Legalizing marijuana a good idea
Legalizing marijuana a good idea
This is in response to Mr. Simmons’ letter of Feb. 22. Legalizing recreational marijuana will do nothing to our citizens and youth that they aren’t experiencing right now, when it’s supposed to be illegal. I have been using marijuana most of my adult life, aside from my 30 years in law enforcement and government security. Not too good mix there. But I was happy to take it back up after I retired. On the job, I’ve seen what havoc alcohol wrecks in our community, our country, and if someone wanted to make that illegal, I’d be the first one standing behind them. So I can say from what I’ve seen in my years as a cop and my own personal experience, marijuana is not the demon some folks are still trying to make it.
I am a lady of senior years and use ‘medical’ marijuana for the normal ills of the 70ish folks. It’s a Godsend for my arthritis and anxiety. So I can state for a fact — one that I’m sure every law-enforcement officer on Kauai would agree with — that one can buy pakalolo in any park and on almost any beach on the island, from Polihale to Ke‘e. Do folks think our one dispensary is ‘serving’ all of the island’s medical needs? Sorry, but when you have to drive 35 miles to pay at LEAST 2 times as much for marijuana that is half as good as you can get it from a private grower, then I imagine you can see that legalization is nothing but words. It is available everywhere and way too easy for kids to get. I draw the line there. Children in school have developing minds and don’t need something that could harm them or take away what little motivation they already have to go to school and work hard to become something. But legalizing it won’t change things for them. What it ‘could’ do is let law enforcement concentrate on where the kids are getting the dope and bust them! Legalizing something takes it out of the hands of the street dealers who are all mostly bad news (not the private growers). And Hawaii needs the tax money, which would be a LOT to help finance the messes the state has gotten themselves into with white elephants like the Honolulu rail. And our taxes would maybe not go down, but they wouldn’t need to be raised so often.
Legalization will not contribute to more pot smoking. If, like I, folks want to be legal, $150 and a couple of lies and they are now legal for ‘medical’ marijuana. Legalization will help put the street dealers and the ‘pot’ docs out of business, thus cleaning up our island, not hurting it. And using your excuse as a lady ‘billowing’ pot out her window and inviting strangers to her home to smoke with her and getting ripped off? How would legalization stop that? Idiots will always be idiots. If you want a villain to fight, sir, just look at all the folks killed recently by drunk — not high — drivers. That, and hard drugs are what is tearing our communities apart. Not marijuana.
Susan Straight, Waimea
The jazz cabbage turns one’s brain to mush. A clear example would be this letter.
And yet you’re still able to articulate and express yourself in a manner that is acceptable to many people. How nice. What is your point? There is still the negative effects to smoking pot. Like being stoned or just not being aware where you are. Then comes the tough part, this leads to slow death. Finally, death. Because the people who use pot actually decline sociable attributes, then they decline any involvement with people, finally they go into that zone, and leads to eventual death. Because they know it all, they decline friends, which leads to anti-social life behavior, and eventual death. Suicide, or other crimes whereby a cop can just kill them rather than arrest them for the crime.
The state (all governments), by making a substance, like marijuana, illegal is arrogantly, often violently, asserting it has a property right in your body. This is contrary to individual liberty where the essence is that you own your own body…period.
RG DeSoto
Good try Susan! It’s obvious you want MJ legal, the problem is, you’ve been a little to obvious in your bias over facts literary effort? Weed smoking does indeed go up after legalization, more children at younger ages have better access and are “illegally” using, and traffic accidents increase. There are health challenges for the lungs of all who partake, and smoking weed does indeed decrease productivity of the user. Not good for the economy outside of the drug business, and labor force productivity goes down. No matter how much you think you know, and “want” something to be true, does not make it so!
MJ Gordo? Jack Webb must be your hero.
Not unlike right-wing fever dreams, eh, Gordy?
Well written and rings true. Mahalo.
