.....As i am new to this Fellowship i'm not ceratain if the above subject can be debated or on which board it should be posted.I am studying the above subject and would like to debate "Could WW2 have been avoided,and events that changed the course of the war,including mistakes made by polaticians before,during and after the war.Any guidlines you can give me would be appreciated..............................Morse

Morse: Depends on what theater.. Asian or European?2 separate conflicts although a lot of the same participants...

Ferris Bueller: The tag is an ankle bracelet tied to a home base. If you leave your home.. it goes off to alert those who monitor your probation/house arrest conditions.

as such our homeless are not jailed unless they break the law. Some people just find the jail world easier to live in then the outside world... that is disturbing.

Morse:

Earlier this month we discussed the subject of "appeasement".  You can do a search of the board using the small form above the messages.  In that topic we discussed why appeasement happened and the different interpretations of it.

I think that WW II was unavoidable both in Europe and in Asia.  WW I was a resolution of conflicts that had started going back to the 19th century (and perhaps earlier than that).  Germans wanted to have an empire of their own much like France and England had.  The problem was tht the world had already been "divided" among the superpowers.  For Germany this meant that the only part of the world that they could potentially conquer was Eastern Europe.

In WW I Germany fought against Russia and nearly defeated it until the Czar fell from power and the new Communist government (under Lenin) surrendered and declared peace with Germany.  At the time Germany took control of several areas under the Czar's control.  For example, the Ukraine, Finland, etc.  However, Germany was no able to effectively control those lands and eventually lost them as the German economy sank into a deep recession in the 1920s.

When Hitler came to power he was determined to destroy what he called the "jew bolsheviks".  Hitler went on to incite antisemitism, hatred of the Roma (what we call Gypsies) and hatred of Slavs.  At the same time Stalin despised Hitler's fascism and how Hitler moved in to use the state to solidify the power of German capilatist monopolies.  The conflict between Stalin and Hitler was unavoidable.  They both knew it and signed their non-aggression pact to buy time before going to war.

Western superpowers knew this, and they "appeased" Hitler and gave him control of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Their hope being that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union and in that way find the "living space" that the Third Reich wanted.  They probably thought that if Hitler was busy destroying the Soviet Union, he would stay away from France and England.  The superpowers hated the Soviet Union too, so appeasement was favorable to them.  This gave Hitler the impetus he needed to attack the Soviet Union and at the same time build his army to attack France and England.

On the Eastern front Japan had invaded China, Korea, Vietnam and other parts of Asia.  The Communist parties in those countries were determined to drive out the Japanese and these communist parties had the support of the Soviet Union.  The Japanese also hated the Soviet Union and were determined to build their empire by invading the Soviet Union from the East.  They also saw the opening of the hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union as an opportunity to "divide and conquer" the Soviet Union by attacking in two fronts.  The Communist parties in occupied Asian countries declared war on Japan too and that meant that the conflict spread itself over all of eastern Asia.

Western superpowers were willing to tolerate attacks on the Soviet Union because they hated communists.  However, they were not willing to tolerate attacks against themselves.  When Hitler decided to invade France and Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, the conflict became truly a world war, and it was unavoidable because both Germany and Japan were determined to build their empires.

Übergeek 바둑이: Hitler invaded Poland splitting it with the USSR,The Allies responded by declaring war on Germany. Then with little action by the Allies, Hitler then invaded France by going around the Maginot line and into the lowlands, defeating the French (except for Vichy) driving out the British . THEN came the battle of Britain with Hitler hoping to invade England. when he failed... THEN AFTER ALL THAT... he foolishly invaded the USSR. That sequence doesn't sound like appeasement to me.It seems you have a different view of Western intentions Oh I also forgot the invasion of Norway and Denmark which came before the invasion of France.. Hitler really conquered all of the west except for England before turning to the USSR.. So if they were hoping Hitler would go after the USSR first,,, it didn't work out too well. And don't forget the Soviets attempt to invade Finland before all that

