Well, that's a plant.

How about a general compromise and settle on "Shrub"?

No, shrub is synonymous with bush. Your fake smile doesn't hide your fake compromise .

Herbs & plants,

Botanical entity?

Fuck a duck, I'll put my hands up if I'm wrong and it is a bloody tree!!!!!
No links for obvious reasons but just Google cannabis tree.
2 hours late night debating that took!

Teen who butchered two friends was addicted to skunk cannabis


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1770

^

It's a drink, not a drug.

How can something I like be a recreational drug?

Cannabis addiction soars as drug gets stronger

This was front page of the Independent too yesterday.





What about comparing it to drugs actually considered addictive? The more dangerous claim was in the Independent too



Excuse my language but this is bullshit. The strongest skunk you can buy today is between 20-25% THC, a lot of it is around 10%. Good hash, like Howard Marks used to import is up to 30% THC. Soapbar hash, common ten years ago, is poor quality but it is cut with (sometimes literally) shit, glue, plastic and God knows what else far more unhealthy than actual cannabis.

The 'third of the price' claim is baffling. The Independent says


'Skunk' hasn't dropped this dramatically in price, and is nearer to the quoted 1994 price (in my experience). Soapbar hash has dropped in this time by a great amount - demand has fallen as people realise they were smoking rubbish. Good hash remains expensive.

Independent article: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health ... 369014.ece

I the 1980's, 'oil' was a prevalent form of hash, some of it having a THC content of 50%. (I think it was then a class A drug) In 1979 Afghan Black was £7 a quarter.
So remember guys, drugs were better under Maggie.

Nice tips, you two above me. It seems that the good old Maily Telegraph is in a bit of a flap about cannabis too - it was very happy to report The Independent's U-turn after ten years of campaigning to decriminalise the drug.

Yesterday, The Maily Telegraph printed a double page feature concerning a Barbara Green's teenage daughter who was 'addicted' to skunk. Ms Green was prompted to blab her story as she had read a similar tale in The Torygraph detailing an account of a boy who suffered cannabis induced psychosis. You should have heard my mother ranting about it over the dinner table!

Can the medical report (linking cannabis to psychosis) in The Lancet, mentioned in yesterday's Torygraph's article, be trusted? What sort of tests were undertaken to confirm this notion? Have similar methods been used to establish a link between skunk and addiction? I am very cynical about what the right-wing press publish concerning Mary Jane. Why not write reams of articles about cocaine and heroin to scare the sh*t out of us?

As you might have guessed, I haven't much of a clue about cannabis. It seems to me, however, that all the legal drugs available to us, such as booze and fags, don't really do much to give us what we really want. Some renegade scientists say that the need to get 'high' is not dissimilar to the drive for oxygen, food and sex. Others go further and state that the War on Drugs is a war on consciousness.

It's really a throwback to the days of Randolph Hearst. Hearst wanted to criminalise the hemp industry because so many of the other uses for hemp (such as paper-making) conflicted with his own business interests, such as paper mills.

Sure, there are other reasons why the Mail/Express etc are more nati soft drugs (or at least more strident). Probably 'cos nice middle class kids in suburbia are more likely to be smoking the occasional doobie or dropping a pill than mainlining the brown.

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

What are they picking on me for? Sorry, Mary Jane's my middle name. That and my mum's CD collection leads me to believe she may have been a toker in the past, not that she'd ever tell me.

Phil Hammond, GP and stand-up comedian, refers to the Lancet as the medical equivalent of the News of the World.

Would William Randolph Hearst have had much influence on UK thinking re cannabis? Did he have business interests over here too?

Thats odd. My middle name is Cokehead and my mother has an extraordinary amount of mirrors around her house.