• Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    It’s a plant. Plants should be legal to grow. Maybe sometimes you will have to take steps if you want to grow it and it’s an invasive plant, but it’s still a fucking plant.

    I use cannabis medicinally, and it’s true that I would prefer to vaporize it (I don’t smoke) when I use it than take some sort of pill. Because it gives me very fast pain relief. I’m sure if inhaling ibuprofen worked much faster than taking a pill, people would do that too.

    • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I also smoke it (I don’t vaporize) medicinally for my leg and I can go from “literally can’t stand up” to “pretty much fine” in like 4 tokes, it’s amazing 👍

      But one of the side effects I’ve been experiencing lately is that I’m always having a great time, which some people really seem to have a problem with 🤔 I can’t figure it out.

      I can’t help but say commodity cannabis ruined weed though. Dudes should be growing it in their back yards and sharing it freely with their dawgs, not paying $300 an ounce at a dispensary that feels like the DMV. The cannabis industry MUST be deregulated.

      • eyeon@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        The commerce should be regulated imo- there’s a lot of bad things people will do for profit when not properly regulated.

        That doesn’t prevent you from growing your own or consuming your buds bud, that’s just personal use and does not need to abide by the same regulations

      • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        $300 an ounce at a dispensary

        Damn. Living in Michigan is pretty great on this front. Weed is dirt cheap at dispensaries here.

        • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Our supply is kept artificially low by overregulation. You need something like a million dollars in liquid money to get the permits to grow commercially and they only give out a handful of licenses per year, ensuring that the rich get richer and everyone else gets fleeced. Still better than Iowa where “any amount” leads to jail time.

          • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That blows. I’ve heard some people complain similarly here, but the bar seems at least somewhat lower.

            I’m just thrilled I can go to a store with posted hours, rather than calling a guy who says to come to his house and then isn’t there, tells you to wait for him, and two hours later finally shows up to tell you he doesn’t have anything for you.

            (Not that this was my normal experience, but it happened enough to make me despise most dealers.)

        • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I still get mine from Earl 😂

          In seriousness backyard product does have risks, but so does dispensary stuff. A lot of these labs just rubber stamp stuff. I’ve read exposés on the cannabis industry that read like Upton Sinclair.

      • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        Here it’s like $100-140/oz, but quality fell massively after legalization. Like, really, genuinely, the worst chronic from before legalization is better than all but the best after.

        • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          We can only grow in Illinois with a valid medical card, otherwise it’s a $200 ticket. The police union fought back when they wanted to let everyone grow.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            I would hope that would also be changed with federal legalization. Getting the FDA involved shouldn’t be a roadblock to that. The FDA doesn’t get involved when you grow your own vegetables.

      • Today@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Is Michigan one of the states that they can’t ship hemp to? I didn’t think it was on the list. Eight horses hemp, flow gardens, hoku seed company… There’s a ton of legal weed out there that’s very reasonably priced.

        • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I’m in Illinois so I’m not super familiar, but although hemp is better than nothing it’s definitely not the same

          • Today@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            There’s hemp online with 20% thc or higher. It sells out quickly, but if you get on the email lists you’ll know when its dropping.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Do you know how many poppies it takes to make significant amounts of opium or heroin? We’re talking micrograms per gram of plant.

        Why shouldn’t growing it be legal? It would be pretty easy to find out if you were processing the stuff into something illegal.

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    First of all, I’m not at all against medical (or recreational for that matter) marijuana. It helps people, and those people should have access to medications that help them, and I’d rather have the current system than no access to medical marijuana at all. I feel like I need to start off with this because otherwise I feel like parts of this comment may come off as anti-marijuana, and that’s not my intention at all.

    But it’s always been kind of wild to me how the programs we have are handling medical marijuana, I’m pretty sure if a doctor tried to handle any other medication like we usually handle medical marijuana, he’d lose his license.

    Marijuana isn’t one drug, it’s several, THC, CBD, Terpenes, various other cannabinoids and other active ingredients, all with different interactions with your body and with each other that can produce a variety of effects on their own or in combination with the others.

