Showing posts with label The Straight Dope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Straight Dope. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Marijuana: Medicine or Poison?

Wisdom Quarterly
Celebrated in the media, frowned on by cops (on duty), abused by the public, bemoaned by collaterally damaged victims of others' abuse... pot is funny; that doesn't make it healthy. How to quit pot addiction

The Buddha did NOT smoke marijuana, survive on hemp seeds, or advocate the consumption of any intoxicant, no matter what Cypress Hill or hempsters suggest. (Hemp good, drug harmful).

On the contrary, the fifth precept runs: "I undertake to abstain from consuming intoxicants that occasion heedlessness." Laying around sinking like a stone instead of advancing is spoken of as a terrible thing in the Advice to Householders.

In fact, he warned that "There are, young householder, six miserable consequences to indulging in intoxicants that occasion heedlessness: loss of wealth, increase in quarrels, susceptibility to disease, loss of reputation, indecent exposure, and weakened intellect" (Sigalovada Sutra).

If people get stoned, that's on them. The crime is thinking, saying, or acting as if the Buddha is applauding or winking.
  • Wisdom Quarterly's BOTTOM LINE: We don't care if you smoke it, but don't allow yourself to be deluded into thinking it's a "Buddhist" thing to do. (If you "have" to have it, note what the HHC says is good about it*).

Marijuana is UNSAFE
Sam de Brito (smh.com.au)
Before we answer this, let me say I've smoked more dope than 95 per cent of readers, guaranteed. For close to 20 years I inhaled leaf, tip, buds, bush heads, hydro, chocolate "Buddha," sinsemilla [seedless], Mexican dirt weed, power skunk, Maui wowie, black hash, brown hash, green hash, hash oil, the putty out of downpipes... even ground up seeds and stems.

I've cooked with pot, eaten it [along with countless munchies] in cakes, brownies, banana bread, and straight off the plant. I've drunk it in thick shakes and smoothies, teas, bong water and, once, smeared resin on my eyeballs because someone told me it would get me stoned. (It didn't work).

I've grown it, stolen in, given it away, traded it for a wetsuit, even pretended it was parsley and kangaroo scat when selling it. So please don't tell me I'm anti-dope.

I just reckon it's time that people, in an attempt to sound enlightened, stop telling the world that "marijuana is harmless [or marijuana is healthy]." Anyone who's been around it for long enough knows that's not true.

I do not know whether others have ever heard voices after taking drugs. But I have, several times, and it used to be what I paid good money for. The problem was, as my drug career deepened and lengthened, those pesky head noises would appear after just one cone of hydro (hydroponically-grown). And there's the rub.

Hydro-marijuana is everywhere nowadays. It's the dope of choice for younger smokers, because nothing else delivers the punch and the value for money like a knuckle of super-sticky buds out of some biker's basement grow-room.

If one examines a hydro set-up, it is obvious they get hot and humid. Thus they are a magnet for every type of bug and insect within a mile. This is why a lot of growers hit their plants with a cocktail of pesticides and fungicides that make Agent Orange look like asthma medicine.

This means the plants, and the buds kids smoke, are also chock full of those pesticides. This is in addition to chemical fertilizers chosen by growers whose knowledge of chemicals and their effect on the human brain is limited to nonexistent. More

Treatment
The negative effects of marijuana addiction will impact an individual physically, emotionally, psychologically, and socially, causing the person's life to be unproductive and even disconcerting. Fortunately, addiction treatment can help establish energy and progress to individuals robbed of life by marijuana addiction. There is a reason why the individual smokes. And all of those reasons rolled up into one do change the fact that they experience harm as a result. It is not enough to switch addictions. More

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Does "Monopoly" teach Capitalism?

The Straight Dope
Was Monopoly originally meant to teach people about the evils of capitalism?
Dear Cecil: I heard the original Monopoly game, before Parker Brothers took it over, was designed to teach people how broken capitalism is. Is that true? — Matt, Whitehorse, Yukon

Cecil replies: Yes, it's more or less true, although you have to ask: who needs a game to understand how screwed up capitalism is when all you have to do is read the news?

Be that as it may, I convened the Straight Dope staff to play several versions of proto-Monopoly. Their review: nothing like the socialists to make the capitalists look good. The earliest recognizable version of what we know as Monopoly was patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904. The Landlord’s Game, as she called it, featured a board with the familiar circuit of increasingly pricey neighborhoods interspersed with railroads and utilities.

At three of the corners were Go to Jail, Public Park (the ancestral version of Free Parking), and the Jail itself. The fourth corner, however, wasn’t labeled “Go” but instead bore a drawing of the globe encircled by the lofty words “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.”

Translation: you got a hundred bucks. Nonetheless you realize: someone here has an agenda. The story goes that Magie intended her game to be a teaching tool about the injustices of capitalism. She was a fan of the theories of political economist Henry George, who thought landlords were parasites and advocated a "single tax" on them to replace all other taxes. More