Just maybe when Molotov signed that deal with Ribbentrop, that the Soviets were trying to appease Hitler in to attacking the west first,, which he did, that deal lasted almost 2years.Maybe Stalin was hoping to share even more spoils with Hitler,After all Stalin snapped up the Baltic countries. But also lets add this yet another Hitler/Stalin pact, signed  a few months AFTER the west declared war on Germany.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)

GTCharlie:
.....I am thinking in particular to Europe,and look forward to hearing your views....Morse

Ferris Bueller: Medical Marijuana in California is a joke...... its just an attempt to make it as legal as cigarettes, and INMHO if dying patients need it, then why not like other drugs, instead of local "dealers"??

Czuch: best wait for (V) as he seems to know all about drugs...

as he said way back in march***I mean, I'm growing a 50/50 THC to CBD cloned plant. My standards are very high as I work for the government.***

Czuch: If you are trying to say "why not other prescription drugs".. Because they cannot make a drug like it. Most man made drugs of a heavy duty nature have serious side effects, some can even kill ya in order to try and improve your health. So many different people with different illnesses find medical marijuana 'clean' compared to man made drugs, and also helps combat side effects of man made drugs.

As one old lady over here pointed out.. when she was on man made drugs for her problems, she felt crap all the time through the side effects. A friend of hers suggested to try eating very small amounts of marijuana. She did and found it works better then expensive pharmaceutical stuff without the side effects. The amount she has to use in a making a dish is very small.

Many of our basic medicines are based on natures own brands... Aspirin for example.

GTCharlie: He defeated the French full stop. The Vichy regime was an allowed government by the Nazis in certain parts of France. The regime wilfully collaborated with the Nazis throughout their period of government.

As for appeasement... Our army had lost it's edge, the great depression took it's toll on military research. While the Germans during the 30's steamed ahead. They borrowed (via books and all) ideas that were developed by other nations who had used the books as 'door stops'.. and developed them. We'd seen the Spanish civil war and how well the Nazi war machine worked.. and our government sought time to catch up.

Chamberlain made a deal with Hitler, but set the invasion of Poland as a step to far (mutual defence policies, etc) .... The Maginot line was a throw back from WWI warfare.

Over here in the UK we get taught about the period between 1918 and 1939. That's wear the appeasement attempts took place.

***I mean, I'm growing a 50/50 THC to CBD cloned plant. My standards are very high as I work for the government.***

This was a quote from a scientist who works for the government... not my words!!

Not my fault I watch DOCUMENTARIES!!!

GTCharlie:

> It seems you have a different view of Western intentions

I do, because the west had shown its hatred of the Soviet Union from early on.

The "Whites", the counterrevolutionary movement that tried to restore the Russian monarchy, were made up not only of Russians but also of soldiers from Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, United States, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Australia, Greece, Turkey, China, Romania, Rstonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Czechoslovakia. The Russian Civil War was fought from 1917 to 1923 and all those countries put aside their differences and sent troops to try to drive the communists out of Russia. There were 2,400,000 Russians, 155,000 Allies and hundreds of thousands from the Central Powers fighting on the side of the Whites. The war left about 15 million people dead, of those 13 million were civiliands. The desire to destroy communism was manifest from early on and the superpowers failed to destroy the Soviet Union because they compted among themselves for wealth and power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War

On Nov. 26, 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a pact designed to destroy international communism and the USSR. Italy joined the pact 1 year later. The "Axis" (a name adopted in 1941) was born out of anticommunist hatred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact

On Sep. 30, 1938 Germany, the UK, France and Italy signed the Munich Agreement (notice that the US was no involved at this point). This agreement gave Germany control of the Sudentenland, an area in Czechoslovakia with a large proportion of Ethnic Germans. On Oct 10, 1938 Germany occupied the Sudetenland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

At this point I will say that the Allies (UK and France) were hoping that Hitler would abandon his claims over Alsace-Lorraine in France and concentrate on moving east on a path towards the Soviet Union. This was the appeasement that pleased the allies. Since Hitler was a sworn enemy of communism, the logical thinking was that Hitler would much rather go to war with the USSR than with the Allies.

