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Japan to criminalise cannabis use
(www.bangkokpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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This fucking backwards ass notion of weed as a "gateway drug" needs to die. Their reasoning for calling it that shows their idiocy, in that it's called that because it's cheap and harmless, so they think it will lead to people believing other drugs are similar. Imagine branding something as dangerous because it's (Checks Notes) cheap and harmless.
Although from personal experience, I'd say that weed is a gateway drug of sorts, in that if you're addicted to something far more dangerous (like alcohol), using weed can act like a "gateway" to sobriety.
And yet alcohol shall not be banned.
What are they thinking?
And unlike cannabis use (as far as I'm aware), alcoholism is actually a real problem in Japan, because drinking alcohol is not only socially acceptable but downright enforced.
It's even worse, because over a third of Japanese are allergic to alcohol and probably shouldn't be consuming for increased health risk.
I know what you mean, but it's not an allergy but the lack of a gene to metabolize alcohol properly. So it's more comparable to lactose intolerance (which over 70 percent of Asians also have).
It's not an "allergy", but it still has detrimental health effects. Not having the enzyme greatly increases cancers related to drinking, among many other health impacts.
Allergy is just a way to explain it more simply.
If its like the US they get buckoo tax monies they aren't getting from canna.
to be fair states that have legalized are getting tons of ganja tax monies.
They can't stop people from making bathtub wine.
In my experience weed can be a gateway drug when you have to buy it from a drug dealer. As an analogy, lots of people end up buying something other than what they went into Target to buy.
Also a criminal record can fuck your life in a myriad of ways, if like me you fall in love with someone from another country and you both have weed charges neither country will let you live together even decades later destroying what's probably your only chance at happiness.
These rules are needlessly cruel and absurd.
Whatever it takes to get people to take some shrooms and chill all the way the fuck out
Also, dealers don't check ID.
Welcome to Japan, where everything, especially their mentality is fatally stuck in the glory days of the 1970/1980s.
Even today they still use fax and computer usage is the office middling and general computer literacy is abyssal.
It's Japan. If anything is promoting drug abuse, it's the work culture.
It's not entirely harmless, but more harmless than a lot of OTC medicines.
It's not harmless. It's linked to mental illness and increased stress. People need to stop spreading this myth.
EDIT: I know that people are down voting because weed is incredibly popular and rarely does harm, but that doesn't mean you should propagate the myth that it's harmless. Your personal experience should not speak for everyone.
Weed can easily cause intense anxiety and paranoia if the user takes more than they can handle. This is just as true for someone who is trying it for the first time as it is for someone with a long history of use.
If you have ever had panic attacks or heart palpitations, the combined increase in heart rate and anxiety may trigger a panic attack. It's also habit-forming enough that people who've had panic attacks will keep using it despite knowing they are risking a really stressful experience.
You'll need to cite your sources on that, though the APA style guide doesn't have a citation format for "conservative grandparents with dementia."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425748/
"Someone's asking for sources on wild claims, quick, let me google some correlations!"
If you look at the link between alcohol and mental health disorders, cannabis is way safer, and there's not even a direct causal link to what would cause these correlated issues with cannabis use, unlike with alcohol, where there's a clear causality.
You say that like it's a bad thing. What else am I to do when someone asks for sources? I've read similar research in the past and went to find it again.
That's whataboutism.
Correction, you've googled similar studies before. I'm pretty sure you haven't read them. There's literally nothing there except sampling bias and weak correlations.
You can do that for literally anything
No, it isn't. It's not "what about alcohol" as in "let's not talk about cannabis, but talk about alcohol instead".
It's a "you don't understand the actual risks involved, you don't understand that you're linking things you think they prove something (even without reading them) that confirms the bias that has been programmed into you, so here's some context to make it more understandable"
The context being objective science not having found any causality with mental health disorders and cannabis, and honestly, not even proper correlations.
If this was about the dangers to mental health, then those dangers would be objectified, and alcohol would be considered more dangerous and prohibited. If for some reason the prohibition of cannabis doesn't come from objective science, but pure political shitcanery, then it wouldn't care at all about the objective facts of any of the risks, but it would pretend to — even going so far as to completely make shit up
Which is exactly what is happening here, and you're perpetuating it. Probably without realising it, but you are.
There's clearly no convincing you. By all means, continue to spread the myth that cannabis can do no harm to anyone, and eventually the wrong person will believe you.
Remember when you were talking about whataboutism, trying to discredit my entire comment?
Well, now you're doing what's called "a strawman." At no point have I said or even implied that cannabis is literally harmless.
That's probably because I'm trying to defend my initial statement, and I didn't realize you were only taking issue with the sources I presented.
In light of that, excuse my accidental strawman. But also, I don't really care to argue about the veracity of the research presented by the NIH.
Aaand that's sort of my point.
