Johns is a bit of a stretch for me.
Actually a lot longer than that, depending a lot on the level of use prior to stopping. Cannibinoids are highly fat soluble and so are stored in body fat, and the rate at which they are released varies considerably. Detectable traces can remain in the body for long periods of time, at least months for heavy users. The equipment exists to test down to extremely low but meaningless levels, so the cutoff point used by the tester is critical. When you pass a test all it means is that any levels you may have are below that arbitrary cutoff point, not that there isn’t any THC present.
Also, they can get a pretty good idea of how long since you stopped using, and hence how heavy you were using, by comparing the absolute amount of (exogenous) cannibinoid metabolites found in the urine, with the ratios of the various metabolites (if I recall correctly, it is a while since I read up on the details).
Hilker
Again my lack of clarity gets me in trouble. You are absolutely right on long term/ heavy users, the results can show up for much longer than a month.
But even 1 nights indulgence tends to show up for a minimum of about a fortnight using the cut off points most minesites use (I dont have it to hand).
I do it for the joy, mole, not the need, but I’m sorry. You’re right, I was rude before.
I don’t think there’s any way to answer a question like that. Perhaps the economics isn’t as simple, or perhaps it’s a matter of taste, small-group peer pressure and larger socialised traditions. Drug substitution patterns are the haziest of all the hazy areas of research into use, so my friends in white coats tell me, especially once you get into opportunity speculation.
You’re ticking every box, there. Seriously though, I see the issue as the fact of some kinds of drug use being conceptualised as ‘problematic’ when in social fact, they’re nothing of the sort. Andrew Johns’ problems have obviously been depression, bipolar disorder and Phil Gould, not ecstasy. Drug use is already normalised, everywhere but in the statutes, the remand cells, and the feverish imaginations of the AA cultists. What I’d like to see penalised instead of drug use per se is people’s harmful behaviour, which brings me to your last point.
Now this is an interesting and repulsive phenomenon. When I was a young Devil—oh, back around the first chapters of Leviticus, I can’t be sure—I was taught that it was both polite and necessary to offer substance-gifts in return for drinks or whatever offered to you, but exceedingly impolite to shout when you know the person you’re buying for can’t repay. It *breaks* all the sacred rules to expect, or worse, demand repayment like that. The Shout works in a gift economy.
An economic transaction like you’re describing has a few very specific names, and shouting isn’t one of them. I think we can both agree about the criminality of exploiting vulnerable people for sex.
Response to your 6.56 held up by the infinite moderation monkeys, mole.
Youie, who’s counting?
Lest it not be said that drugs can addle the mind, I present for your blogging pleasure a good part of a song by a band renowned for their drug use and perverted religious tendencies.
They oughta be ashamed of themselves… Good thing they never came to nothing…
Those who have used drugs, like me, are forced to stand back and watch while non-users set the terms of the debate. There are a lot of very smart people out there who are talking about something they have no personal experience of, because they’ve never used. And these people cause a lot of damage because they bring all their intelligence to bear on a topic on which they know nothing of value. The very mind-altering properties that make drugs attractive to us, make understanding them impossible unless you’ve been there.
Drugs are a political, not social, issue. Our society is full of preventable, illegal things that people do on a chronic basis. The low hanging fruit are the roads: consider that 1,600 Australians died in road accidents in 2006, ten times the number of drug related deaths. Deaths from alcohol and tobacco are similarly huge in comparison to illicit drug deaths.
We could look at workplace injuries, number of people killed while walking (crossing the road), number of people killed by mistakes in hospitals, or the number of people killed by eating poorly. All of these deaths dwarf the number of deaths from drugs, the majority of the deaths are preventable, and none of them receive anything like the attention that drugs receive.
So: why pick on drugs? Is it because the non-users are setting the agenda without knowing anything about what they’re talking about? Is it like the abortion debate? That’s another debate largely set by people who don’t understand it — because, being male, they can’t get pregnant. “Just say no” could indeed be the catch cry of opponents in both debates!
The reason that people can’t agree on a response to the “drug problem” is because, firstly, the problem is so tiny as to barely exist, especially when compared to the preventable deaths caused by other facets of society; and secondly, the majority of the problem relates to the quality and availability of drugs rather than the drugs themselves, making drug users irreconcilably opposed to non-users in terms of the frame of debate.
Rich people with ready access to good quality drugs, like William Burroughs or Hunter Thompson, can live long and even productive lives, and many people like myself would consider their contributions to our society to be overwhelmingly positive. You could say the same about music: the Beatles or Pink Floyd, or any number of modern acts (Underworld, say, or any of the psy-trance movement that I am personally enamoured of).
To conclude this overly long post (sorry): there is only barely a drug problem, and what problem there is, is already being managed quite well. There are plenty of other problems in our society which are far worse; and people who have no experience with drugs are surely not the ones who should be involved in the debate, for they have no idea what they are talking about.
Try telling them that…
Fantastic, now to get people who have no experience with using the environment to butt out of commenting on the environment, people with no experience in irrigated farming to shut the fok up about murray-darling water, for people with no experience at using guns to likewise shut the fok up about gun control, for people with no experience at…. er.. you get the picture.
What are going to be the longterm effects (if any) of what is apparently a huge subculture of cocaine use among urban Australians?
What’s the basis for this, suz? Is there such a subculture?
Well, maybe ‘subculture’ was the wrong word, when I should have just said ‘a lot of people who use cocaine from time to time’. I said “apparently” because I myself don’t and haven’t, but a lot of people I know, mostly under 40, have had or still do have a line of speed on occasion, at parties, etc.
