Doug Benson Joins the Smoking Circle

[jed]

Who's Doug Benson?

That girl is right, it is all about myspace.

[Stan]

Yeah but it's tough to swallow that your habit of choice, if you so choose to have one, is illegal when there's something out there that is way more dangerous, kills more people every year, and breaks up families the way alcohol does. There is no rational reason as to why pot is illegal... someone just decided to label it a "controlled substance".

 There's a very good reason marijuana was made illegal, Erika: Money

In the mid 1930s machinery was perfected that would allow the hemp fiber to be more easily and economically seperated from the plant. This meant paper, clothing and other manufactured articles could be produced at prices far more competitive than ever before. This did not sit well with two American giants: William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Corporation. Hearst not only printed newspapers; he made the paper on which to print them. If hemp became the primary source of paper, not only would much of Heart's paper making machinery become obsolete, but the forest he purchased could only be used as backdrops for Marion Davies movies.

 Further:

Dupont, meanwhile, had just perfected a process for making paper from wood pulp (which Hearst would use extensively for years to come). The process, which relied heavily upon DuPont chemicals, was not necessary in manufacturing paper from hemp. Additionally, DuPont had recently taken German patents and perfected the miracle fiber nylon, to be manufactured from coal tar and petroleum products. Inexpensive, readily grown hemp fibers would put a damper on two of DuPont's future money makers, paper production and textiles.
 Make of these facts what you will. One thing is certain: Hearst and DuPont made a fortune thanks to the prohibition on hemp.

 The above quotes are from Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society Peter Williams, Prelude Press 1993, ISBN: 0-931580-53-6

 There's a lot more on the subject in there, but what the hell am I, your personal typist?

[Bryan]

Who's Doug Benson?

He's a pot-centric L.A.-based comedian who you might know from Best Week Ever (if you watched Best Week Ever.) He also seems like a super guy, from what I've heard from him on various podcasts, and read online.

[Sarah]

There's also the view that the oil companies were behind the criminalization of pot.

[TremblingEagle]

Conspiracy theories aside weed can have varying effects on people
for most it seems rather benign but speaking for myself it was a real horror show
I don't know if I'm stating strongly enough how uncomfortable it was for me. I can imagine a few people over the years as sensitive to it as me being enough to give it a bad reputation.

[todd]

Conspiracy theories aside weed can have varying effects on people
for most it seems rather benign but speaking for myself it was a real horror show
I don't know if I'm stating strongly enough how uncomfortable it was for me. I can imagine a few people over the years as sensitive to it as me being enough to give it a bad reputation.

How do you handle other drugs? It sounds like you might be suffering from the disease known only as: "Being a Tremendous Pussy."

[erika]

Heh. I know a lot of people who don't like the effects. It gives them panic attacks, etc. even though they're not prone to that sort of thing regularly.

I also think it has to do with the potency.

That said, if I have more than 2 or 3 vodka drinks I could potentially puke for an hour or so and maybe some more the next day. Certain alcohol has a notoriously bad effect on me, while others can drink it down like water.

[Stan]

 Conspiracy theories, Trembling Eagle? What I posted was conspiracy facts.

 Also, I'm really overusing italics of late.

[erika]

Don't DO that! Folks here do not like even mildly excessive font embellishment.

[TremblingEagle]

Conspiracy theories aside weed can have varying effects on people
for most it seems rather benign but speaking for myself it was a real horror show
I don't know if I'm stating strongly enough how uncomfortable it was for me. I can imagine a few people over the years as sensitive to it as me being enough to give it a bad reputation.

How do you handle other drugs? It sounds like you might be suffering from the disease known only as: "Being a Tremendous Pussy."

Might be a little of that, but only a little.
I drank pretty heavy in my younger days without too many ill effects. Other than that I had such a bad time with weed I never wanted to journey further into narcotics land.

[TremblingEagle]

Heh. I know a lot of people who don't like the effects. It gives them panic attacks, etc. even though they're not prone to that sort of thing regularly.

I also think it has to do with the potency.

That said, if I have more than 2 or 3 vodka drinks I could potentially puke for an hour or so and maybe some more the next day. Certain alcohol has a notoriously bad effect on me, while others can drink it down like water.

I don't remember ever puking from alcohol, I got the body chemistry for drinking definitely not for greens.

[John Junk 2.0]

Has anyone else had visual and/or auditory hallucinations on pot?  Is that just me?  More importantly, was that just PCP in my pot?

[TremblingEagle]

Has anyone else had visual and/or auditory hallucinations on pot?  Is that just me?  More importantly, was that just PCP in my pot?

describe it

[John Junk 2.0]

My auditory hallucination went like this:

I smoked some really strong and scary weed with some people I didn't know in student housing in college.  My roommate was an R.A., and he was a devout Mormon who I suspect was in the closet, but I guess you could call him a metrosexual.  He work CKOne and collected bags from luxury boutiques and hung them in the bathroom as kind of minimal interior design.  So there were Tiffany bags and Ralph Lauren shopping bags hanging in our bathroom.  Did I mention this is at the Maryland Institute College of Art?
Anyway I got stoned with these people who then all went somewhere and left me to my own devices and so I went back to my dorm.  My roommate was in bed, but not asleep.   I think he called his girlfriend, but I started to get hyper-paranoid that he was going to narc me out and get me kicked out of student housing.  I could hear that he was just saying stuff like 'Hey, how's it going?" from the next room, but it's like the letters of the words were switching around like in scrabble and re-combining to read "My roommate is on drugs please come here and arrest him!" --but the scrabble thing is only the way I can conceptualize this experience.  I didn't "see" the words, but I heard them, and then in the process of parsing out the meaning of the words I heard, the memory of the words mutated and I was remembering or receiving the words as different words than what I "actually" heard.  But all this was happening as I was hearing them, and the memory is more like the memory of a syllable, not a whole word.  And I'd lose track of the syllables and have to piece things together all over again, but I'd rebuild the sentence as something way more sinister than reality.

On a different occasion a candle-holder on a wall smiled and winked at me.  This is also while I had intense shivers on a couch and was trying to watch This Film Is On by R.E.M. while super stoned.  BAD IDEA.  But I think that was just crazy weed.  It had red hairs and shit.

[TremblingEagle]

My auditory hallucination went like this:

That's really interesting to me
Marijuana obviously can have powerful psychotropic effects on some people. It varies enough I'd warn anyone about to experiment with it for the first time to be aware of that.