Gallup: Cannabis Use Greatest Among Lower-Income and Less Educated
“Adults younger than 50, for example, are twice as likely as those aged 65 and older to be regular cannabis users (12% vs. 6%, respectively). Men (11%) are marginally more likely than women (8%) to be regular consumers” - Gallup
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all 9% of users must live in the downtowns of our cities. Because now, everytime I go downtown the smell is overwhelming.
The % does seem low to me. But the qualifier “regularly” for these users might explain it. Maybe lots of those downtowners think “regularly” means more than three times a day! 😀
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
My kids noted that whenever they went to the local community college, they smelled quite a bit of the stuff, and one daughter notes that on her dorm floor, there is a room or two that smells consistently of it.
One possible reason we might think it's more prevalent, along those lines, than it may actually be is because it's called "skunkweed" for a reason--it lingers quite a bit, just like tobacco. The weird thing for me is that I lived in the dorms at two "party" schools--Michigan State and Colorado-Boulder--but I learned to identify the smell at my niece's funeral. Maybe it wasn't as prominent in the engineering building as others?
I'm torn on the stuff. No desire to use it, and I was told by a doctor that I'm allergic to it (scratch tests), but I'm seeing at least anecdotal evidence that people use it to do things like cure back injuries and drop opiods, which seem to be far deadlier. On the flip side, my niece's funeral was the result of a fentanyl overdose, so the stoners she hung out with weren't just into weed. Don't know if it was just coincidence, a sign of the pain she was going through (her mom divorced my brother-in-law and weaponized family court and her kids against him ), or whether marijuana really is a gateway drug.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Is cannabis/ marijuana a gateway drug?
NIDA’s page on the question is getting pretty old, but in 2020 they weren’t sure: https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/marijuana/marijuana-gateway-drug
CDC, pretty much but not exactly the same house, agreed, also 2020: https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/health-effects/risk-of-other-drugs.html
Interestingly, the NGO American Addiction Centers says the real gateway drug is alcohol. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/the-real-gateway-drug
(I didn’t dig into that deeply enough to find out if they did any kind of ‘control’ for people who used alcohol and didn’t take up any other drugs. They have a lot of charts and graphs that are interesting, though.)
I tend to think that, like alcohol, the cannabis problem doesn’t have a good legal solution—though it’s pretty clear that the de-regulation has worsened a lot of other problems, like impaired driving.
Field sobriety tests can work tolerably well on cannabis impaired drivers, I’m told, but these drivers are already a high risk to other others by the time you get them pulled over and do a FST. And success in court, I hear, is less consistent than what you get with a recognized objective test like various blood alcohol level devices. (Several labs are working on fast chemical testing for cannabis, but the way THC behaves… Devices that are rock solid as court evidence might be quite a ways off.)
We were probably better off when legal recreational marijuana was not a thing. (Though I do think jail time for low level use-offenders was not generally an effective strategy.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
....I see that 85.6% of adults have used alcohol, about 50% have used cannabis....and then it tails off drastically with each "more serious" drug. I'm thinking that we need to find a better explanation than "gateway", which is perilously close, IMO, to a slippery slope fallacy. There's a hint of truth if one posits "if one is willing to cast restraints aside to smoke dope, they just might be more willing to cast restraint aside to smoke crack or the like", but the risk factors are just not that high.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Marijuana addiction is a real problem, as is the strong correlation between marijuana use and other illicit drug abuse. This presentation from the 2023 Shepherds 360 Conference is very helpful.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6lyOZsTQa8LpwWG1vgZxGl?si=3lpwdg7jR0GY…
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