He he, SATP. Fair call. “Personal experience” doesn’t hold up as a basis for speech in democracy.
Jack Strocchi:
Not picking on you but when you said
I couldn’t help thinking “Yes indeed …. for the importers, manufacturers and dealers!”
Everyone:
Why is it that in so much talk everywhere about recreational chemicals [drugs, alcohol, the lot] so little is said about the tremendous economic, social and political effects this has on us all? You, me and everyone else.
How many puppets are in the political system because the purveyors of recreational chemicals pay to keep them there? How many families have lost everything because of recreational chemicals? What percentage of our GNP is lost through the use of recreational chemicals? How many Australian firms [and the jobs that go with them] have gone down the gurgler because of the widespread use of recreational chemicals?
.
“…apparently a huge subculture of cocaine use among urban Australians? ”
You are closer than you think Suz. Maybe not ” huge “, try substantial and maybe urban “professionals” rather than Australians in major cities is a better likeness.
I find the prices quoted for ice in WA outrageous and it takes a certain type of person to prefer ice to coke. 3 days and no sleep isn’t my idea of fun.
My friendly delivery boy was always busy busy busy – that phone was a threat to his sanity most weekends. Demand was constant – one thing about users is that they will always call again.
“The mind altering properties of a wager are what, exactly?” – SATP
Addiction.
“I liked this bit — ‘the cat was too anxious to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’ — which I inititally read ‘the cat was suspiciously eager to have a thermometer inserted into its rectum’.”
What you and your cat get up to in the privacy of your home is nobody’s business but yours.
Michael, are you perchance a user?
Just that a wager isn’t even a substance you know.
SATP:
I get the picture. And since we all (by definition) have experience with “using” the environment, which includes irrigated farming (since this affects our water supplies) I take your point that everyone is entitled to that discussion. Regarding guns, which are designed especially to kill things other than the user, I think we all can have an opinion about that since we all encompass “the other”.
But of course you missed my main point, which is that “the drug problem” is vanishingly small compared to other problems that kill people and wreck lives. That drugs harm self and others is largely a by-product of the context in which they are used (that is, illegally); it is a side-effect of prohibition, not a property of the chemicals or how they work. Nobody takes bad drugs when they can afford good drugs.
Graeme Bell says:
I think that the reason is that such economic rationalisation of (non) drug use is silly, firstly because the drug problem is vanishingly small, and secondly because it’s a substitution argument; it supposes that if we didn’t use drugs then we would increase the GDP. According to QUT:
(see http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003442/01/3442.pdf)
I think a better question is, are the economic and social costs of prohibition worth it?
Actually Mark my point wasn’t that we are all entitled to discuss.
I was agreeing with you.
People who haven’t used something ought to shut up.
Thus people who don’t use guns don’t know what they are talking about.
People who don’t run an irrigation farm don’t know diddly squat about irrigated farming.
People who don’t drive long distance know nothing of what it is to drive long distances. & so on.
Or perhaps non-drug users (but who have met a drug user) are entitled to speak on drugs after all?
Certainly would be closer to knowing something of drugs than someone who eats food being qualified to comment on irrigated farming?
What is next? A bus passenger “qualified” to pontificate on petroleum exploration?
Graham (sorry about the previous mis-spelling, I hit submit when i meant preview), I just found this interesting link about prohibition in the US 1920-33:
at cato.org. I think it’s clear that economic analysis has been done in this area but it has not found a positive correlation between prohibition and economic success.
People like taking drugs, and they seek them out — nobody is holding a gun to their head. The vast majority of us are not even remotely addicted.
And the drug problem is tiny.
Would motor vehicle road deaths, pedestrian crossing the road deaths, alcohol & tobacco deaths, workplace deaths, eating poorly deaths, and mistakes in hostpial deaths, (all of which dward drug deaths in raw numbers) be more or less than drug deaths, when proportionate to the number of users?
SATP,
You’re not agreeing with me. I never said that people who don’t use things should shut up. I only said that people who don’t use drugs should not be involved in the debate.
Which is wrong, and I take it back.
What I should have said was, people who admit to using drugs are excluded from the debate because as soon as someone admits to it, they are condemned. This is obviously one-sided, in favour of non-users. Hence this thread: someone finally stood up and said, “yes I take drugs”; and here we are.
So no, you don’t agree with me at all.
I don’t think that it’s eating that qualifies, but breathing and drinking, since it’s about the environment and not about food. But it’s a long stretch between drugs and irrigation, and you’re putting words in my mouth.
Some bus passengers are already making their point about petroleum exploration by being on the bus in the first place. But it’s a long stretch between drugs and petroleum exploration.
What’s your point?
It’s not about percentages, it’s about the number of dead people. Why spend billions putting people in jail when so few are being hurt?
Anyway. I suppose we can count all users of valium and other, similar legal drugs among all of the drugs in use (except alcohol and cigarettes) in which case we will find that there is a high number of people using drugs. Alcohol of course is the big killer and will skew the statistics. Take alcohol away and we still have loads of people taking Valium, prozac, period pain relievers (some of which are quite potent!) and friends. I’m not sure how many of those die, but you don’t hear of it often.
I know many, many people who take E. I’ve never heard of an australian dying from taking it, though I have heard of a 14 year old girl who took E and then drank so much water (because of those fear campaigns about drugs, y’know) that she died from the intake of water. Very sad. And I know that people have died from GHB, but that’s because GHB feels like E (apparently) but is 1/7 the price. If E was $5 a pop, noone would take GHB.
