[Redway]

Originally Posted by Parmy

How many has it spiralled into a world of depression, suicide or dependency...?


What would the age limit be?

Less than alcohol. Alcohol is objectively a much worse drug than cannabis, whether it suits people individually and their personal biases to say it or not. That’s just a fact. There’s no reason in the world for cannabis to be illegal when poison in a bottle (ethanol) is perfectly legal, and still manages to be a driving cause of incarceration, rape, liver-diseases, death and violence even when legally regulated. Cannabis, even on the raggedy-est of black markets (so long as it’s not spiced), has never killed anyone. Just say weed messed you up personally and leave it there. You rode the boat on rocky shores, probably for the wrong reasons and almost certainly without the likes of CBD alongside to round off the edges, and puked. That’s it. For every anecdote like that there are a trillion of alcohol actively ruining people’s lives, the drinker themselves and the people around them. There’s no genuine competition.

A lot of issues that unmitigated THC gives people are because we don’t educate people towards responsible, healthier, balanced use. That’s a side-effect of illegality and ignorance, not another reason to keep it illegal. Pointing that out doesn’t make you a hapless stoner or even necessarily someone who takes so much as a sip of CBD-chamomile tea, just like not wanting a return to alcohol-prohibition (ala 1920s-America) doesn’t make you a raging gutter-alkie who uses vodka for mouthwash. You might likewise be teetotal altogether. Either way, cutting through all-that just means you’re not blinded by bias, hypocrisy and culturally inertia. Alcohol is a hard drug and group-1 carcinogen that causes more harm, destruction, death and ruined lives than most other drugs put together. It just gets a free pass because it’s universally legal and happens to be deeply culturally embedded, so people are more inclined to turn a blind eye and make excuses for it. But that doesn’t have to be you or anyone-else, wherever you sit on the spectrum of consumption of any of these substances. You might be completely abstinent, you might be an occasional and highly curated user, you might be more dependent but still not blinded to the universal truth of it-all.

In any case, illegality reduces education, quality control and understanding of balance. Many other corners of the world know that now and still aren’t nations of monged-out zombies, but the U.K. officially lags way, way behind and remains obsessively and hypocritically alcohol-forward and very in-your-face about it, because it’s just everywhere. That doesn’t help anyone. Is cannabis harmless? Is it a good idea to use it every day if you’re not taking it medicinally? No. It just isn’t worse than alcohol, and to insist otherwise is just-plain hypocrisy.