I feel like you missed the tongue-in-cheek aspect of this article.
It's essentially a list of positive changes stemming from legalizing marijuana under the guise of "unintended consequences" (the poor hippies!) that will also seem beneficial to many.
The funny thing is that the farms that supply dispensaries need labor and often pay under the table. One of these kids could make a few hundred bucks a day for a week trimming and then use that cash to do a fair bit of traveling. Nobody is getting disenfranchised here, it's just a bit for the article to get your attention.
EDIT: What is with people deleting comments lately? So you're comprehension on a subject wasn't perfect and sparked a discussion, big deal! It's nothing to be embarrassed about, people make mistakes. Look at my past comments, I say stupid crap all the time and nobody has taken my keyboard away....
I didn't take the article as tongue-in-cheek, I took it as a serious list of the positive benefits of legalizing weed, and took it as an opportunity to soapbox for the benefits of legalizing everything else.
That is what it was about, but didn't you notice it was written from the perspective that legalizing is bad because it's hurting this group of people? There's a significant dose of irony here.
> Unlike that issue, the main issue is whether the weed is harmful to its users.
I am pretty sure if (I'd love to say when but let's be realistic) we get proper legalization (as opposed to decriminalization), we will have to start considering regulation on smoking marijuana just like we need to regulate smoking tobacco. Perhaps not as much as smoking tobacco because we know that second-hand tobacco smoke can cause cancer but there might be further discussion on how far this freedom takes us. We might still force people to go on smoke breaks to smoke rather than let them smoke at their desks.
Do you know if the smoke "sticks" to the paint on the walls like tobacco smoke tends to do? Is comparison to tobacco even fair? Sorry, I have to resort to asking others as I don't have much personal experience in this matter.
I re-read that page now that I'm home, it doesn't say what I thought it did re relative tar levels of MJ vs tobacco. But it does make the obvious conclusion that people smoke less pot if it's more potent, and inhale less tar as a result.
Must MJ smokers I know in Cali actually don't light up any more. They use some sort of steaming device that basically transfers the active ingredient into the air without the ash and burning....
they're not "steaming devices" - they do not use steam but rather just hot air. they're called vaporizers, and what they do is cause sublimation of THC into a vapor, which is inhaled along with hot air. this eliminates the presence of tar, which is a byproduct of combustion.
There is probably some differences but most of the carcinogens should be in both. A consequence of burning plant material AFAIK. Maybe somebody better versed in the subject can chime in.
Hm, I don't think so. While it's true that inhaling burned plant material is never a good thing, there is no evidence so far that smoking cannabis causes cancer.
Search for Dr. Donald Tashkin who has done extensive studies on this subject.
Afaik tobacco smoke is also radioactive due to phosphate fertilizer [1][2] so I assume this is also a major factor leading to its carcinogenic properties.
I think it's extremely interesting. At least in California, hippies have had a lot to do with the advocacy of weed as a benign recreational drug over several decades, so they deserve a share of the credit for the quasi-legal status the drug now has. They took on most of the legal risk and while exemplifying the positive aspects (by being 'mostly harmless,' so to speak) so that you could enjoy this freedom, whether or not you personally choose to exercise it.
What is "the situation," though? The legacy of hippies is much, much more than just "the kids who wear those clothes and hang out in that area." Someone mentioned that the post was tongue in cheek, but it reads to me more like tone-deaf.
It's like basing commentary on the current state of internet business on people who have the "Bill Gates in the 70s" Poindexter look.
It's funny you use that analogy, because the hippie subculture is a bit more complex than just scruffy kids in hemp shirts.
As a very very brief capsule summary, the 'hippie trail' that started up in the 60s features stops in India, particularly Goa - a bit more westernized than other parts of India, nice weather, very very cheap, and so on. In the late 80s and early 90s the hippie community there turned on to a subset of industrial/electronic music and melded it with a flavor of middle eastern music (thanks to the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula a few centuries prior to the Portuguese colonization of Goa) to produce a musical fusion that became known as Goa Trance. The Levantine musical influence combined with fairly high-tech electronics shortly made Goa a very popular destination for Israelis who had just completed their military service, and Israeli musicians who had a lot of the musical heritage at their fingertips became major players within that scene, resulting in distinct sub-genres.
Meanwhile, the music and the small industry of all-night parties and record labels etc. spread to other popular destinations such as London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, and Tokyo (which also happen to be foci of audio/synthesizer engineering excellence). I made a whole bunch of Israeli friends in the 90s who came to SF because it was part of that music scene while also being in close proximity to Silicon Valley; almost all of them joined or founded startups. I know for sure some of them read Hacker News.
Now, I wouldn't say that the current state of Internet business depends on hippies any more than it depends on Bill Gates' Poindexter look, but there's a closer connection between hippies and the tech scene than you might imagine. While I'm not a hippy myself, as an electronic musician/audio pro/hacker I think the hippie movement has had an important rule in cultural and technological cross-fertilization.
For another take on that "What the dormouse said" by John Markoff that traces a whole lot of the early beginnings of Silicon Valley culture back to 60's and 70's counter culture, including extensive LSD and pot experimentation (in some cases on corporate time, encouraged by people in charge...) and participation in the anti war movements etc..
I for one will weep no tears whatsoever if the ending of easy money for people dealing drugs causes the end of hippy culture. The cost-benefit analysis of "worldwide drug war" versus "some chilled-out kids living in SF" is pretty simple.
how is pro-weed zealotry stupid? it's essentially saying that people's lives are being ruined, staggering amounts of government money being wasted, and entire classes of criminal being created by trying to ban something that (a) shouldn't be banned in the first place and (b) cannot be banned effectively anyway.
if the zealots are all on the wrong side, that just shifts the entire centre of gravity of the discussion (see the overton window for more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)
The original comment is deleted by now, but it jumped into arguing whether weed is harmful or not, which is totally orthogonal to what the article discusses, to then conclude that it isn't and because of that it should be legal, without backing any of the arguments and just using HN as a soapbox. This is zealotry.