Yes, we should take the harms of any substances seriously, but to be frank, the risks in cannabis are comparable to caffeine, and on an objective level, even smaller. So my deeper point is that people should realise that attitudes can be deeply "programmed" by our environment (and I'm not talking about some malicious and purposeful propaganda, except at the very start of it, after which society just sort of did it's thing), and we should realise to readjust our attitudes towards cannabis to be more like our attitudes towards coffee. For example, it's not often you need to worry about someone's caffeine consumption, but that too is a thing sometimes. The worst example I can think of is a middle-aged woman I worked with who made coffee 4x stronger than anyone else, no-one else would drink it (except for me as well, but with a lot of cream and sugar, and much much less than her). She was so caffeinated, it really did show up on her skin and definitely on her behaviour. She was very, very mildly psychotic, and I use that not in the colloquial, but clinical sense. In the sense that she was very mildly hypomanic and slightly confused at times, making a lot of mistakes in our work, to the point that she was prohibited from taking any of the orders that came from the government, because they didn't want to pay for her constant fuck-ups. Other times it's perhaps a young-ish person who is doing too many energy drinks, or it's my 93-year old grandma who has anxiety and who's hands shake, but who says she won't stop drinking coffee. I'd say my worry for someone using too much cannabis has been much on the same level. It used to be bigger, when I was younger, and somehow believed the studies that only talk of these correlations, until I understood that none of them had any substance, always just "analysing" previous work and when you look into those, they're more questionable than the newer ones.
We've accepted a work culture in which you can make jokes about how you "can't even function before my first cup of coffee", and that's completely fine. But if I say "oh damn, I just can't get to sleep without a good bowl full of indica", a lot of people would instantly consider me an addict of some sort, while the other perhaps a not-so-funny character in an office sitcom.
Thank you for the apology, but there really was no need. Still, very mature of you, rare on online forums. tips fedora
edit Oh here, have an image as well.
OK maybe? I think it depends on the user. Excuse my falling back on anecdotes now, but I don't think I've met anyone whose had a panic attack from drinking coffee (though I would not be surprised). However I know several people who have had panic attacks from ingesting THC.
I agree that we are too blase as a culture about the relative risks of caffeine and alcohol dependence. I just get frustrated when people parrot the notion that cannabis has never hurt anyone. I even support the cause to at least decriminalize it and even legalize it for adults, though we need better education about the potential risks. I've only ever seen warning labels about the habit-forming nature.
Yeah, anecdotes aren't science.
Especially when we've established how biased society's view of cannabis is.
Caffeine can actually kill you of an overdose. It's not even that rare, medically. Not compared to zero cannabis overdose deaths.
Caffeine can even cause auditory hallucinations on a fairly small dosage. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/caffeine-linked-to-hallucinations-51161154/
https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2016/04/20/cannabis-vs-caffeine-which-is-safer-a-cup-of-coffee-or-a-puff-of-weed/
Yes the site is "cannabisculture", but they give sources to actual science outlets and specific publications
And this isn't to say that caffeine is really that dangerous, as it isn't. You can abuse it and get problems, but most don't. It's more addictive and more dangerous and more used, and less worried about. They hypocrisy around coffee is expecially high here in Finland.
It's honestly crazy, I've had to strip down and take a piss in front of a guy who's lips were packed with snus and who was on his 12th cup of strong coffee for the day. As in he had to visually confirm I didn't have any gadgets or anything on my dick.
All this because I got a fine for smoking cannabis. And I had to do that every week, on random days, for six months. Beyond humiliating, especially done by people who were clearly sorely addicted themselves, which I wasn't. (At the time I didn't use caffeine or nicotine — even going so far as to not eat chocolate because of it's caffeine content.)
Yes you have. Go to literally any high school, and like a third of the kids are so high on energy drinks that they'd get a low score of mania on clinical tests. Just because you've not associated someone's behaviour with caffeine doesn't mean it didn't cause it as much as cannabis the anxiety attacks of the people you talk of.
And caffeine is actually regulated, formally. Cannabis isn't. So you'd get way stronger strains than what you might if it were legal, ans definitely strains with more CBD, which counteracts the psychotic effects of THC.
You literally couldn't give the equivalent of that in caffeine, because it'd be like 8 large energy drinks and would literally kill a person, whereas with a cannabis overdose, you'll get anxiety instead of a coronary and death. Also, the anxiety is very strongly connected to the legality of cannabis as well. In places whereby cannabis is legal, those sorts of anxiety attacks are far fewer.
Video games are habit forming. Do you think they should have labels on them? Literally anything can be addictive. What causes the "cannabis isn't addictive" myth is that cannabis doesn't cause dependence. As in you could smoke insane amounts for several years daily, then quit cold turkey, ans only suffer a few days of insomnia if that.
With alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, you'll get actual physical withdrawal symptoms. With alcohol so bad that you can die.
if you're into that, just wait till you hear about alcohol and cigarettes! Anxiety, paranoia and panic attacks seem fine compared to Cirrhosis, COPD, Emphysema, Cancer, Stroke, Renal Failure, Kidney Failure, and Fatty Liver Disease. All of them painful, all of them deadly.
But god forbid people smoke some weed 🙄 They might in very rare occasions get a temporary increase in anxiety!
More whataboutism. We're talking about weed. And I'm not making the blanket statement that no one should smoke weed. I'm saying it does have health risks that should not be ignored.
Also it's offensive that you would trivialize the suffering that people go through in a panic attack.