Reminder that Evil targets kids - Joe vs Elan School
(elan.school)
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I think it's one of those things where it's metaphorically right, but not literally.
Smoking weed doesn't compel you to do acid, cocaine, or anything else, but when you're told all of these things are SUPER BAD TERRIBLE, and then you do weed and it's... pleasantly relaxing and way less of a detriment on your daily functioning than alcohol is, you're inevitably going going to get curious and ask yourself 'if they lied to me about weed, what else are they lying to me about?' and consider trying something else that people say is actually good.
The other thing it does is put you in contact with a drug dealer. Weed is a literal gateway to the criminal underworld in that regard.
Of course, the elephant in the room about both of these things is that they hinge on the illegality of weed. When weed is legal, consuming it doesn't generate curiosity about illegal substances any more than alcohol or tobacco do. When weed is legal, you don't buy it a guy who gets regular phone calls from people who regularly murder eachother to control who distributes where.
So yeah, his AA coach, and Nancy Reagan were right that weed was gonna put him on path to worse things, but at the same time, he would never have become a drug dealer if he'd been able to buy weed from a legal business, rather than from a criminal.
I know a number of people who smoke marijuana, and they're all fine. I wouldn't think of them as addicts or junkies any more than I'd think of someone who likes a drink after work as an alcoholic.
...The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is that these people - these good people - are regularly in contact with a guy who, even if he is not a very bad guy himself, is one handshake away from some real fucking monsters.
...And weed doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be a gateway drug. But it kind of is, because they made it one.
I'm not so sure I believe that. I'm not confident that a weed distributor is going to never give any advice to someone on how to access mushrooms, acid, or ecstasy. The issue is how deeply are people going to dive into recreational drug use, and then continue on recreational drug use and begin getting involved in the criminal element for other recreational drugs.
It's not so much that it's just weed, it's that there is a drug culture out there, and most of it is criminal. And sure, if you remove the criminality to it... you then allow the massive fucking incentive of the other drugs themselves to fucking destroy people. You'll transfer people out of prisons and into hospitals and homelessness camps.
It becomes a total wash. This is because, in the end, drug abuse is a social problem, and social problems can't actually be solved by the government. They can only become solved by the society. A moral prohibition by the general population is what would fix it, and basically nothing else.
What do you think makes alcohol and tobacco magically different?