Aloha Kakou and Officer Striaght,
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, medicines, chemicals added to our foods, agriculture chemicals put on, or sprayed on crops, chemicals put in animal foods, chemicals injected into livestock of all kinds, growth hormones, the list is endless…this is mankind gone wild matched by nature on the opposite side of the same coin…Cancer, cancer, and more cancer, heart disease , stroke, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and profit profit profit for all the top end people…but sadly not a natural life for the users, takers, and believers…just a meaningless modern life in the rat race to support the ultra lifestyles of the rich and famous. And remember your Blind Faith in these substances starts with your, when too young to disbelieve…Blind Faith in Santa Claus…and that is why they say “horse on you…!”.
If you were educated about your body the only thing you’d want to inhale is pollution free pure air, found occasionally on the whatever current windward side of the island, though south east winds may carry Honolulu’s air pollution our way…and as to the other poisons mentioned above, they are your choice…remember too, FREEDOM OF CHOICE can be costly.
It’s been said before, MARIJUANA makes ya stupid…you’d have to be stupid to poison your own lungs’ “alveoli sacs”, look them up, they’re located in your lungs excreting your body’s waste product gasses for intended pure oxygen inhaled into your lungs. If you look them up and read about them you will be less stupid…or don’t and be more stupid-less resistant if you still smoke more pakalolo…and even smarter if you can figure out that last phrase…!
Smoking pot is an escape from reality, if you can’t face reality on Kauai you need a reality tune-up because Kauai may be the most real place on earth.
Mahalo
Charles
Charles, maybe when you are 70 and in pain and refuse to use the opioids that are given out freely by well meaning doctors, you might see the benefits. And as for smoking it, I don’t. Vaporization is a clean, non-smelly way to and not hard on the lungs. I know because I used to smoke cigarettes, and THEY almost killed me. Now I only vaporize pakalolo, and make marijuana capsules at home, and it makes my restricted life much more active. Without it, I wouldn’t walk to the beach, or take part in other physical activities that cause me pain just from moving.
Yes, this is a volatile subject. But I can guarantee legalization is going to happen – the bumbling bureaucrats in Honolulu with see the monetary advantages of it and to heck with whether it’s good or bad for people – it will get legalized. How else are they going to bail themselves out of this bottomless pit call ‘Rail’?
Oh, and Gordon? I’ve read your letters for 15 years and highly respect your opinions. Just please throw away that copy of ‘Reefer Madness’ you have stashed away somewhere. They actually lie in that little movie, you know. Sit down and talk face to face with folks our age who find great comfort from pot in our ‘golden’ years. You might be surprised at what you learn. No disrespect intended.
Susan, maybe we should make marijuana legal for anyone over age 60 or some age like that. I have never tried marijuana, nor have I studied it extensively, but I am somewhat of a libertarian and I also believe that the drugs that doctors are currently prescribing are often expensive, addictive, and destructive. I think that when people reach retirement age, pain management becomes a greater issue, while productivity may not be as important as it once was. That said, I am not encouraging anyone should just coast when they get older. I think we owe it to our family, society, God and ourselves to be as productive as possible until we die.
Susan, what do you think about legalizing it for older people?
This says it all:https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-addiction/201807/is-marijuana-gateway-drug
Charles, usually I support your ideas in these comments…however this time you missed the mark!
Thc has tremendous medicinal value for many people. By the way, it can be used in tincture form to prevent injury to lungs. Valuable for epilepsy, nausea associated with cancer tx.,, PTSD, etc.
Aloha Kakou and Susan and Ruthann,
…of course I realize that ‘lolo is a lesser of harm than so much other medical routes…Let me say that pain is an effect and always has an underlying cause, often from causes still effecting oneself when decades ahead, but long forgotten when they were originally causing…which swings us around to legalization…naivety smokes it now and especially speaking of the youthful stoners today, and decades later the effects come on from chronic, long term, causative use; and those long term users who themselves perpetuated the ‘lolo’s drug content use effect on themself, for relief of new pain effects now decades later and are stoned from reality for decades and not experiencing their rightful and true path of life’s experience, and may well shorten their optimal time of longevity on earth, and that limited time may include uncomfortable if not horrific pain, suffering, and or disease relieved now only by what you say, that is, the opiates, which are also a true departure from reality.
How would you like to get to the end of your life and realize you weren’t there for most of it.
