For the first time, Americans are smoking more marijuana than cigarettes, poll finds
BY NATACHA LARNAUD | AUGUST 31, 2022
For the first time on record, regular cannabis usage has surpassed cigarette use in the U.S., according to a new Gallup poll. Marijuana use has increased dramatically over the past half-century and is currently the highest Gallup has ever recorded.
Of the American adults who participated in the poll, around 16% said they currently smoke marijuana, while nearly half said they have tried it at some point in their lifetime. When the question was first asked in 1969, only 4% of respondents said they had tried it.
That same year, 40% of respondents said they had smoked cigarettes in the same week. But during the past decades, cigarette use has decreased among Americans.
In the poll conducted last month, only 11% of respondents reported being smokers —the lowest recorded since Gallup began collecting data in 1944. That's a significant decrease from even the previous year, when 16% of respondents reported smoking cigarettes in the past week. In the 1950s, 45% of adults polled said they smoked cigarettes. [reworked this just a bit]
In 2019, 83% of respondents believed smoking was "very harmful" to adults who smoke, and another 14% said it is "somewhat harmful." In 2013, more than nine in 10 respondents said smoking caused cancer and 91% of smokers polled in 2015 said they wish they had never started smoking.
"Smoking cigarettes is clearly on the decline and is most likely to become even more of a rarity in the years ahead," Gallup senior scientist Dr. Frank Newport said. "This reflects both public awareness of its negative effects and continuing government efforts at all levels to curtail its use."
Please go to CBS News to read more.
________
Is Cannabis Huxley's "Soma"?
August 31, 2022
People have been under a lot of stress due to the 30-months long COVID hoax and the economic consequences of the gratuitous war against Russia waged by NATO.
I find it curious that there has been hardly anything written about the effect of cannabis in coping with this stress. Just google "the social impact of cannabis legalization" to see what I mean.
What follows are the arguments for and against cannabis.
Scott Lively, the co-author of The Pink Swastika begins with the argument against cannabis. I follow with the argument for.
Scott Lively--"That stink you're smelling in the presence of a pothead isn't just the dope himself - it's the toxic stench of deliberate civilization-destroying social engineering by an elite class who wants everyone stoned to better control us."
by Scott Lively
Is Cannabis Huxley's "Soma"?
August 31, 2022
I find it curious that there has been hardly anything written about the effect of cannabis in coping with this stress. Just google "the social impact of cannabis legalization" to see what I mean.
What follows are the arguments for and against cannabis.
Scott Lively, the co-author of The Pink Swastika begins with the argument against cannabis. I follow with the argument for.
Scott Lively--"That stink you're smelling in the presence of a pothead isn't just the dope himself - it's the toxic stench of deliberate civilization-destroying social engineering by an elite class who wants everyone stoned to better control us."
by Scott Lively
(excerpt by henrymakow.com)
I started smoking pot at 14 when a hippie-dude picked me up on a country road hitch-hiking home from my girlfriend's house. I had been an eager consumer of alcohol since the age of 12, and "weed" was a welcome addition to my wild and rebellious lifestyle. Although I took many other drugs over the next dozen years, marijuana was my drug of choice, and not just because it was cheap and easy to score.
I loved the feeling of "creative genius" that came over me when I got high, when all of my thoughts and imaginings seemed so much more interesting and exciting. But it was all just self-delusion, as I discovered from later reviewing, sober, the notes I had written while high. Nevertheless, like so many others of my generation, including many people still enslaved to it (and defending it now as "medical use," LOL), I became a full-fledged pothead.
(left, Scott Lively)
In reality, marijuana makes you stupid, not smart. It's probably the single highest factor in the educational failure of teenagers - especially inner-city black kids who have ready access to it. When Anne and I personally ran our inner-city mission in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 2008-2015, next door to Commerce High School, we witnessed dozens of clusters of teens ducking into alleyways (and behind our church) to smoke weed on their way to school every morning. You can't learn anything when you're high, and when you come down from the high you suffer with dull-witted lethargy for the rest of the day or until you smoke some more. As pothead Tom Petty sang in "Learning to Fly," "coming down is the hardest thing."
I was one of the first potheads at my high school. At the start of my ninth grade year (1974), there was a small handful of us who would sneak off into the woods to get high each morning before the first bell. By the end of that school year, there were over a hundred. I had been on the honor roll through the eighth grade and even skipped a grade in science, but within the first two weeks of smoking pot, I sank from the very top to the very bottom of my algebra class and a year or so later completely dropped out of school.
It is commonly argued that marijuana is not an addictive drug, but that is a egregious and socially destructive lie. True, it's not physically addictive like heroin, and there are people who can take it or leave it as a recreational drug, just like alcohol. But marijuana is highly psychologically addictive and is especially hard to quit because the use of it over time profoundly affects one's ability to use reason and rationality in decision-making. That's a handicap that lingers for weeks after you stop because the active drug THC stores up in your fat cells and continues releasing slowly in the body. I didn't feel fully normal again literally for months after I finally stopped after 14 years of use.
Marijuana use can also cause schizophrenia/psychosis - which may explain periods of extreme paranoia I occasionally suffered. But thankfully, it didn't seem to cause lasting brain damage. So when at 28 I rediscovered personal ambition and the capacity for long-term planning in my post-pothead life (shortening one's time-horizon is another side effect of pot) I was eventually able to finish college, graduate law school and establish my own law firm.
