The weed with roots in hell

When I was a youth -- high school, college, and beyond -- everybody smoked pot. By everybody I mean pretty much all my friends and people who went to the same parties and belonged to the same political organizations (I was an activist) and roommates and girlfriends and casual acquaintances. It was just completely normal. It was illegal, but that didn't really apply to white people with college degrees. That just wasn't something we had to worry about, the cops weren't interested in us.

Anyway, I really didn't see much, if any harm in it. All of the people I knew were perfectly functional, they did well in school then they held jobs, often very demanding jobs; people who used cannabis were at no evident disadvantage to people who didn't. It seemed obvious that alcohol had far more potential for harm, and that just about all of the harm done by cannabis was the result of it being illegal. So, obviously, I and just about everybody I knew were convinced that it ought to be legal.

I actually lost interest in cannabis many years ago -- I can't even remember exactly how many. Don't know why, I just outgrew it I guess. But my opinion about legalization didn't change, and I was glad when it started to happen. However . . . 

It turns out that the products available today are not weed as I knew it. When I was in college it was basically impossible to consume enough pot to suffer any evident harm other than being really, really stoned. We even had dope smoking contests, which pretty much had to be won on style points because there was no limit to what a person could consume. This is no longer true. Back in my day, the very best weed was about 4% THC. Nowadays, due to selective breeding, whole marijuana flowers are more than four times as potent. But kids aren't smoking flowers any more, they're vaping products that are 90% to almost 100% pure THC. 

This is not the same drug. It can be addictive, cause serious psychological problems, and physical sickness. It's especially dangerous for young people whose brains are still developing. I'm still for legalization of marijuana as it once was, but we need regulation to eliminate these super-potent products, and we especially need to keep them out of the hands of adolescents. It turns out capitalists ruin everything.