I said it before: nobody takes bad drugs when they can afford good ones.
And I should add: the price of good drugs is artificially high because of prohibition.
Ever since a bloke I went to uni with died because of a bad hit of junk – a guy with a first class honours degree in Classics and a lawyer – I’ve been firmly in favour of legalisation.
And though I didn’t like it very much, the marijuana I did inhale when I was young I’m sure did my health much less damage than all the ciggies and the grog over the years.
Mark [at 10:50pm and 11:20pm]:
I wasn’t pushing the substitution arguement …. and I am as familiar as anyone else with the destructive, persistent and unintended effects of Prohibition in the USA. That’s one reason I referred to recreational chemicals rather than to drugs. Decriminization does sound fine but on its own it only transfers the problems from one field to another.
No. I was looking at the problem, in part, from a military perspective. Recreational chemicals are definitely the way to go if you are intent on conquering a nation or if you want to destroy its military strength: Firewater for the natives [then just walk in and take their land]. Alcohol too to make sure those damned Fenians in the Australian colonies are kept quiet so they don’t get up to mischief. British opium for the Chinese [it got them cheap silver, tea, silk and, besides, they were able to carve up a once great empire]. Heroin for the US forces in Viet-Nam and for the Soviet conscripts in Afghanistan too [why shoot them when they pay you good money to make themselves militarily useless?]. Who knows, follow the money trail from the users of non-legal recreational chemicals in Australia and it might lead to some rather nasty organizations intent on doing us all harm.
Recreational chemicals are terrific weapons.
Cheap, self-delivered, deadly accurate, reliably effective, long-lasting, capable of inflicting harm on even more enemy who are outside the country, unlikely to harm your own forces if you have strong discipline, leave material and property undamaged …. and the enemy insist on giving you huge amounts of money for your own war chest for attacking them. Why would any astute military leader mess around with expensive missiles or weapons of mass destruction when far more effective weapons – recreational chemicals – are right at hand?
Recreational chemicals are terrific weapons.
I think we could think about that in different terms, eg the pleasure principle [drug-taking for fun] versus the death instinct [militarism, authoritarianism, destructiveness].
The trouble with ‘recreational drugs’ (from my experience) is when the pleasure principle meets the death instinct inside individuals – ie people self-destruct via addictive drugs. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. Pleasure easily becomes inertia which morphs into nihilism and self-destructiveness.
It could easily be argued that tobacco and alcohol use are on the same continuum – it’s just that narcotics users, for example, tend to go out like shooting stars.
Oh, and the one stone-cold harsh reality that everybody seems to be missing is that, like adults, young people take drugs because they are fabulous fun.
“recreational drug” Would this be the original oxymoron?
HILKER covered the topic well, esp the nonesense about ‘supa strong grass’ – Hashish is customarily 30-50% THC compared to the strongest grass at 15%.
What causes the face-down on the floor stone in skunk & hydro is the increase in other isomers; THC is an exceptionally complex molecule, with any number of variations. The old hippie test of good, bad & yuk dope was that the higher quality lasted longer psycholgically with few, if any, physical effects, the dross had heavy physical effects, gaa-gaa on the couch and very little psycho active component.
Simply put, good dope makes you want to run out and DO something, the rest just leads to the muchies and bad TV.
Bad news though, a lethal dose was discovered many years back – take 100 grams of hashish for every kilo of body weight and drop onto head from the fourth floor.
The big problem with drug awareness campaigns is precisely how to deliver the message. The ‘just say no’ type of anti-drug campaigning championed by Nancy Reagan in the 80s, furthered by later US administrations (and now picked up as Australia’s ‘war on drugs’) produced advertisements that simply weren’t believable.
Any form of drug use was figured as an almost instantaneous road to hellish addiction, when the reality obviously isn’t that simple. The people who the ads are targeted at realise this very quickly (both through personal experience as well as anecdotal evidence), and so come to immediately discount any drug message that is presented to them via government funded advertising. It had been demonstrated that the government was ‘lying’ about drugs, and anything they said about the matter should be ignored.
While I think that raising the issue of drugs with young people is admirable (and it’s great that it’s become a talking point), the best advice that the pamplet (which is, for the most part, fairly innocuous, although it does lean strongly towards the ‘just say no’ ideology) is to ‘be honest’ and acknowledge lack of knowledge if you don’t have it, rather than playing the reefer madness card. To do anything but that runs the risk of alienating your target group.
LSD has been on the out for a while. It’s still strongly associated with hippie culture, which just isn’t very in vogue at the moment. The basic composition of available LSD has been changing for quite some time too, and I reckon this is strongly linked to rave culture. Tripping was still relatively big back in the early-to-mid-90s, but the tabs didn’t have much actual LSD in them, instead they had a much higher volume of speed or ecstacy: so people would be more concerned with jumping around a lot rather than sitting and staring at the wallpaper.
Chicken and egg to be discussed at conference.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I find this interesting… (feel free to delete if it’s egregious)
John Greenfield: “Boys adore football because of the competition, the skill, the sweat, the biffo, the mateship, the tribalism, and the opportunity to worship demi-gods. They do not give a flying fuck about the participation of footballers in public health campaigns. They only want their team to win.”
I agree, but I’d boil it down to something even simpler: among the higher mammals, the young play at what they’ll actually be doing as adults. Watch a kitten play (gee, I wonder if any bloggers have ever done that!): it’s playing at killing things, which is what cats do for a living. Puppies like to catch and retrieve a ball: they’re playing at co-operating with humans, which is what dogs used to do for their paycheck, before they all went on the dog dole.