The Allies underestimated Hitler and Stalin, and the unthinkable occurred. Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on Aug. 24, 1939. In this pact Germany and the USSR aggreed to divide Eastern and Central Europe and to remain neutral in case of a third party decalring war on either country. In Sep. 1939 Germany and the USSR invaded Poland and divided the land between the two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

WW II started on Sep. 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and the UK and France declared war against Germany. The hopes that Hitler and Stalin would declare war on each other were dashed. The Alies undestimated Hitler and overestimated his hatred of the USSR.

Why would Stalin and Hitler sign this treaty? Everyone knew that those two hated each other and Germany had openly signed the Anti-Commintern Pact. They needed to build up their armies and secure strategic territory before going to war. Hitler wanted Norway and its iron ore trade, and Romania and its oilfields. Stalin wanted Finland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States. They knew that war was unavoidable, but they played for time.

After Hitler defeated France and invaded Norway, he turned on the UK. Hitler was overconfident and thought that the Luftwaffe would effectively defeat the RAF, but the UK had a secret weapon called the RADAR. Radar made the Luftwaffe ineffective and Hitler decided to abandon the plan to invade the UK and decided to invade the USSR instead. It was then that Winston Churchill asked Stalin to become allies, and this did not happen until June of 1941. It took the defeat of France, Belgium and the Netherlands to make the Allies abandon its hatred of communism and decide to coordinate their efforts with the USSR.

After the war ended, the most of same powers that had once been members of the White Movement became NATO in 1949, with Germany joining in 1955. It took the defeat of Germany and the loss of Eastern and Central Europe to make former competing empires put aside their differences and work together in a unified anticommunist front. My view of western objectives during WWII might not be entirely correct, but at least it does explain why Hitler was appeased rather than crushed.

(V): No doubt, my point was that the strategy of hoping That Hitler would attack the USSR Everyone knew first is speculation,the Germans wanted to recoup land taken from them by France in the treaty of Versailles. But remember, Stalin was also an evil man

GTCharlie: Stalin was a very insecure man with tooo much power. Always a danger. He killed the USSR more efficiently then any internal or external enemy. If the Germans had left Stalin alone I recon he would have brought down the USSR quicker on his own.

As for Hitler going for the Russians.. A war on two fronts is never a good thing.

Czuch: Today's cannabis far stronger than in '70s, DEA says

Related
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XNew York Times
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Drug Trafficking By Henry Pierson Curtis

Sentinel Staff Writer

October 18, 2009
E-mail Print Share Text Size

Grow-house raids in residential neighborhoods — happening regularly these days in Florida — often yield an illegal crop worth millions.

Super Pot.

Once a mildly inebriating plant, cannabis's potency has increased steadily since first studied by the University of Mississippi Marijuana Project in the 1970s.

Back then, the average marijuana sample contained less than 1 percent THC. That jumped to 3.2percent in 1992 and then to 8.8 percent by 2006, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

But marijuana cultivated in Florida regularly tests twice as strong as the national average, the result of years of genetic tweaking by Miami-based Cuban drug rings.

Raised in grow houses as clean as high-school science labs, the pot seized so far this year has contained 20 percent THC on average, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami.

"I don't know what they're teaching them in Cuba, but they know what they're doing," Polk County sheriff's Lt. Steven Ward said. "This is the best marijuana I've ever seen."

Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical known as THC, is what gives marijuana its high. Plants seized elsewhere in the United States contain 10 percent on average, according to the DEA.


27% THC stuns MBI
When high-tech grow houses spread from Miami to Georgia from 2005 to 2007, drug agents say, marijuana samples began breaking old standards for potency.

"Twenty-seven percent!" said Agent Billy Powell of the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation in Orlando, who seized 366 pounds of that strength pot from a grower near Orlando International Airport in 2007. "That's the highest I've ever heard of."

