: Gerald
: : I take it you dont drink alcohol, caffine or smoke tabbaco.
: : These are all drugs too you know?: BASE727::Gerald and Sam i was not refering to alchahol, tobacco or caffine . I was refering to illegal drugs such as marijauna hash, cocaine heroin ,etc,etc,etc.
Why treat one drug any differently from another? They are all drugs...after all, d-Thalidomide is still legal, despite being known to cause horrific birth defects.
For the record i have NOT touched any illegal for over 10 years and I'm damn proud of it..
Actually, you have, although you didn't know it. I can cite three examples.
1. Due to the coke boom of the '80s, most of the notes of that period floating around the North American continent had small but measureable traces, so there's skin contact for you.
2. During the 1980's, both Philip Morris and BAT (amongst others) were seriously considering lacing their cigarettes with small amounts of marijuana. By "seriously considering", I mean that all the preparations were in place - they could have started rolling out "spiked" cigarettes within a couple of days. How would the general public be aware of this, given that no company would advertise it?
3. Your endocrine (hormone) system daily produces hundreds of "banned" substances. Entirely naturally. Take, for example, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), also known as "businessman's acid", because the effects are similar to LSD (though much shorter in time duration - the "businessman's" bit comes from the fact that you could smoke some during a lunch hour and be reasonably straight for the afternoon at work).
DMT is Class A. Here in the UK, possession is liable to lead to seven years inside, dealing, fourteen years. DMT is also produced by the human pituitary gland. Which means that every one of us on the planet is breaking the drugs laws merely by existing...
AS for the stuff you mentioned Gerald I dont drink booze i smoke a pack of puffs a day and i,m like a vacuum cleaner when it comes to coffee.
Which means that your drugs of choice are caffeine and nicotine. Now, physiologically speaking, both of these are more harmful than tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
Deaths have been attributed directly to caffeine - the French novelist Honoré de Balzac drank himself to death with the stuff (63 cups in one night if I remember correctly).
No death has ever been directly attributed to THC poisoning. In lab tests using cannabis oil (which is lethally strong stuff, being a refined form of cannabis resin) they actually drowned rats in the stuff. It's gross, but to try and determine what the "toxic dose" of cannabis was, they fed the rats so much of the stuff that it actually drowned.
The estimated "lethal dose" of cannabis is a couple of kilos. Even if you're Bob Marley, that amount would normally last you the best part of a year. If you compare "lethal doses" of THC and ethanol (alcohol), it emerges that alcohol is 2500 times more poisonous than THC.
Where deaths occur, you can blame them on the harmful effects of smoke and tar, rather than the active substance. Cigarettes are as prone to give you cancer. You can eat marijuana, though, without the cancer risk that chewing tobacco has.
In fact, the only record of a death I've heard of that was attributable to cannabis was a luckless Moroccan following a lorry carrying a large amount of cannabis - the back door flew open and a ton of the stuff fell out, crushing the man and his car. That's the lethal dose!
Gideon.
