@al
I'm not sure I agree with your point about comparative potency. For sure, some weed's stronger than other weed. But the incentive for growers and buyers is to favour the stronger over the weaker and thus selectively to breed only the stronger. After all, whereas alcohol serves a social function beyond getting twatted, and so can support a market for weaker booze, that's not so clearly the case with dope. Most of the time, that's smoked for the sake of getting boxed.

The schizophrenia point's interesting, since it plays into a public perception that schizophrenia makes you dangerous, which it plainly doesn't in the vast majority of cases. I'd hazard a guess that there's a good number of schizophrenics (allowing that we can agree on a meaning for the word "schizophrenia" in the first place) are never diagnosed because the condition doesn't make enough of an impact on their lives; of those who are, most just get on with it and lead a fairly reassuringly unremarkable life for most of the time.

Now, it might be that some people are better off without dope - but that's just trivially true.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 26 Jan 2009, 11:20, Reply)