Pedro Tomas, the Cuban-born defendant in that case, told officers he learned how to grow marijuana by reading magazines at a local 7-Eleven store. Saying he didn't think raising pot for personal use was illegal, Tomas claimed he intended to smoke all 366 pounds himself.

"He said that with kind of a smirk on his face," Powell said.

In September, Tomas, 37, was sentenced in Orange County Court to 28 months in state prison.

Mahmoud ElSohly, a pharmacist in charge of the Marijuana Project, told The New York Times last year that illegal-pot growers have been using the same techniques to grow stronger cannabis that agronomists deploy to produce better-quality fruits, vegetables and other plants.

The Marijuana Project, a University of Mississippi research facility, is the only federally approved cannabis plantation in the U.S. Its laboratory tracks pot's chemistry and grows plants for researchers.

"They have been doing genetic selection for years," ElSohly said in December. "You can see the potency keeps going up."


Strong pot riskier?
What that means is debated endlessly.

Law enforcement and drug-treatment experts say significantly stronger pot poses known as well as suspected health dangers.

"The first thing to keep focused on is that marijuana at any potency is not a benign drug," said David Rosenbloom, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, who compared marijuana consumption to alcohol abuse. "I'm not talking about a kid who smoked one joint and went on with his life."

Marijuana's negative side effects include anxiety, hallucinations, panic reactions and physical impairment, such as with driving a car, which likely increases at higher THC levels, he said.

"I'm saying it's probable because of there hasn't been a lot of formal research," Rosenbloom said. "There's no reason to believe there will be any difference in outcome other than intensification."

Advocates for legalizing marijuana say stronger pot reflects market demand and simply means smokers can consume less to get its euphoric kick.

"The bottom line is there's more of a connoisseur market now than in the 1970s," said Keith Stroup, founder and legal counsel of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Henry Pierson Curtis can be reached at 407-420-5257 or hcurtis@orlandosentinel.com.
Copyright © 2009, Orlando Sentinel

<bMost man made drugs of a heavy duty nature have serious side effects, some can even kill ya in order to try and improve your health. So many different people with different illnesses find medical marijuana 'clean' compared to man made drugs, and also helps combat side effects of man made drug



Yes, so why here, like California, do we let private people grow the stuff and sell it for prescription???

Czuch: ... why import it, if it is to be used for medical purposes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannabis#Partial_list_of_clinical_applications

GTCharlie:

> Stalin was also an evil man

Of course. The reason why the Allies were reluctant to let the USSR become an ally is because Stalin was a cruel dictator. Unfortunately Stalin had risen to power in the aftermath of Lenin's death. The all-out war declared by the Whites radicalized the communist party and gave Stalin the opening he needed to enforce his dictatorial brand of communism and the command economy system. If Lenin had not died things would have been different because Lenin had a more balanced view. Western Europe was not ready to make any openings to communists. It took the Great Depression, WW II and the Cold War for both communists and capitalist to abandon some of their more radical policies towards one another.

We also have to remember that prior to WW II values were different. Welfare Capitalism did not exist. The idea that western culture was meant to uphold freedom and democracy as its main tenets was born out of the WW II and the Cold War. Prior to WW II western culture lived for imperialism. Pursuing great empires was the main driving force behind western economies. Imperialism as evil is a concept that was born out of WW II and the great destruction caused by the empires trying to gain power over each other.

Today we see imperialism as bad and democracy as good, but it is hard to believe that only 70 years ago western culture would rather send millions to their deaths than uphold those values.

Czuch:

> Yes, so why here, like California, do we let private people grow the stuff and sell it for prescription???

Several pharmaceutical manufacturers are working on tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) inhalers similar to the inhalers used to treat asthma. There are already THC tablets on the market. I think the unwillingness to decriminalize marihuana comes from its potential economic benefit to pharmaceutical companies. You can make a lot more money selling inhalers and tablets than you can make letting people grow a plant in their garden.

