Cannabis Fun Club in Russia

Drugs kill people. But they save civilization - this is the conclusion that the political elites of developed countries seem to be coming to. However, for now it is not comme il faut to voice this opinion publicly - it is indecent. Only a few today openly dare to do this. As a rule, these are either wealthy people who are independent from anyone, or former officials who no longer risk their chairs
"I firmly believe that the war on drugs does more harm to our society than drug use itself." George Soros

God knows, something strange is happening in the world right now in the area of ​​attitudes towards drugs, something is shifting in the public consciousness towards greater drug tolerance. There is no talk about Holland and Switzerland, they have long been the talk of the town in this regard. But not long ago Britain legalized the medical (for now) use of marijuana... In Germany, a law was passed on the creation of Fixerstuben in the country - a network of points for the free distribution and use of low-potency narcotics. The first points are already operating in Hamburg, Hanover and Frankfurt am Main.

What about Europe? Even America, a country where fighting Colombian drug lords has become a national sport, a ritual curse for every gubernatorial candidate, and a wandering plot of Hollywood folklore... even this hard-hearted America seems to have wavered. Californians have overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that now legalizes the cultivation of marijuana and its use for medical purposes. But the Arizona initiative is even cooler - according to it, doctors are now allowed to prescribe patients any drugs in case of medical need. Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington have also decided positively on the issue of medical use of marijuana. Soros has donated several million dollars to social movements - participants in the fight for the legalization of marijuana. And that's not all.

In November 1998, the UN Secretariat received an unusual letter. Not only was the subject of the message unusual – the letter contained a demand to reconsider the “strategy of the war on drugs, which has proven its inadequacy” – but also the level of the signatories. The former UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar, former US Secretary of State in the Ronald Reagan administration George Shultz, former Prime Minister of Greece Andreas Papandreou, Nobel laureate John Polanyi and many other famous people in America and the world were dissatisfied with the war on drugs.

Recently, former French presidential candidate Lionel Jospin publicly stated that it would be better to smoke marijuana and get behind the wheel than to get drunk and get behind the wheel. The presidential candidate was hushed and there was a terrible scandal. What kind of madness is this?

What's going on on this planet anyway?..

Myths are crumbling...

MYTH ONE: DRUGS ARE A SOCIAL EVIL

The argument that economic troubles in Russia are the cause of drug addiction has already become a common cliche. However, if the cause of drug addiction was only the poor economic structure of society, then drug addiction would not exist in economically prosperous countries such as Canada, the USA... But drug addiction has always existed - in all centuries and among all peoples. And not only among peoples! It has been noted that even animals indulge in hallucinogenic mushrooms and herbs.

No, Elvis Presley did not die in a drug stupor from hopeless poverty. American bohemians are not addicted to cocaine and American students are not addicted to marijuana from poverty. Vysotsky did not shoot up and Oleg Dal did not drink vodka from social inferiority. The causes of drug addiction are not economic or social. They are biological.

It was with these considerations in mind that Soros wrote to the US President: "I am convinced that a drug-free America is a utopian dream. Some form of drug addiction or substance abuse is endemic to most countries..."

MYTH TWO: DRUG ADDICTS ARE A MINORITY

What does the tricky word "endemic" mean? It means "intrinsic, inherent." Researchers have long since drawn attention to the immanence of drugs in humanity. However, you don't have to be an expert to see what is not hidden...

Drugs have become such an integral part of our everyday life that they are not even noticed. The entire human culture and the basis of our pastime are narcotic. People periodically gather together to socialize, and during their conversations they take drugs orally. Some do it every day. Some once a week. Some on holidays. This is normal... During the war, soldiers were given a daily dose of C2H5OH diluted in water - 100 grams for the front... After high-level talks, the presidents of the two countries go to lunch and - purely symbolically! - take a dose... An American and a Japanese go to a bar after work and take drugs there. Russians and Ukrainians do it in their kitchens, talking about life. And what kind of communication is there without drugs?!..

They do this at weddings. This is done at funerals. This is done during calendar holidays. Actually, without drugs there is no holiday, no meeting, no wedding. Drugs are a symbol of our civilization.

Attempts to almost completely ban drugs have been made, but they have not led to anything good - everyone remembers the famous "dry" law in the USA and the accompanying rampant bootlegging mafia, underground jazz dens, where people went in the evenings to take C2H5OH illegally... Everyone also remembers the fight against alcoholism in the USSR in the 1980s, when instead of prohibited alcohol, the use of drug substitutes increased sharply. If it increased, it means there was an objective need, which was not taken into account when banning. Then the authorities in both the USA and the USSR came to their senses, realizing that people still cannot live without drugs. This is not a pampering, but a necessity.