Looking back, I recognized in my own life the little-noted truth that marijuana addiction severely stunts your emotional growth. And when I started trying to save marriages in my Christian family-law practice, I recognized that factor in the lives of some of my clients and/or their spouses. It was practically axiomatic that if one party was a regular marijuana user, there would be no reconciliation in that relationship because the pothead was simply too self-absorbed and emotionally immature to change.
I was shocked during my 2014 campaign to learn how many self-described conservatives wanted marijuana to be legalized and how vigorously they would parrot the "medical use" talking points. In all but a few cases I could see that was just a smokescreen (pun intended), and they were just potheads like I had been. But it helped me to understand why legalizing weed was and is such a high priority for people like George Soros, who has heavily funded the effort nationally.
Why? Because habitually smoking pot makes you irrational and self-centered, robs you of initiative and keeps you emotionally immature. In other words, it turns otherwise normal people into weak-minded liberals - the perfect citizens for a dictatorial socialist regime.
So, in your assessment of what has gone in wrong in America - and why so many people have gotten swept up in nonsensical Antifa and BLM delusions and LGBT lunacy, submitted mindlessly to medical tyranny or have dropped out of the workforce to collect welfare and laze around at home - don't forget "the skunk factor." That stink you're smelling in the presence of a pothead isn't just the dope himself - it's the toxic stench of deliberate civilization-destroying social engineering by an elite class who wants everyone stoned to better control us.
Please go to henrymakow.com to read more.
I started smoking pot at 14 when a hippie-dude picked me up on a country road hitch-hiking home from my girlfriend's house. I had been an eager consumer of alcohol since the age of 12, and "weed" was a welcome addition to my wild and rebellious lifestyle. Although I took many other drugs over the next dozen years, marijuana was my drug of choice, and not just because it was cheap and easy to score.
I loved the feeling of "creative genius" that came over me when I got high, when all of my thoughts and imaginings seemed so much more interesting and exciting. But it was all just self-delusion, as I discovered from later reviewing, sober, the notes I had written while high. Nevertheless, like so many others of my generation, including many people still enslaved to it (and defending it now as "medical use," LOL), I became a full-fledged pothead.
In reality, marijuana makes you stupid, not smart. It's probably the single highest factor in the educational failure of teenagers - especially inner-city black kids who have ready access to it. When Anne and I personally ran our inner-city mission in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 2008-2015, next door to Commerce High School, we witnessed dozens of clusters of teens ducking into alleyways (and behind our church) to smoke weed on their way to school every morning. You can't learn anything when you're high, and when you come down from the high you suffer with dull-witted lethargy for the rest of the day or until you smoke some more. As pothead Tom Petty sang in "Learning to Fly," "coming down is the hardest thing."
I was one of the first potheads at my high school. At the start of my ninth grade year (1974), there was a small handful of us who would sneak off into the woods to get high each morning before the first bell. By the end of that school year, there were over a hundred. I had been on the honor roll through the eighth grade and even skipped a grade in science, but within the first two weeks of smoking pot, I sank from the very top to the very bottom of my algebra class and a year or so later completely dropped out of school.
It is commonly argued that marijuana is not an addictive drug, but that is a egregious and socially destructive lie. True, it's not physically addictive like heroin, and there are people who can take it or leave it as a recreational drug, just like alcohol. But marijuana is highly psychologically addictive and is especially hard to quit because the use of it over time profoundly affects one's ability to use reason and rationality in decision-making. That's a handicap that lingers for weeks after you stop because the active drug THC stores up in your fat cells and continues releasing slowly in the body. I didn't feel fully normal again literally for months after I finally stopped after 14 years of use.
Marijuana use can also cause schizophrenia/psychosis - which may explain periods of extreme paranoia I occasionally suffered. But thankfully, it didn't seem to cause lasting brain damage. So when at 28 I rediscovered personal ambition and the capacity for long-term planning in my post-pothead life (shortening one's time-horizon is another side effect of pot) I was eventually able to finish college, graduate law school and establish my own law firm.
Looking back, I recognized in my own life the little-noted truth that marijuana addiction severely stunts your emotional growth. And when I started trying to save marriages in my Christian family-law practice, I recognized that factor in the lives of some of my clients and/or their spouses. It was practically axiomatic that if one party was a regular marijuana user, there would be no reconciliation in that relationship because the pothead was simply too self-absorbed and emotionally immature to change.
I was shocked during my 2014 campaign to learn how many self-described conservatives wanted marijuana to be legalized and how vigorously they would parrot the "medical use" talking points. In all but a few cases I could see that was just a smokescreen (pun intended), and they were just potheads like I had been. But it helped me to understand why legalizing weed was and is such a high priority for people like George Soros, who has heavily funded the effort nationally.
Why? Because habitually smoking pot makes you irrational and self-centered, robs you of initiative and keeps you emotionally immature. In other words, it turns otherwise normal people into weak-minded liberals - the perfect citizens for a dictatorial socialist regime.
So, in your assessment of what has gone in wrong in America - and why so many people have gotten swept up in nonsensical Antifa and BLM delusions and LGBT lunacy, submitted mindlessly to medical tyranny or have dropped out of the workforce to collect welfare and laze around at home - don't forget "the skunk factor." That stink you're smelling in the presence of a pothead isn't just the dope himself - it's the toxic stench of deliberate civilization-destroying social engineering by an elite class who wants everyone stoned to better control us.
Please go to henrymakow.com to read more.
________
This isn't to promote cannabis but more for educational purposes:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.