Übergeek 바둑이: Well, I dont personally believe that pot is a "soft" drug. It is addictive and does cause problems for those who use it for recreational purposes.

It does have benefits that outweigh its downside for some sick people.... but letting people grow their own or for people to be able to sell it to people with a prescription doesnt really make sense to me either?

I have read that there are some benefits to smoking it that you cannot get from taking a pill... I had not heard about the inhaler yet, maybe that gives the same benefits as smoking it does? I am not against whatever is good for medicinal purposes.... but pot is not some drug without a harmful side effect.

I saw today that Bam will not allow the federal government to enforce its laws against the use of pot in states where it is legal

Czuch:

> I dont personally believe that pot is a "soft" drug

I think by "soft" people would mean a drug that does not cause aggresive or euphoric behaviour, hallucinations or total sedation. Marihuana is a sedative and because of that people who smoke it "mellow out". It has side effects, like all drugs. Anybody who thinks it is healthy to smoke marihuana is stupid. There is nothing healthy about any drug.

I think the inhaler was developed to keep THC as a controlled substance. An inhaler would deliver 9-delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (9-d-THC) which is one of over 400 compounds found in marihuana. Pharmaceutical companies can make a lot of money out this.

As a chemist, I can say that I have mixed feelings about the current state of the law. On the one side, it breaks my heart to see people go to jail for drug offenses. On the other side I know how harmful these things are and whether strict control or deregulation is better depends on who is compiling statistics. Statistics on deregulation and crime incidence are not always reliable.

I do find interesting that the powerful tobacco and alcohol lobbies have kept tobacco and alcohol as legal drugs. The US had prohibition and it led to alcohol smuggling and organized crime in the 1920s. Canada tried to decrease tobacco consumption by steeply raising the "sin" tax on tobacco. It led to cigarrette smugling from the US and a rise in the tobacco black market in the 1990s. If tobacco and alcohol are a measure of what happens when drugs are legal, then high "sin" taxes and public education on drug consumption might seem the way to go with some of the less harmful drugs.

Some drugs are so mild that people don't even see them as drugs. For example, caffeine. It would be funny if Starbucks went out of business because caffeine suddenly became illegal!

Czuch: With regards to Marijuana.. as far as I am aware.. there has never been a fatality related directly to it's use.

When compared to some drugs that are prescribed.. that makes it "soft". One prescribed drug is now part of a $500 million plus lawsuit over people getting diabetes from it. That same drug (and all in it's class) has side effects that can cause renal failure and as at this time.. there are no tests to see if you have that side effect or not... yet it is prescribed.

As for addiction, yes.. it can be, but then again that applies to many prescription drugs that are prescribed to which a procedure of coming off slowly has to used. Many of the side effects noted on Marijuana can be seen on prescription drugs or worse.

They did a study on harmfulness of various drugs in relation to health recently (the study included tobacco and drink) and on those grounds Marijuana is "soft". Drink and tobacco kill and yet are legal. The main concern was over the age of smoking pot. As with underage smoking and drinking it can cause problems in development of a person, yet because it is underground there is no control over underage use as there is with drink and tobacco.

Übergeek 바둑이: As long as a person smoking pot stays away from driving a vehicle or any other responsible activity,the worst thing that can happen to then is heartburn from too much pizza.Booze is much more dangerous,and produces much more aggressive and dangerous behavior

I just got an interesting spam in my e-mail. It was from Amazon. An ad for a book called "The Great War and Modern Memory". It is a book about WWI. There are other books in the spam too, about WWII and the American Civil War. It is interesting because I have never bought books from Amazon. Could it be that they caught my IP address when I was searching Yahoo, Google or Wikipedia for information on the posts I put here earlier? I am hoping it is just a coincidence!