Today, all drugs are divided into legal and illegal. The following substances are legal: ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine. No one is allowed to smoke tobacco, drink alcohol or brew chifir. The rest is prohibited. Moreover, it is prohibited not because of harm to health, but simply due to random historical factors. For example, alcohol is immeasurably more harmful than hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, but it is not prohibited. Smoking tobacco is more dangerous than smoking marijuana, but it is marijuana that is prohibited. Heroin is a thousand times more dangerous than ecstasy - both substances are prohibited.

It so happened that each culture legalized its traditional drug. The Europeans grew grapes, from which they extracted alkaloids. The Indians chewed coca and peyote cacti. The peoples of the North ate fly agarics. Asia smoked opium and hashish. But it turned out that it was not the Indians who conquered Europe, but the other way around, so now in America they drink, not chew. The Europeans colonized the North and forbade the Eskimos and other Chukchi from eating basically harmless mushrooms, but allowed them to drink harmful vodka.

And now the peoples of the North and the American Indians are practically destroyed. After all, the organisms of people have adapted to traditional drugs generation after generation, so Europeans can drink a lot. But the northern paleoanthropes, who had never even sniffed vodka before, do not have the necessary enzyme that breaks down alcohol, they quickly become drunkards and die from the "fire water".

The victorious civilizations brought with them and imposed their “traditional” values. But the losers did not sleep either. Globalization in the field of drugs began much earlier than in the field of high technology, the Internet and finance, so any regional drugs can be found anywhere in the world. Moreover, chemistry added fuel to the fire of drug addiction, synthesizing “a lot of new and interesting things.”

-- The "presentation" of morphine and cocaine in Europe took place 150 years ago. The "first time" happened to us during the bourgeois revolution of 1848, -- says the chief narcologist of Moscow, director of the Research Institute of Drug Abuse Prevention Evgeny Bryun. -- It was a new aroma of a new era: Baudelaire in the minds, light decadence in the air, landaum in the mouth... Then the interest in eastern "herbs" suddenly disappeared. A closer and more widespread acquaintance of Europeans with drugs occurred at the end of the 19th century. In Europe, there was a relatively widespread passion for morphine, hashish, codeine, and heroin was gaining popularity. At that time, little was known about drugs, and this almost mystical spirit of the East aroused great interest. Russia has always been a little late in this regard. Our first drug wave began only in 1913 after the announcement of the tsar's "dry" law. The First World War added fuel to the fire, then the Civil War. The surge of drug addiction in the country arose precisely at these turning points. Cocaine and morphine became fashionable, and especially cocaine with alcohol. There was even a catchphrase: "The revolution was won by roach and cocaine."

...Why does the body need drugs? They raise the tone. They allow you to change your emotional state. They relieve stress and fatigue.

Our entire civilization is a continuous stress: we live not only in an "abnormal" artificial environment, but also in an abnormal quantity - there are 100,000 times more people on Earth than animals with similar weight and type of nutrition, and cramped conditions, as we know, cause aggression, which must be suppressed or somehow redirected so as not to destroy society. And if you also consider what animal we came from... Not the most successful one.

The thing is that primates have virtually no natural enemies. They are their own enemies. And yet, primates are not predators and do not possess predatory "instrumental power" - claws, fangs, strength... And in such animals, as biologists have long known, the population-centric instinct is weakened - the instinct to restrain intraspecific aggression. And if such an animal "made it to the top", it needed powerful external limiters and channelers of aggression. The general name for these systemic limiters is culture. Religion, morality, sports, cinema, games, carnivals... And drugs. As an integral part of culture.

That's why drug users are the majority. It's just that everyone takes different things and with different frequencies...

-- A person has three vital drives: the food instinct, the sexual instinct, and the instinct to change one's mental state, -- continues the chief narcologist of Moscow. -- Ivan Petrovich Pavlov talked about this. There is an innate human need to regularly change one's mental state. For this, a person needs either psychoactive substances or psychoactive actions. Every person has a need to experience delight, to receive pleasure and displeasure... If a person does not receive his norm of emotions, he falls into depression. If a person does not experience these alternative "extreme" states of consciousness for a long time, he gets sick. This is why carnivals were so popular in ancient times, they performed exactly this function -- they allowed people to bathe in strong emotions.

But there is a group of people (about 30% of the population) whose threshold for these mental reactions is quite high. They need excessive stimuli - much more intense than ordinary people - in order to experience at least some pleasure, in order to see some new meaning. These people are emotional diabetics. They are the ones who can become addicted to legal or illegal drugs or become adrenaline junkies - mountain climbers, racers, gamblers... If not one, then another, but 30% are born potential drug addicts, and nothing can be done about it.