Boys like sports games because they can practice at aggressive competition, and also at working together within impersonal rule-based systems. They learn how to take and give orders, and how to balance aggressive individual achievement with the needs of the team. I think the impersonal, uncaring nature of the abstract rules is what’s perhaps most important in the scheme. When you’re out hunting in the forest or in the corporation, neither entity gives a shit about what your personal needs are, and the sooner you understand that and learn to use it, the better.
Girls, on the other hand, play at the subtleties of consensus-based, co-operative systems. They learn subtlety and attention to detail, which is important when caring for the fragile and non-verbal young. They learn about psychology and human relationships, essential for getting cooperative tasks done and maintaining family order.
And of course, everybody likes drugs. Although they shouldn’t. Seriously. Big anti-druggy type here. Anyway, carry on.
AMPHIBIOUS.
Thanks for that extra info. Particularly the points about hash (and especially hash oil, which can hit 70-80% plus if done right) being way stronger than any raw plant material could ever be; the difference between the ‘couch lock’ dope and the good stuff; and the lethal dose (which is so extraordinarily high as to be utterly irrelevant).
I have heard some truly ridiculous claims from the anti-crowd about the potency of raw cannabis, up to 25-30% THC! If that were true, the plant would be unable to structurally hold itself up. Even 15% is probably a bit high, I would say a max. of about 10% is closer.
Beside THC itself, and its isomers, there are a whole bunch of other closely related cannabinoid compounds, such as cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabinol (CBN), and many more, that come into play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid
One last point, any ill effects of cannabis use are often due to the commonest means of delivery (smoking) than to any inherent danger with the drug itself.
Comments such as these just go to illustrate the point that drugs, especially illicit drugs (which are only illicit by acts of parliament and history, not pharmacology) somehow manage to addle the thinking of those who evidently don’t even take them themselves…
Cheers…
Well, the stems wouldn’t necessarily be 30% THC, so it might still grow.
In most cases, yeah. Although if you get hold of a large amount of high-grade stuff that’s been a bit over-dried, the crystals that end up in the bottom of the bag would be more like 70-80%.
FDB – rubbish
One last point, any ill effects of cannabis use are often due to the commonest means of delivery (smoking) than to any inherent danger with the drug itself.
Yes, and one of the bad side effects of smoking dope is not only smoking dope but that it can be the conduit for people to start smoking tobacco.
The ME & India only began to smoke the various cannabinoids (hash & ganja respectively) upon the arrival of TOBACCO. Thanks a heap Sir Walter, decapitation was too good for you.
Prior to the 16th C the ME ate hashish as majoum, a sticky concoction of hone/sugar, spices & couscous, India drank it as bhang, milk, water, pepper, sugar & other spices.
Even China only smoked opium rarely and then the aristocrats pure; it was usually eaten. With the arrival of tobacco,the coolies would roll up with specks of opium wihich was the impetus for the British “send a gunboat” Opium Wars when the Emperor tried to stop them landing indujstrial quantites from their vast estates in India, specifically Patna.
The British Pharmocopeaia still gives the recipe for tincture of opium as “take 10 grams of finest Patna opium…”
Everyone:
I couldn’t give a rat’s ar*e how some people get their jollies – so long as in doing so they do not harm others. And I abhor the ratbags who think imprisonment is the only answer to a serious and largely hidden problem.
There’s a tendency for some people commenting on recreational chemicals to pretend that it’s all about pleasure-seeking and individual choices and about fuddy-duddies with old-fashioned silly laws.
Well, there’s another side to the story …. and here’s just one example: A disabled lady I happen to know is in her late sixties and is a pensioner who just manages to get by. She was an easy target recently, when druggies broke into her home, ransacked and wrecked it and bashed the living daylights out of her trying to find money and anything saleable to buy drugs. She has been around enough to distinguish hoons from a thieves from druggies – they were druggies; besides, they made that crystal clear themselves!!! That’s only ONE example.
When that sort of thing happens to innocent people do you expect me to have any respect for addicts?
New post:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/04/your-drug-habit-supports-teh-terrrrism/
Amphibious – gawd. You really have trouble letting go, dontcha?
A good mate of mine at uni was a pharmacologist, and somewhat preoccupied with extracurricular work, shall we say. I’m only going on what he told me, and my experince of putting it to the test – one small cone of crystals through a fine-meshed pipe and I was more wasted than smoking 4 or 5 big ones of the weed that produced the crystal residue. Every bit as good as the oil he extracted with purloined lab gear, in fact.
But then, you know best I suppose. How do the Inuit smoke it?
I went to a wonderful dinner party a few years ago and was served course after course of amazing food, followed by coffee and a tray of powder which had come into the country through the bowels of a terrified Bolivian. Put me off illegal drugs for life. Say what you like about (insert alcohol company here), but they are miles ahead of your drug lords in terms of causing harm. It’s the one area of consumption where I do go on about provenance.
Gender considerations aside, what’s changed is the notion that being off your face is a moral-free zone. If “you” get wasted (on alcohol, something else or a combination) then anything “you” do can’t necessarily be ascribed to the same “you” that requires respect and affection and freedom from penalty. Maybe I have missed out on some experiences or good or ill, but I like to think that my fear of brain-scrambling is motivated by ethics, and am well aware that what works for me isn’t necessarily for others.
I am interested in the early and tentative conclusions from a few long-term studies that show certain drugs (yes, including alcohol) hasten dementia-like conditions, and am treating them as such rather than Teh Answer.