Jim Dandy:

The following chart was published in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg

Apparently it was published in The Lancet, a medical journal published in the UK. The article can be found here, if you have a subscription to the journal.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140-6736(07)60464-4

The actual abstract can be read here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17382831

It is very interesting. They used a "nine-category matrix of harm, with an expert delphic procedure, to assess the harms of a range of illicit drugs in an evidence-based fashion". They generated a chart to correlate dependence and physical harm. Two groups of experts independently assessed the data. (Read the abstract)

In that chart cannabis is causes less dependence and less harm than tobacco or alcohol. Tobacco causes almost as much dependence as cocaine, but it is less harmful than cocaine. The worst drug is heroin. I think that the medical profession is working towards a better understanding of what drugs effects are and how that can be applied in a regulatory system.

Übergeek 바둑이: I guess those stats back up my opinion.Moderation is of course the key.

(V): With regards to Marijuana.. as far as I am aware.. there has never been a fatality related directly to it's use.



Everyone has heard this one before..... but I have read studies that show too much caution when driving impaired by pot, and that can, and has lead to other people being involved in an accident.

Also, just because one drug is "better" than some other legal one, is not a good argument for it to be legal as well, IMHO.


What is the definition os a drug anyway??? You want to say caffeine too? Is caffeine a drug?? What substance is not a drug then???

I dont mind it as a prescribed drug, I am sure it much safer than many other prescribed drugs, and others that are legal too. but I dont want you and me growing it and selling legally to someone with a prescription either.

And as dandy pointed out, prescription drugs have a warnig that they are not to be used while driving etc..... same as legal drugs IE alcohol, no drugs should be used while doing anything that can harm someone else!

Czuch:
"Also, just because one drug is "better" than some other legal one, is not a good argument for it to be legal as well, IMHO."

If a legal drug is "worse" than an illegal one, should it be illegal? Seems kind of logical to me. But of course I see the opposite as logical as well.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as marijuana is illegal, booze should be as well.

Let the drunks get prescriptions for booze I guess.

In actuality, I fully support legalization of marijuana. With the same restrictions as alcohol. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there isn't a test to tell if you are CURRENTLY under the influence of marijuana. I believe the only tests are if you have recently smoked it. (Which could be a week ago!)

Czuch: "but I have read studies that show too much caution when driving impaired by pot, and that can, and has lead to other people being involved in an accident


That has been my major complaint regarding women drivers for years............less the pot part

Czuch: It's a crime here to be under the influence of any substance while driving. Drink/drugs.. anything that impairs your ability including prescription drugs and any illness that could cause an accident.

NO actual deaths from just smoking Marijuana have ever been recorded as far as I can tell.

As to growing.. as far as I can tell, the states that allow it do so that the grower is under license. Better that then imported via drug cartels. Personally I feel it rather wrong that a drug baron gets money from medical 'pot' in the same regards I do not agree with the massive trade in prescription drugs on the internet (eg Viagra) that has sprouted.

As such there is no excuse here to have smoked and then drive. The advertising about the dangers have been going on for years in the UK.

rod03801: I'm not sure, I've heard of at least 3 testing systems. Hair, urine and one other.. and there is probably more. By the sound of things, I think they can be more accurate then a week.

I never smoke pot while I'm working....spend way too much time looking for the wrench thats in my back pocket! lol

freedom of choice has long been an issue in the United States.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson traded pot growing secrets and strains.
Ben Franklin used cocaine regularly.

I believe pot should be legal....if you use it at home.
I believe alcohol should be illegal...unless used at home.

rod03801:

> as far as I know, there isn't a test to tell if you are CURRENTLY under the influence of marijuana

Recently here there were complaints from some members of the public because the police has developed a new form of breathlizer test.  In the previous testing procedure the police could check only for alcohol in the blood as measured when a person blew air from the lungs into the bre3athilizer machine.  The police couldnot test for other drugs because testing for them would require a urine sample and a suspect could refuse to provide a sample.  However, a new breathalizer machine allows for testing for other drugs such as marihuana and cocaine.  Initially privacy advocacy groups complained, but the vast majority of the public is in favour of the new testing system.  People driving under the influence of several drugs can now be charged.