Each person has their own choice of doping. But it has been noted that if the amount of legal psychoactive substances (the same cigarettes, vodka) decreases, people start using illegal ones, because the need for them does not disappear. Let's remember 1985. The adoption of another "dry" law. They began to use pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizers, dichlorvos.

And children, in the absence of light, familiar alcoholic drinks, drank bad wine, moonshine. Children always drink something! And here you always have to choose the lesser of two evils - beer instead of vodka, marijuana instead of heroin. And then, during the "dry" law, children had to choose the greater evil. Alcohol became unavailable to children in principle, tobacco became unavailable to them. At that time, there were about eighteen factories that made tobacco. Half of them were closed for reconstruction at one time. Why, who needed it - is not clear. And these non-linear decisions at the top led to very high social tension in society. Young people began to use "black stuff". In the East, it is called "koknar", an opium decoction. At first in its pure form, at first they drank, then they began to inject, make heroin in a home-made way. When there is a need, but there is no way out, then they begin to look for it, "manipulate" and use all sorts of nasty things.

The number of deaths from alcohol has increased because people drank a lot of homemade moonshine instead of quality drugs... After all, what's good about a legal drug? Because it's pure, not a surrogate...

"Overdoses of low-quality street drugs maim or kill users, which leads to an overload of the healthcare system," Western economists echo the capital's chief narcologist.

MYTH 3: YOU CAN GET HOOKED ON DRUGS AND THEN THERE WILL BE TERRIBLE WITHDRAWALS

This is a half-truth. Physiological addiction is caused only by those drugs that are similar in their chemical composition to metabolites - substances that participate in the process of metabolism in the body. These are alcohol, nicotine, endorphins, amphetamines, opiates - they are always in the body, therefore regular use of alcohol, nicotine, morphine, heroin, opium causes physiological addiction - the drug is integrated into the metabolic processes in the body instead of its natural analogue, and then, when there is a deficiency in the body, withdrawal symptoms of varying severity begin. Alcoholics and heroin addicts suffer in search of a dose and can even die without it; smokers shoot up a cigarette, and when it is impossible to get a cigarette, they start smoking clipped nails, hair, horse sorrel...

Some drugs that are produced inside the body (amphetamines, endorphins) are responsible for the state of euphoria, calm, pain suppression... The content of these natural drugs in the blood of lovers is very high, that is why the feeling of being in love is so pleasant. Some especially advanced citizens manage to maintain a sufficiently high level of physiological endorphins and amphetamine group substances in the body with the help of special practices - oriental exercises, cunning diets and breathing exercises - and therefore are constantly in a "joyful state", believing that they have achieved enlightenment... By the way, one of the methods of treating drug addiction is based on this effect of replacing artificial drugs with natural ones.

Another group of substances, hallucinogens, do not cause physiological addiction. That is why they are considered harmless and are gradually being legalized in different countries. The most striking example is marijuana. Hallucinogens (mushrooms, LSD, cannabis, ecstasy) cause only psychological addiction, so quitting smoking, for example marijuana, is immeasurably easier than quitting smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol or injecting heroin. "We should never exaggerate the harm from smoking marijuana, because this could discredit our warnings about stronger drugs," warn prominent figures in the American establishment.

By the way, few people know, but there are people who are hooked on hypnosis. One of the authors of this material witnessed how hypno-addicts follow a touring hypnotist from one venue to another, buy tickets for each performance and go on stage, where they are subjected to the hallucinogenic effect of hypnosis, which is similar to the effect of drugs... By the way, according to some data, a single dose of LSD is equivalent to several sessions of psychotherapy, and costs ten times less.

MYTH 4: PEOPLE GO FROM SOFT DRUGS TO STRONG DRUGS
In order to be convinced of the falsity of this thesis, it is enough to look around. Millions of people around us smoke. How many of them, having started with Marlboro, switched to heroin?.. Almost all people drink. And some even suffer from alcohol addiction. How many morphine addicts are there among those who drink?..

According to statistics obtained by the US government, "for every 100 people who have tried marijuana, only one currently uses cocaine once a week or more."

MYTH 5: THE DUTCH EXPERIENCE OF LEGALIZING MARIJUANA HAS FAILED. HOLLAND HAS TURNED INTO THE "DRUG DUMP OF EUROPE"
This point of view is usually voiced by those who have been to Amsterdam and were shocked by it because they were not used to it. Indeed, the whole city has a specific smell of marijuana. Stoned blacks and white tourists walk around the squares. Ecstasy and crack are sold on the streets... This is the "drug dump of Europe" in the eyes of those who are not used to it. I think that if a person with such logic came to Arbat for the first time in his life and saw hundreds of colorful nesting dolls, he would say that Moscow has turned into the "nesting doll dump of Europe". But let's turn to the facts.