That said, a New Year’s Eve party at Bondi about five years ago was praised for the lack of violence and offensive behaviour – the police commander said that this was down to ecstacy rather than alcohol as the drug of choice. The career of said commander ended soon thereafter. It’s a funny old world.
FDB.
I was kind of exaggerating to make a point.
Those ‘crystals’ you refer to are the resin glands (trichomes) which contain virtually all of the THC. Harvesting them is an ancient art. It is what hash and hash oil are made from.
It is comparable to the difference between low strength beer, and overproof spirits. They are both ethanol, but you don’t drink a litre of OP, and correspondingly you don’t smoke several cones of trichomes. Smoking small amounts of the high strength stuff is far better for your repsiratory tract than smoking large amounts of the low strength stuff.
Hilker – I was just being cute. Although to be fair, the more potent a strain is, the more inbred it’s likely to be, so what you said isn’t so far from the truth sometimes. The strongest weed I ever smoked (by some considerable margin) was so genetically fucked-up it couldn’t grow proper roots and had to be grafted to get a decent yield.
And yes, you’re dead right on the “crystals” – virtually pure THC like I said. The glands themselves don’t always end up at the bottom of the bag, especially if, as I said, the weed is overly dry. Sometimes it really is just a mixture of the stigmas and crystallised alkaloids (white powder). You can snort it in actual fact, although I’ve never tried. It’s pretty much the preserve of large-volume-handlers, which ain’t never been me I swear!
And dope before dinner parties – never.
(Unless it’s a nachos and ice-cream dinner party, then have at it)
Well if the world’s a drag, m’ friend
And you cain’t cope
Go out n find yr connection
N smoke some dope
And get high, if ya can.
And if the weed ain’t no good, man,
Ya still feel sad,
Go take a walk downtown,
Now you ain’t doin’ so bad,
Not at all, not at all.
– 99 Year Blues
Big advocate here for the walk downtown over the other alternatives. Still, whaddaya gonna do. btw, dropping Jorma’s name at the exactly precise right moment once saved me from a brutal ass-kicking. It’s actually a pretty funny story, but it takes too long to tell.
Thanks, Jorma! I owe you one!
The dust, or crystals, at the bottom of a bag of grass is dried oil exuded from the plant. Traditional hashish (except Moroccan & Lebanese – a different technique for cultural & agricultural reasons) is an appealing combination of earth dust, human skin cells, oil (hemp if you’re lucky, more likely, since the 70s, sump oil) and what ever else is added down the line.
The only way to go these days is the freezolator – THC is virtually insoluble in water but freezes above zero C (about 2-4C depending on the purity of the water) so the worst grass, off cuts, trimmings, even stalk can produce a hash of stunning purity whereas you wouldn’t give the raw material to your worst enemy.
Hilker – did you miss my joke re the LDC?
LDB – doesn’t grow there, Aminita Muscaria was their tipple.
Amphibious
It is not an oil, it a resin. It is produced as spheres by glands on the end of tiny little stalks that cover the plant, but obviously mostly concentrated on the female flower structures. These tiny balls of resin are the trichomes. The reason the plant produces them is not clear. (Maybe God made them just for us. How nice of him.)
There are a number of ways to extract the resin cleanly.
One is, as you suggest, to get the trichomes cold and just knock them off, either into water and then strain them out through a series of graded filters (and you can buy special filter bag sets specifically to do it), or sift it dry through fine silk filters which probably produces the nicest tasting stuff.
Or you can extract it chemically by soaking the plant material in a solvent for a very short time (less than a minute), which dissolves the resin selectively, catch the solution and let the solvent evaporate, leaving behind el primo oil. If you do it right the oil is a clear golden colour and very pure. Now that shit will blow the top of your head right off. Solvents include alcohol (ethanol or isopropanol, at least 70%), butane, and liquid CO2. For various practical reasons, iso and butane are the easiest choices, but the ideal is ethanol or CO2.
Go check the dope sites for more info. There are some safety practices you have to follow when extracting with alcohol or butane solvents, mostly concerned with fire hazard. But it is no more dangerous than working with petrol.
So I’m told. I am not a user (or producer).
And I got your joke about the LD50. Just couldn’t think of a snappy comeback.
Mark on 2 September 2007 at 7:37 pm
I give mark credit for honesty, one of his better characteristics. But I mark him down for an instant fail for his reliance on arguemtum ad hominum.
Under Mark’s operational philosophy, drug addicts and drug traffickers would be society’s top advisors on drug policy. Imagine Schapelle Corby, the Trimboles and that pot-head who used to write for National Review in charge of the Ministry for Uncontrolled Substances.
Thats the Cultural Left for you. Put the lunatics in charge of the assylum.
mark says:
Mark may find it difficult to conceive but there are plenty of ex-drug users and close observers who would beg to differ.When I travelled through the Deep South I was always amazed that the most hell-raisin’ types are also the most god-fearin’. They know sin “from the inside”, so to speak.
I used to trot out the same liberal nonsense about drugs about a generation ago, when I first encountered Milton Friedmans famous attack on drug prohibition. Unfortunately my neo-liberal illusions did not long survive a sustained encounter with the US.
I was in the US during the Crack Wars. I have forgotten more about Bedford-Stuyevesant than mark would ever want to know. If mark thinks that legalising crack would reduce not “cause a lot of damage” then I suggest his damage estimator is blowing smoke and badly needs a valve job.
mark says:
Addictive drugs are a primarily a moral issue. They disable the individuals moral core: consciousness and free-will. If you bend the mind and bond the will you destroy the possibility of morality.
