Uh oh, stoners: Even synthetic marijuana is getting banned

By Dan Calabrese - The North Star National

I guess it’s time for legions of marijuana smokers to descend upon the state capital in Missouri, calling for legislators to die in a fire and declaring them to be dickheads and the Antichrist. Because more of their chemical-induced fun has just been taken away.

Missouri has now become the fifth state to ban a sort of synthetic marijuana called K2, which looks a lot like incense and which you could heretofore purchase at gas stations and the like.

Your reason for living.

The appeal of K2 is that it mimics the high you get from smoking pot, but doesn’t show up on any drug tests, so you can continue to spend your life in a stupor without your employer noticing – except for the fact that your reports read like lyrics from a Pink Floyd album.

Poor dears. Every time someone points out negative information about marijuana, or even a fake version thereof, they act as though their child has been kidnapped. I write columns on this page about everything from economics to foreign policy and all points in between.

On any other topic, I’ll get a handful of comments, many of which disagree and almost all of which calmly and rationally explain where, in the opinion of the reader, I’ve gone wrong.

When I write about marijuana, I easily get 10 to 20 times the comments I get on any other subject, and the comments are nothing if not colorful. Here are a few choice snippets from comments on my column last Thursday regarding a possible link between pot-smoking and bipolar-related psychosis:

- A false prophet and an anti-christ. That is what you are.

- die in a fire, mr Dan Calabrese, fucking little pig

- Unamused and disgusted that you would take the government coin to peddle political piddle. (I’m getting government money for writing this? When? – DC)

- Please stop wasting valuable paper you hack!!

- what a twat,really what a complete dickhead,

- Dan Calabrese have you had your mental state evaluated by an upstanding psychiatrist lately?

- What a fucking asshole!!!..

- Fuck you.

Dude. And it was my understanding that the weed makes you mellow. Guess not.

To be fair, there were some more substantive arguments offered, and you can see the whole thread here. But everyone danced around the point. I noted one study that indicated theremight be a causal connection between pot-smoking and eventual psychosis, and pointed out that it’s stupid to risk it because no oneneeds to get stoned – when God has already put the natural chemicals into your body that allow you to enjoy life to the fullest without introducing any foreign ones.

Pot smokers are determined to deny any possible negative effect, no matter how plausible, because they are bound and determined to keep getting stoned. They. Cannot. Stop. It will ruin their lives.

How dumb are pot smokers? One guy on Facebook actually compared the ingestion of THC to get him high to reading books. And of course, everyone tells me I have no right to express an opinion about it if I’ve never actually tried it – as if getting stoned gives you all the information you need about its long-term health effects.

Stop any drunk driver on New Years Eve and ask him about cirrhosis of the liver. I’m sure he’ll be an expert! At least if you think like a pot-smoker thinks.

There is a reason pot-smokers direct all this anger at me every time I write about their cherished weed: Although they deny it, they are addicted – psychologically if not physically, and quite possibly both. A few of them even go so far as to admit it, telling how smoking pot is their method for coping with life.

This is why pot-smokers flood my comment section with this sort of stuff every time I write on the subject. This is why they tell me on “cannabis forums” to “eat your own shit,” which is a funny comment coming from a pot-smoker, who is always insisting pot is great because it’s from nature. Dude. So is shit. You go first.

You react with great hysteria when someone threatens the thing without which you have decided you cannot live. You regard the carrier of this message as a mortal enemy who must be destroyed at all costs. If you depend on your freedom to get stoned in order to make it through life, you cannot – cannot – stand by while anyone points out the potential problems associated with what you’re doing.

You will come up with nullification arguments to try to silence this information.No one who hasn’t tried it can say anything! Thus, everyone but pot-smokers are eliminated from the discussion. Nice try, Arlo.

Look, I realize that the blowback against the war on drugs the past 20 years or so has been fierce, and somewhat effective. So many people refuse to deal with the realities of life, the pot-smoking population has grown exponentially, which I guess is why I get five or six comments when I write about taxes but 50 to 100 when I write about this.

But just because growing numbers of people believe something – and dosomething – doesn’t mean they’re right. It might just mean that society is spiraling out of control as people abandon all pretense of self-restraint and give themselves over to every conceivable indulgence.

Perhaps the same willful denial that has led the nation to the brink of fiscal calamity is enabling these people to wreak havoc on the natural chemicals in their brain without giving a thought to the long-term effects.

And even if I one day find myself as a minority of one, I really don’t care. When information comes out about the dangers of marijuana smoking, I will tell you about them, and the inevitable comments will be predictable.

If you are bound and determined to go through life stupefied, I can’t stop you. But I am bound and determined to talk about the price you and others are liable to pay for your rejection of sound, sobriety. And you can’t stop me either.

Have at it, stoners.