Scope the Canadian researchers asserting that marijuana legalization somehow grows the prospects of automobile accidents, as though the USA hasn’t trademarked the basic premise of corporate propaganda. As ever, privilege to convey information means privilege to manipulate information.
It’s been a running joke among law enforcement for years that drunk drivers are easy to spot for their being more likely to speed and/or drive recklessly, whereas stoned drivers are easy to spot for their tendency to go well *under* the speed limit as paranoia prompts them to overcompensate. Where drunks helplessly give little to no regard for their surroundings, stoners by default are pulled outside themselves to varying degrees. The effects of the two, drinking versus toking, are every bit as dissimilar as the id and the superego. But when pharma affords as much to marketing as to out of court settlements, this bullshit is what the public receives.
An objective study on car accident fatalities caused by perfectly legal pills would blow this assertion by funded researchers out of the water, but it’s the one and same mass hallucination justifying lacked personal responsibility that rationalizes corporate-level irresponsibility. I don’t think endangering others is any legal right, and I don’t think being prevented from endangering others is itself an infringement of any civil or basic human right, but only egos might ever see a problem with either claim. If everyone in the country were plastered, giving little to no regard for their surroundings, corporations would make a killing, from alcohol manufacturers/distributors to the counselors and healthcare networks dealing with the aftermath, to say nothing of the prison industrial complex. But if everyone in the country were higher than kites, drifting above and beyond themselves, they’d be more focused on compensating for themselves than endangering anyone or enriching anyone at cost to the life and liberty of others.
Freedom’s not the ability to impose, it’s the ability to not be imposed upon, yet here we are in a nation that measures patriotism by eagerness to see fellow Americans suffer, whether by favoring any war, by favoring private gun ownership, or by resistance to traditional welfare, resistance to masks specifically or to universal free healthcare generally. Bluntly refuse to impose thine will across others no matter the circumstances, refusing to ever use and/or abuse anybody, refusing to live your life by lying, cheating or stealing regardless of ego-maniacal rationalizations for survival or what one subjectively feels one is owed, and you will be shown the door to any and every institution. Recognizing this reality, marijuana has played no small role in my thus far escaping death or imprisonment.
I do not have to hide my convictions or principles in the trenches of oblivion, or underneath any flag, religious symbology or corporate logo, for unlike the synonymous one and all drunkards, patriots, zealots and brand loyalists, I require no assistance in carrying my blame or my credit, not while the universe beyond costumed pageantry of egos freely provides completion where actual voids may lay. Because integrity and free will eternally accomplish all the many things which any flattery, any safety net of oblivion or any promise of marketing, cannot.
No high school dropout, or societal dropout for that matter, writes as do I without having read an awful lot and without having read a lot of awful. But I actually quite mindfully avoided many of the epic classics of literature, because reaching my own conclusions always meant more to me than the ability to quote others. If I happen to reach similar conclusions as great thinkers of the past, who the fuck cares. My lifetime is not about replicating the experiences, thoughts and feelings of anybody else. No lifetime should be. A conditioned majority rules will never address how a harmless thing might in fact be harmless, just as my mom’s rightwing Facebook circle will never show her examples of black collectivist communities policing their own, in the same sense that what we are guided to understand is always always always a pathway never conducive to our integrity or our free will. As evidenced by my own mother’s complete inability to realize any possible omission from where she is informed of the worlds beyond her hospital bed. Devout in Roman-Catholicism all her years yet the one person working to maintain her existence is the one non-Christian she knows. Complacency to spite anyone’s experiences, thoughts and feelings is no less self-destructive than crawling inside a bottle of rotgut. Admittedly, there are times where imbibing spirits might provide one with a state altered enough to grant them a necessarily different perspective. And while there are certainly safer means and methods for achieving that end, marijuana or transcendental meditation or whatever else one can grasp as though their lives depended on nothing more and nothing less, there forever remains a stoic fucking difference between celebrations of brazen ignorance and abject joy at all the unknown left to be observed.
There is a specific reason why there is no money in truth. The same reason why everyone daydreams equality as a sharing of riches and predictably with their own persuasion all the richer, rather than the sharing of suffering.