A Brave New World of solipsistic drug users is already more than half-way there to nihilism. And much stronger pschotropic substances and gadgets are already in the pipeline.
mark says:
We can chew gum and walk at the same time ie reduce road and drug deaths at the same time. The govt is already waging war on anti-female violence, alchohol and tobacco drug abuse and the road carnage at the same time as it is following a hard line on drugs. Why go backwards on drugs, do more harm and let the problem get out of hand?
All the non-drug toxic activities that mark mentions are, in the normal course of events, legal – not illegal. Hard drugs are already illegal, and inherently immoral. We already have a legal and moral handle on the drug problem. And Howard Salvation Army is winning the war on drugs.
mark says:
Hard drugs are toxic poisons which destroy body, mind and soul.
mark says:
The problem is tiny because it is being kept tiny through legal suppression and moral opprobrium. You want to unleash the genie, we will end up with crack heads running the streets. Nearly 300,000 extra people were killed during the period from 1965-96, mainly due to drug related crime.
mark says:
So make your solution is to make hard drugs stronger and easier to buy. That would be a moral disaster, a sizeable fraction of the population would turn into self-centred zombies. Way to go for moral progress.
mark says:
What rubbish. Syd Barrett, Janis Joplin, Syd Vicious, Jim Morrison did not exactly “live long and productive lives”. As a recent report unsurprisingly concluded, they live fast and they die young.
As if rock stars should be the role models for society. They are freaks. It is madness to base normal social policy on the lifestyles of deviants, no matter how successful.
The basic point to remember is the interaction of drugs with the vulnerable: kids and minorities. A conservative parent is one who gets mugged by the reality of bringing up children in a neighbourhood where drugs are rife.
MOre generally, does mark think food is going to be put on the table and bridges will stand if truck drivers, farmers, engineers are all high on dope? You live in a cocooned, insulated unreal world. It might help if you stopped being “enamoured…with psy-trance movements”.
mark says:
Thanks to Howard’s War on Drugs and Border Security. WHich mark wants to stop.
mark says:
Yes and drug addicts really do know everything worthwhile to know about drugs. No wonder the term “liberal” is a term of abuse in the US.
Jack, that was another Mark who made those comments you’re quoting. So I don’t think you should conflate his views with mine, as you appear to be doing, though he may well also share an opposition to Howard’s policies!
So I gather Jack you’re no longer quite as enamored of your beautiful losers as you used to be?
And if you scroll down that linked thread folks, you’ll find Jack engaging in more tireless self-promotion and ad hominen arguements and praising two musicians that have admitted to using illegal hard drugs without major regrets and surviving quite well now.
What crap. Where do people get this nonsense from? How many people read this shooting-from-the-hip bullshit as fact? No grower with an IQ above room temperature in Celsius would ever muck around with grafting cannabis. Why would you piss around with a process that takes a couple of weeks and may or may not work when it only takes 8wks in sum to flower a cannabis plant? If a strain didn’t develop good roots, a grower wouldn’t try to raise more than one copy. The notion that a plant is so inbred it won’t form roots is fully ridiculous. FDB, are you on Johnny Howard’s ‘Tough On Drugs’ payroll, spreading disinfo for fun and profit?
No… resin trichomes are NOT ‘virtually pure THC.’ They’re about 20% THC on a really good day.
You can snort trichomes, but don’t expect to get more than a sneeze out of it. THC must first be heated before it is psychoactive. There’s no alkaloids in cannabis, crystallised or otherwise. If it’s crystallised alkaloids you want, go find a nervous-looking Bolivian. …And ‘stigmas?’ Don’t you mean calyxes?
While I tend to disagree with SATP’s estimation that only users are qualified to make sensible drugs policies, most non-users haven’t taken the time to acquire the social and pharmacological knowledge needed to make reasonable policies. Even users, as is made BLOODY obvious by FDB’s ponderous comments, often know either nothing at all or a just lot of myth and half-truths about drugs.
I was under the impression that Andrew Johns was using in part to mitigate against the low cycles of his condition. This is not at all unusual. About 50% of all users have a mental illness. A lot of the discussion has focussed on physiological effects of drugs. That is a rather reductive approach. Even moderate cannabis use can have very negative impacts upon work and family relationships. This doesn’t mean that Howards policies are right. They are rubbish. But there is a reason why the alternative approaches, favoured by people who work in the area are called “harm minimisation”. Countering the worthless Howard way by denying there is harm is also rubbish.
Pleeeeze indeed. Your little tirade exposes nothing but your own ignorance. The notion that a plant is so inbred that it won’t form “proper roots and (has) to be grafted to get a decent yield” (which is what I said) is not “fully ridiculous” – it is in point of fact the whole basis of grafting when and wherever grafting occurs. The entire stone fruit industry, for example. You’re foaming at the mouth with ignorance. Hilarious!
If a strain doesn’t develop good roots, you grow one or two and then either do a simple clone of a short section of branch or a tricky tissue culture of any little bunch of cells. Then you graft to a good honest stem with root system. It doesn’t even have to be cannabis – hops work well too.
Why do it? If you’d smoked the product you wouldn’t be asking that question. Trust me.
This is just completely wrong. Have you heard of people eating cannabis?
Okay, my mistake. THC is not an alkaloid (actually I never said it was, but that is what I meant) but you’re wrong too, in that there are plenty of alkaloids in cannabis. And when dry and cool THC is indeed in crystalline form.
