Originally Posted By: Trav
The fact is kids have been smoking cigarettes for a hundred years, they were always easy to get and still are.
Kids get booze when they are teenagers and party, they still get booze easy enough today.
Those horses are out of the barn now they want to let another even more miserable one out.
I grew up in a drug/tobacco free household with extremely moderate alcohol consumption (dad might have a beer a week, mom might have a glass of wine a couple times a month if that). My relatives were a bit different...everything under the sun, but did kind of try to hide it. I first smoked pot at age 14. I didn't touch a cigarette until I was 15. I didn't drink unattended/for recreation until I was 17. Cigarettes were easy to get, but not as easy as pot. Alcohol was comparatively difficult to get, though senior year the floodgates seemed to open.
Alcohol almost train-wrecked my life, and to an extent I am still reeling from the consequences. Tobacco scares me to death as I am now addicted to dip and worry that I won't quit before it harms my health. It sounds stupid to not be able to stop putting dead plant matter in your mouth, but the cravings can be really difficult to beat, especially with dip having about 50% more nicotine per "serving" than a cigarette. Over the decade that I used pot though, about half of that decade practically daily, I never had to deal with any major consequences with it. No arrests, no crazy behavior, no spilling spit cups, no lighting the yard on fire, no hangovers. Just good clean fun. There are only two reasons I don't use now...if I had an accident at work, regardless of fault, I would be drug tested. The second reason is that drug dealers are usually [censored] people and obnoxious to deal with. A store would be so much better.
I hope the rest of the country follows suit, and I hope that one day the federal ban will be lifted. Big tobacco, big alcohol, and big pharma can go cry a river.