Marihuana is a sedative and analgesic.  It will take away your pain, and it will also impair short term memory and concentration.  I think that if the police could test people involved in traffic accidents for marihuana use then we would find that it does play a role in many accidents out there.  As with all recreational drugs, there are side effects not only to those who directly use them, but also to those people around them.  If marihuana and hashish were to become legal, then I would expect the police to prosecute anyone driving or using machinery under its influence, just as we do with alcohol.

Czuch:

>  I dont mind it as a prescribed drug, I am sure it much safer than many other prescribed drugs,
>  and others that are legal too. but I dont want you and me growing it and selling legally to someone
>  with a prescription either.

I think this will always be a problem with recreational drugs.  Alcohol is available to anyone over 18 (or 21, depending on where you live).  The same is true with tobacco.

I think that people should get an alcohol consumer license.  If people drink responsibly, then they have earned the right to enjoy their alcohol.  If somebody is found driving or operating machinery under the influence of alcohol, or causing a domestic disturbance, or falling into addiction (alcoholism), then they should lose their alcohol license temporarily or permanently depending on the case.  We have this with driving licenses and drunk drivers lose their licenses, but not their ability to buy alcohol.  If a person has no alcohol license, then it would be illegal for them to purchase products containing alcohol.  A similar license then could be in place for other substances, like tobacco, marihuana, etc.  Of course there would be great opposition to this from breweries, distilleries, vineyard owners, etc.  Controlling the product they sell is not in their best interest.

Marihuana as a prescription drug would probably be like other prescription drugs that are abused for reasons other than the medically prescribed reason.  A good example is insulin.  If you are a diabetic your life depends on insulin injections and proper control of dosages and timing of the injections.  This is the medically correct way to use insulin.  If you are not diabetic, does it make sense to take insulin?  Of course not, because it is dangerous and it could potentially kill you.  However, there are people who abuse insulin.  Bodybuilders inject themselves with insulin in the hopes of forcing nutrients into their muscle cells so that their muscles can grow bigger.  It is a common practice in bodybuilding and some of the people who abuse insulin this way build big muscles at the expense of serious health problems later in life.  It is not illegal to possess insulin.  I never heard of anyone going to jail for having insulin vials in their possession.

Marihuana as a prescription drug would probably be the same.  People who need to take advantage of its analgesic and atininflammatory effects will use it for medically correct reasons.  Then there will be those who will abuse it as a recreational drug.  The government can try to control the supply of any drug, but when people are determined to use and abuse a drug there is nothing the government can do, whether that drug is legal or not. 

Bwild:  And eating chips and twinkies too!

Jim Dandy:

Last night Nick Griffin was on Question Time...

The BNP leader had an inquisition .

(V): the guy is a real joke
enough said

Snoopy: Aye.. a total idiot, and shown so. The irony is now after being shown to be an idiot he's now practising "look at me" to cover his own lack of intelligence.

(V): I think that is exactly what he wanted. Publicity.

(V): Afterwards he complained that he had been treated unfairly saying much of the show had been a "beat up Nick Griffin programme instead of Question Time".

i must of been watching a different program then

John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called 'pullets,' and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.

This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to
his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance, which
rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

John's favorite rooster, Hussein, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed Hussein's bell hadn't rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover.

To John's amazement, Hussein had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of Hussein, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.


The result was the judges not only awarded Hussein the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well. Clearly Hussein was a politician in the making.

Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention

Bwild: 
  For sure Hussein deserves the Nobel prize, maybe even the presidency.  Unfortunately all he got was a couple of blue ribbons.  Maybe they should have changed his name to something less scary to the voting public. 

Bwild:

Bwild:

Mousetrap: He might get a few extra 'right fringe votes' but he ain't no John Hurt in "V for Vendetta" .

Just a silly remnant from when people blamed another race for not feeling ggod about themselves!!