No, I meant what I said. Funny that. Look it up, genius. The calyx contains the ovaries, and the two white, then reddish-brown protuberances from each calyx are the stigmas.
Really, have a think or a read before you go off so gloriously half cocked next time.
Regarding Andrew Johns and his bipolar diagnosis, I came across an interesting (but long) article by Aaron Darc here
Darc questions the diagnosis from both his experiences of drug taking and his training in psychology, and though I think his reasoning on whether Johns actually has bipolar might be informed by some deeply subjective positionings of his own and a certain bias which stems from his suspicions of the diagnosis on a biological basis, it makes for some compelling reading. It is compelling I think because it is punctuated with Darc’s own observations of John’s behaviours in nightclubs and finally, with his own violent schoolyard memories of Johns and his brother. In fact I wonder why its on the net at all, given how explosive it is. It paints a very different picture of Andrew Johns that the ones offered in the media.
And the evidence for that is?
Not really true. There are three reasons for grafting fruit trees. The first is to reduce the time taken for the plant to start producing commercial quantities. Second is to preserve the strain (very important, especially with crops like apples, which have an extremely high variability if reproduced sexually). And third is to improve the quality of the rootstock.
However, the third reason is not because the plant is so ‘inbred’ that it won’t form good roots. It is because of naturally differing levels of susceptibility to root diseases in different strains. This is largely only a problem because of modern monocultural farming practices, and growing species out of their natural range. It has nothing to do with inbreeding.
Inbreeding is not a major issue in either commercial fruit trees or cannabis. The reason roots don’t form in a cannabis plant is nearly always due to poor growing practices, including the temperature and pH of the growing medium, and insufficient nutrients.
Yes Hilker, of course I exaggerated the case.
There is also the use of grafting simply because different diseases or soil/water conditions prevail in the area where a strain is bred from where it’s to be grown.
I was just a tad annoyed at someone second-guessing what I’ve seen with my own eyes (in a near-abusive and certainly dismissive tone), and basing it all on a clearly ignorant understanding of horticulture. And a massive underestimation of the determination of some weed growers to make the strongest stuff they can.
Yes, and if you cross strains purely on the basis of potency this can entrench the trait.
Inbreeding [or selective breeding] for potency can have all kinds of unintended effects on physiology, and grafting is one way around some of them. When you’re creating wacky hybrids of already highly selected strains, for the sole aim of creating the maximum potency possible, you turn up some pretty sickly specimens, which when grafted to a “healthier” rootstock will give you a big yield of ludicrous weed that you couldn’t get by trying to just grow the strong stuff from the soil up. That was what I should have limited myself to saying but I got cross because it’s so freaking obvious.
Various longitudinal studies eg David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, Nicola Swain-Campbell (2002) Cannabis use and psychosocial adjustment in adolescence and young adulthood Addiction 97 (9), 1123–1135.
So Jack says:
in order to support his arguments in favour of prohibition of (some) drugs (and not others).
He has just defeated his own argument, then, drugs should be freed from the legal framework that makes it impossible for individuals to make a truly free truly informed decision about whether or not to use them. And if they can’t make a decision on this basis – truly free, truly informed – then they are being coerced. It is this coercion that is truly immoral.
Cheers…
Hilker – Not being snarky – I just used “dust’ coz of the preceding. Of course it is resin, the exudation once separated, physically or otherwise, from the producing pores. I always had a horror of friends offering me ‘oil’ in the 70s because many of the nastier attempts at ‘hash oil’ production used solvents as you listed which is why i thought it worth mentioning the ‘freezolator’ method, simple, pure & clean, no nasty traces.
Our dear Customs service vigilantly seizes books or equipment intended for this purpose, as well as academic works on E (they have a special subsection in the Customs Regs 1996) – they even tried to seize Alfred McCoy’s heroin classic (in the 80s) but the importer had guts and they backed down.
Jack,
Your comments simply indicate that you know nothing of me or my background. You should get off your high horse and ask me questions instead of making assumptions.
Your ugly assertion is incorrect. I come from a world of alcoholics and gamblers; the preferred psychoactives of the legal class.
“Soft” drugs like alcohol are also toxic poisons which destroy the body, mind and soul. I have a great deal of experience in this area from which to draw. But you already have your opinion of me, no amount of rational discourse is likely to change your mind.
That’s always the case with the Strocchiverse.
Anyhoo, I am out on the tiles tonight, thinking of y’all. Party On Luvvies!
Su. Thanks for the reference.
But with respect, your claim was that “Even moderate cannabis use can have very negative impacts upon work and family relationships.”
That is a causal claim about strong adverse effects.
Well, that is not what that paper states. It found that “Cannabis use, and particularly regular or heavy use, was associated with increased rates of a range of adjustment problems in adolescence/ young adulthood-other illicit drug use, crime, depression and suicidal behaviours-with these adverse effects being most evident for school-aged regular users.”
I don’t have access to the full paper, but the important facts in the abstract are that the study looked at teenagers, and the effect was both dose and age related.
It is not reasonable to extrapolate these findings to the general population, teenagers (and children generally) are a special case. Their neurological system is still developing and is highly sensitive to external influences, including drugs of any kind, legal/illegal or recreational/pharmaceutical. They should not take any recreational drugs, and only the absolute minimum necessary of pharmaceutical drugs (many of which have far worse potential adverse effects than cannabis), and no serious researcher or policy maker is advocating otherwise.
This ties in with the age-related finding that some of the effects (but not including depression) were more pronounced in younger users.
