For the sake of understanding: my point with this thread is NOT to advocate driving while high. I do believe that, if you're high, you should be doing stuff that is not likely to bring you criminal problems, and for what I care, a car is a dormant killing machine.

However... there is this dude who recorded a driving test with a toker, both before and after getting high. The results might surprise you.

My point IS: far from whether or not driving while high is safer or not... PRECISELY because it remains illegal, there is WHOLE LOT we still don't know about weed. And whatever little we know, the message remains the same: it is a wonderful plant.

The rant comes because it hurts me to see so much readiness to buy the prohibitionist's bullcrap, where arguments don't fit, the numbers betray the slogans and ignorance reigns supreme. All of a sudden, grow ops are, like, "black holes" of evil, where SOMETHING WRONG is somehow gonna happen (even when, ahem, "roughly (i.e. LESS than) six per cent of the approximately 8,000 marijuana grow operations investigated annually by police involve firearms, while 2.4 per cent of them involve other types of hazards or booby traps")

It hurts me because I saw two friends die to conditions which syntoms (say, pain? nausea? waste? inability to retain food?) would have been greatly alleviated by regular marihuana use.

It hurts me because, where I come from, people pop up pills like water. And they always want more. And they feel blessed for having them, and it's pills the first thing they think of whenever the $hit hits the fan.

If something is kept illegal, and demand is high, how long do you think it would take for crime to take over that market? Crime doesn't even have to make it illegal... the PLANT itself is illegal, for Crissakes.

Normalize the freakin' thing, and crime will pop off like an old balloon. I know my dealer will open up shop somewhere around here, so I don't worry. And there'll be lots like him.

I just want to put my two cents out there (it's obvious I've been wanting to say it for a while... wait, I have ALREADY said some of the above... well, never mind). And also ask everyone to, please, if not well informed about weed, please do so, and ask others to do so. There are people all over the freakin' world doing jail time for possesion, and deep, deep down, this is all a huge lie that, somehow, remains standing to this day. And it feeds from ignorance.