    And often you’re given little to no medical guidance on which ones will actually help with which issues, how much or how often you should take them, and in what way.

    It’s kind of like being given a bucket of assorted pills that may or may not help your condition and being told to mix and match them and try taking them in various ways until you feel better.

    And don’t even get me started on smoking it. Yes, it can be an effective delivery method, and you can go back and forth on how marijuana smoke is more or less harmful in various ways than tobacco, but at the end of the day putting smoke in your lungs is bad for you, and I don’t think there’s a doctor in the world who would disagree with that. If nicotine was some sort of wonder drug that could help with various conditions and you could get a prescription for it, I guarantee you it wouldn’t come in the form of tobacco, you’d get pills, patches, maybe some kind of inhaler, vape or nebulizer, injections, suppositories, etc. some sort of purified product with a known dosage.

    It’s practically impossible to really do medical grade QA on a plant, there’s going to be variation from one plant to another, or even from different parts of the same plant depending on weather, light, water, fertilizer, and other variables in the growing conditions, not to mention just the genetic variations in the plants, and knowing exactly how much of which active ingredients are in the product is kind of key to being able to dial in what is an effective dose.

    Yes, a lot of that has to do with all of the shitty laws and regulations we have around marijuana and our broken medical system in general, I’m not going to go into that too much because this comment is already going to be long enough that a lot of people won’t read it, but I’ll leave it it’s hard to study marijuana to figure what works and how, and it’s hard to build up the kind of industry needed to make actual pure and consistent medical grade marijuana products.

    Now of course, if we handled medical marijuana the way it probably should be for the best results, it would probably turn out to be a hugely expensive undertaking under our current healthcare system. There’d probably be a lot of doctor-patient interaction to help you dial in your dosages, with more guidance on how and when to take it, we’d probably be getting into territory where you’d need some sort of a compounding pharmacist who could provide you with a custom blend of the right active ingredients in precise ratios in the delivery method that’s most effective for your condition and needs, there’d be a huge pharmaceutical industry (and probably all of the corporate greed that goes with it) that would need to be built to provide these medications, etc.

    And unless we have some major overhaul to our healthcare system, that would all probably price a lot of patients out of being able to afford these treatments.

    And yes, the current system works well enough for a lot of people, but it’s possible that it could work even better for them and for even more people if we treated marijuana more like other medications.

    I don’t exactly have a grand plan on how to fix things. I don’t want to make marijuana more expensive or inaccessible for the people who need it. I don’t want to feed into the pockets of big pharma. But I do want to make sure that our treatments are as effective as possible, that we’re treating marijuana seriously as a medication and that people view it as such, and that we’re not just settling for our treatment options being “good enough” when we can do even better. We didn’t stop at willow bark, we built on it to develop modern aspirin and other NSAIDs, and someday we will probably do the same for marijuana, there will probably come a day when almost no one will turn to plant-derived marijuana products for medical reasons because we will have long since isolated, synthesized, and developed entirely new classes of drugs based on what we learn from studying marijuana that do the same things more effectively, more safely, and with even less side-effects.

    • skulblaka@startrek.website
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      6 months ago

      If we had an appropriate scheduling for it so that it could be properly researched and manufactured we could just treat it like every other plant-based medicine we have (of which there are VERY many) - isolate and extract the compounds you’re interested in and recombine them in a pill or gel or aerosol form. Making supplements or tinctures or whatever, from cannabis, wouldn’t be any more difficult than creating aspirin from willow. The only reason it’s difficult is because it’s so highly scheduled that nobody is allowed to work with it.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Op is a moron. Any decent bud tender can tell u exactly what that bud will do for you and if you get it wrong? Oh no nothing really catastrophic happens except u may get paranoid.