As an enclosed, quasi isolated community, Kaua’i, we as a separate societal entity have the unique opportunity to demand more from our elected leaders; demanding more information on Health, and roads, parks, and rest rooms, street drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth, domestic violence, the contents of elementary and secondary education that are at least in part failing the youth who are being caught up in this drug experience, demanding opportunity as a civilian, demanding a meaningful job, a home of your home.
Legalizing “Stone tools” serves to perpetuate the Big Gov’t, Big,
Food, Corps, Pharma, Landowners, Disease Care, offering you little of what would allow you to experience your potential.
Get legally stoned while you are being laughed at and losing out.
Be stoned while,you are forced to take the experimental drugs, and in sickness only being provided experimental,drugs with side effects Saran could not dream up.
And you want to be stoned? Tighten the chains and call it FREEDOM..
We against this legalization are not so much against it for you the elderly and your want of freedom of your body, but while you holler FREEDOM, as did Martin, the MLK-Man, you stand back under the swaying palms in the gentle cool breeze of a fresh Tradewind, allowing the System you mentally rebel against by your use of ‘lolo, to force famlies to give up theirs and their child’s freedom denied to protect their own bodies from mandatory profit driven vaccines, just one of which MMR has been declared by the Federal Court to cause brain damage in children causing Autism, and so far $4 Billion in settlement payment to parents of the victim children. Autism, epidemic proportions the Causative factor of MMR, Effecting 1 in 75 youngsters today. WHEN ONLY A FEW GENERATIONS BACK MEASLES , MUMPS ETC, WERE MERE CHILDHOOD DISEASES OFFERING EXPOSURENTHST BESTOWED LIFELONG IMMUNITY. whose side was Dylan in when he naively said Everbody Must Get Stoned…for,what to let government walk all over you while you are getting stoned.
How about you,get stoned but no more FREE STUFF.
And who will protect these Autistic children, when they are adults, and when the statistics worsen who will carry on the work of thosemjnable tomwork, who will pay the taxes, who will protect our nation from proven enemies?
Who will be the Autism victims, joining hands with the stoned on ‘lolo and smack, crack, and meth?
Who will you rely on, the alkies…? The WALL JUMPERS…? The stoners…?
Roll back the drugs, the medicines, the chemicals and the petrochemicals…let’s rely on NATURE instead, SHE’s carried us through since time began.
Charlie
The writing is in the wall, chemicals, petrochemicals, and the and the 1 stone from reality?
We ain’t talking about a side step to the side of reality, we’re talking a nation following the path of least resistance, the road ahead requires serious and strong workers…! Does,dope providemthst..NOPE…ON Dope…! ! !
Well, we’ve seen the initial comments now and John Clayton has offered the reality of MJ use. Thank you John! :https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-addiction/201807/is-marijuana-gateway-drug In any “Society” where people and the quality of life directly depends on relationships and working together, the idea of altering the brain in a feel good direction over focus, superior reflexes, better memory, and more awareness of what’s happening around you is not a good idea! The fact that we have inarguable proof that pot smoking at an early age affects IQ, and everything else in a young person’s life negatively, is all the proof we need. Legalization and recreational use of any drug is a fools game!
SO much ignorance in some of these comments!!
Susan, thanks for the great letter!! It’s great to hear the perspective of an older, mature, accomplished adult. Your experience in law enforcement adds to the competency and relevance of your point of view and helps to sway negative and ignorant biases.
HOW are we living in this day and age, with the opioid crisis wreaking havoc on millions of lives, still criminalizing a PLANT whose medicinal and economical value FAR outweighs any potential adverse effects, most of which are fictitious or only hypothesized. There are so many other, more pressing issues than criminalizing a plant, that we should be spending time, effort and money on.
With that said, Chimknee’s comment is one of the stupidest I’ve read in a long time, even for him. Dude, get off your high horse. Your letters are so annoyingly obnoxious. We get it, your organic, vegan, zen lifestyle makes you instantly better and smarter than everybody else. Keep living in your “reality” while the rest of us idiots dig ourselves into an early grave with our devil-weed and red meat. You might as well pack up and move off-grid while you’re at it.
One day I could see I had to face reality and give up something to continue reality.
It was either give up Freedom pf Speech…or the Red Meat Weed Devil…I chose the Path of Leadt Resistance. Mahalo for your understanding my intent and success was in shaking your tree…whoosh…!!!