As to the dose related evidence: Well, the paper speaks for itself. They really only found an association with regular and heavy use, not moderate use. (And it is not clear from the abstract how frequent ‘regular’ use actually is. Once a month is ‘regular’, but of no consequence.) It is already well established that heavy use of any recreational drug is going to be problematic, often seriously. So there is nothing new here.
Furthermore, another study found that “there was evidence of an interactive relationship in which suicidal behaviour in adolescence was associated with increased risks of later substance use disorders in females but not males.” So the causal direction is not necessarily from drug use to psycho-social dysfunction, it can be the other way around, for females at least. (Though, of course, heavy drug use can seriously exacerbate pre-existing problems.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=16045065&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstractPlus
It is also well known to be difficult to get reliable evidence about both drug use, and various psycho-social factors influencing drug-taking behaviour.
Lastly, statistically significant findings are not always strong findings and don’t necessarily mean much in practical terms. All it means is the chance of a link is better than random, not that it is causal, strong or important. Personally, I take the 0.05 P value cut-off with a grain of salt, it is only the minimum standard, and not a particularly strong one. All it says to me is that this finding justifies further investigation, not that it is either unquestionably true or important. I prefer P values of 0.01 or less.
This study does not show that moderate cannabis use has a strong causal link to substantial adverse effects on work and social relationships.
I repeat what I said back up the thread. With the exception of a possible and modest link to triggering/exacerbating schizophrenia in people already predisposed to it, there is no solid evidence linking low-moderate cannabis use with any serious health (including social/work) problems. And plenty of people have tried to find it. What is interesting is the lack of any clear, strong association, despite attempts to find it. What the evidence does show is that low-moderate use of cannabis (and alcohol) is largely benign, and maybe even be slightly beneficial.
I am not advocating cannabis use. I don’t use myself, and haven’t for many years. But neither am I against low-moderate use. I think there is way too much hysteria about cannabis, and it is science that should decide what is the best response, not self-serving moralistic control-freak political rhetoric, (and I am looking straight at you, Christopher Pyne).
(I am not accusing you of that, Su.)
Mick Strummer on 5 September 2007 at 5:58 pm
You are confusing the increased external costs (penalties, risk premiums etc) associated with a making a free choice under a prohibitionist regime with the organic power of making a free choice.
I am saying that hard drug usage disables and degrades our moral powers by impairing consciousness and inhibiting free will. This destroys the very core of our humanity.
To be sure external coercion also constrains freedom. But it does not destroy the soul.
Mark (the other Mark) on 8 September 2007 at 6:47 pm
I apologise for confusing Mark (the other Mark) with Mark (the owner of this blog).
I do not apologise for asserting that “the other Mark” is cocooned from the world of illegal hard drugs. You are ignorant and cocooned from the ugly world of hard drugs until it is your unpleasant duty to revive people who have fallen, with a sickening thud, to the floor of your kitchen and are slowly turning blue.
Mark (the other Mark) says:
I am saying that sustained abuse of any addictive toxic drug is immoral, whether it is legal or illegal. Alcholism is therefore immoral, or at least degrading to the moral faculty. Gambling is not drug abuse, but is pretty clearly a bad-habit forming activity.
Your experience with legal toxicities is hard won and to be respected. I am surprised and saddened that you are prepared to waste it by offering such a shoddy apologia for illegal toxicities.
Kim on 8 September 2007 at 6:56 pm
That is blatantly false on the face of it. If I make a blog blunder or false statement I always try to rectify or make redress at the earliest opportunity.
In any case the “Strocchiverse” trope is looking a little thread-bare and shop-worn these days, especially coming from a purveyor of second-hand ideas. A while back I challenged you (and the original Mark) to stack up your psephologic predictions against mine. I note that there has been stony silence from your quarter for quite a while on that score.
Any fool can make correct re-dictions. That is what you spend a lot of time doing. It is a form of ideological comfort treatment that does not add to knowledge.
The test of a savvy commentator is to make correct pre-dictions. The way to make the intellectual cut is to put predictive runs on the board.
My intellectual world model, at least so far as AUS politics is concerned, is doing very nicely, thankyou very much. Way back in mid 2006 I predicted that Howard would stay in his role as party leader and that he would lose the 2007 election.
If you cannot put up on this score then my advice to you is to shut up with the “Strocchiverse” canard. You dont score any points by trying to tamper with the score board.
Jack, the reason why I refrain from “pre-dictions” on election results is that they’re unrepeatable events. We’ve had a long discussion about epistemology and social science before, the result of which was that you just repeat endlessly what you said at the start without taking any account of the points made (except to refute them by switching your ground as necessary).
That’s why I rarely reply to your comments now.
But by way of illustration: in the absence of intelligence data, it would have been impossible to predict s11 (and even then exceptionally difficult). However, it could have, and was predicted that something might occur in a fairly indefinite time frame. Similar predictions since are unfalsifiable as they’re far too imprecise (though false so far).
Your “prediction” that Howard will lose the election is nothing to crow about. Anyone could have seen it coming if they’d been paying attention and disregarding most of the media spin. But in and of itself it tells us nothing much useful – and certainly doesn’t “prove” your eccentric “theories” about wets and dries. Have a look at the regression equations in the Crosby/Textor polling – nothing you bang on about is born out in terms of variables influencing the vote. In any case, all that tells us is about the state of opinion at the time the poll was taken. Analysis of election results in a scientific sense must be post-hoc as the lead up to an election is a dynamic and fluid period.
Mark is right.
This stuff is guesswork rather than science.