        Ok now try that with any pill…oh ur dead? Yeah…

  • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    the whole point of the FDA taking over cannabis is the same as nicotine vaping

    shut down the industry with over regulation that sounds positive on the surface

      • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        no it has not been a failure

        the government was able to shut down most of the vape companies

        some of them were very up to code being made in clean rooms good enough to make pharmaceuticals

        now we have big tobacco vapes mixed in with shoddy products

        have you talked to industry leaders such as business owners of some of these vape companies?

        nicotine and cannabis industry is in shambles due to bad policies and laws

        no wonder look at the right leaning conservatives that keep getting voted in with the latest one having a prosecutor as a vice

        cannabis being rescheduled and not legalized is a trojan horse designed to make the people feel complacent and happy with only extreme regulation and the disappearance of sustainable, innovative products being the end result

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I see people vaping all over the place. If their goal was to shut down the industry, that sounds like a failure to me.

          This also sounds like a failure of their goal:

          Reported sales of cartridge products increased from $2.133 billion in 2020 to $2.496 billion in 2021; sales of disposable, non-refillable e-cigarette products increased from $261.9 million in 2020 to $267.1 million in 2021.

          https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-issues-third-report-e-cigarette-advertising-sales-us

          Generally, profits of an industry the government is shutting down don’t go up.

          • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Sure the industry is gaining money, but you’re ignoring specific company shutdowns and restrictions that shaped the industry out of the hands of certain players. There have been a lot of regulatory fingers in the pie, particularly above state level, that weren’t aimed at making the populace safer but instead at making those companies unable to produce or sell their most popular products. There’s also a lot of legal language bites like “e-cigarette” and “open container” that are seeing non-uniform interpretation in legal states, across vape legislature and cannabis legislature alike.

            Draconic legislature isn’t quite turning the country into a hellscape for consumers, sure. But it’s clearly a possible side effect that isn’t being considered, especially as states are beginning to take it upon themselves to start outlawing studied hemp-derived cannabinoids (like delta8/10 or THC-P or THC-A) that are provided for under the 2018 farm bill.

            Tl;Dr while the industry is growing, it’s clear it has enemies with legal power and that’s the crux of the complaint.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Okay, but this is what OP said:

              the whole point of the FDA taking over cannabis is the same as nicotine vaping

              shut down the industry with over regulation that sounds positive on the surface

              The vaping industry has not been shut down, it’s growing, as I demonstrated. So, again, if that was their goal, it was a spectacular failure.

              • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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                6 months ago

                Cool restatement. Did you actually read what I posted instead of snipping that post though? I acknowledge it isn’t working, but you can CLEARLY see intent of decisions there skewed toward market control of a new industry, especially based on the similarities (Product control focused on appeal, not risk) of legislature brought forward compared to previous concerns

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  I wasn’t quoting you, I was quoting what OP said and why I responded to it the way I did. OP claimed the goal was to shut the vaping industry down. I showed why that wasn’t true. It’s not my fault if you responded to me with some unrelated point.

        • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
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          6 months ago

          Unlikely. The public and political agendas are just the opposite for the two substances: most people support the expansion of cannabis products and oppose the expansion of nicotine products.

          • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            safe effective nicotine consumption were generally supported by the public too and was being ingrained in the culture in movies and tv

            now it is combustible cigarettes with alcohol being heavily promoted again as well in television and film

            if the US does not stop voting in senile past retirement age religious right leaning presidents who view any alteration in the citizen’s conscience it might not ever change or get better

              • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                the synthetic nicotine being produce is done with green chemistry meaning no heavy metals used in synthesis

                with the nicotine being lab made no ground pollutants such as lead and other heavy metals are present just like fake vanilla extract which most seasoning coming from India with polluted soil

                also less soil less environmental impact

                the ingredients have gotten safer over time as well also leading to changes in other industries

                hugely better product both health and environmental and all around

                not to mention not have the ill effects of second hand smoke

                my own lung capacity was around 80% and dropping during the years was consuming combustible nicotine and cannabis products but now is above 90% had my lungs checked by a doctor

                lightyears healthier

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  None of that has to do with your claim, and it is also more claims instead of evidence.

                  Where’s your evidence that there is a safe level of nicotine consumption?