And they are as follows: since the legalization of soft (safe) drugs, the consumption of hard (dangerous) drugs in Holland first stopped growing, then began to fall, and now Holland is in last place in Europe in terms of heroin consumption! Unlike those countries where the policy of "grab and don't let go" is being implemented.

Here is what the thinking American elite says about this, through the mouth of the same Soros: "If public opinion were ready for this, I would propose to destroy the "black" drug market, allowing the use of heroin and some other drugs on medical prescriptions for some registered patients suffering from addiction, at the same time forming public opinion against drug use, conducting work on addiction prevention and explaining the harm and undesirable consequences of drug use, in special cases resorting to legal sanctions. If Switzerland, Holland and Great Britain, as well as an ever-increasing number of countries, have found such experiments possible, then this is possible in the USA as well."

MYTH SIX: INCREASING PUNISHMENTS CAN LEAD TO A DECREASE IN ILLEGAL DRUG CONSUMPTION
In some Asian countries, illegal drugs are punishable by execution. For example, the legislation of Thailand is very strict in this regard. However, drug consumption in Thailand is growing.

In principle, the phrase: "Prohibition is not a solution to the problem" has become a common cliche throughout the civilized world. And indeed, prohibition of consumption and supply is the most ineffective method of combating demand. However, even cliches that are true to the point of banality are somehow immediately forgotten when it comes to illegal drugs. And society again and again diligently steps on the same rake, demanding: "Prohibit! Tighten!" Although the historical experience of the United States during the "dry" law has proven that prohibition of supply does not reduce demand, but only gives rise to a mafia that satisfies this demand.

Moreover, according to observations by narcologists, prohibition can provoke consumption: two thirds (!) of young people first become involved with narcotic substances out of curiosity and a desire to find out what is beyond the forbidden. (For more details, see F. Rice, "Psychology of Adolescence and Young Adulthood." -- St. Petersburg, 2000.) American specialists are of the same opinion: "Demonization of drugs can make them attractive in the eyes of teenagers who, at a certain stage of life, are prone to rebellion."

According to the admissions of the Ministries of Internal Affairs of various countries (including the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs), the effectiveness of the police system in the fight against drugs is 10-20% - this is the amount of drugs detained by law enforcement agencies. 10% effectiveness is 90% ineffectiveness. It would be better not to even spend money on this. Because the 1000% profitability of the drug business is ensured by the state: by prohibiting drugs and removing an insignificant share of them from circulation, the state objectively plays into the hands of the mafia, inflating prices for the product.

The cost of a gram of cocaine is a few cents (its production is no more difficult than the production of aspirin), and the selling price is 100 - 150 dollars. This is the price of the ban. Millions of drug dollars are withdrawn from legal circulation through the prohibitive efforts of the state, slowing down the economy. These are secondary losses. And the direct ones are millions of dollars spent by the state on the ineffective fight against illegal drugs.

Drug addiction cannot be eliminated (demand cannot be eliminated, it can only be satisfied). But the drug mafia can be eliminated if the supply and consumption of illegal drugs are brought into a legal channel. According to Russian police statistics, 30 to 60% of property crimes (thefts, robberies, armed robberies) are committed by drug addicts looking for money for another dose. If a drug addict could get a dose of drugs in a disposable syringe for free at a drug treatment center, the number of crimes in the country would be halved, and the staff and budget of the Ministry of Internal Affairs would be similarly reduced (or with the same budget and a reduction in staff, the salaries of officers would double).

“Focusing finances and efforts on interdiction of drug sales is contrary to the basic principles of economics. As long as the demand and profit from the sale are so great, it will be impossible to stop the trade. There will always be a large number of people willing to risk even imprisonment in order to make a large sum of money... The war on drugs cannot be won. It’s time to lift the suicidal ban,” says Soros.

MYTH SEVEN: THE STATE HAS THE RIGHT TO CARE FOR ITS CITIZENS AGAINST THEIR WILL, IN PARTICULAR, TO PROHIBIT THEM FROM TAKING ILLEGAL DRUGS
As the Commissioner for Drug Abuse in Hamburg, Mr. H. Bossong, rightly noted in St. Petersburg (February 1995): “You cannot teach a person to lead a healthy lifestyle under the threat of criminal punishment...”

The Bolsheviks once tried to drive humanity to happiness with an iron fist. It didn't work. It turned out that the formula: "The Fuhrer thinks for us" is not the most effective for the functioning of an economically successful society. Systems theory states that a complex system works the better, the more decision-making centers it has. In relation to society, this means that everyone should be responsible for themselves. After all, in a democratic secular state, a person has the right to commit suicide. By any means...

sent Wazzup