I Voted
It took me less than 5 minutes at a little after 2PM CST as I was the only one in the place.
From the signs just outside the exclusion zone I see that Amendment 1 is supposed to be ‘a land grab’. I’m not sure how dedicated funding to a trust to buy land translates into a ‘land grab’, but some people seem to believe it.
Amendment 2 is supposed to support drug abuse. How replacing Oxycotin and other addictive narcotic pain killers with marijuana supports drug abuse is beyond me, but some people believe it enough to have signs printed.
So far my vote has counted, as I can see them in the counts in Okaloosa County.
6 comments
In 2016 I may make a button that says something like “I Voted — for all the good it did.”
All my young life I remember being told that marijuana had “no legitimate medical uses” so I didn’t use it. Not surprisingly, the drug is still around, distributed in its classic illegal form, and people are still sent to jail when they are caught with it.
I now believe that sanity has no legitimate medical uses…
(I’ve seen references to the fact that in some states where medical marijuana has been legalized, some town law enforcement authorities are rejecting the change and arresting people for possession anyway. There’s a reason some communities call the police “the law” …)
It got over 57% approval, but it needed 60%. That kind of support should generate some interest among people in the state legislature, but it won’t.
I didn’t personally use it, but you couldn’t avoid a contact buzz in the military in the late ’60s, it was everywhere. You floated through the Army area of barracks on Shemya on a marijuana haze.
When I was working, I avoided seeing it, because it wasn’t worth the paper work or overtime costs to make an arrest for marijuana possession unless there was a very substantial amount.
California didn’t legalize marijuana for non-medical purposes this election but any amount under 28.5 grams is punishable by a maximum $100 fine, which is almost the same thing. The reality is that cops aren’t going to bother with marijuana arrests in California, most of the people they might want to arrest probably have medical marijuana cards anyhow (I could get one myself if I liked the way the stuff made me feel, because of back pain and nausea caused by said pain).
Having ridden herd on my Mother’s meds and reading the side-effects on so many different drugs and products, marijuana has to be classed as one of the least problematic drugs available.
It grows wild all over the US and was cultivated for decades as fiber crop like flax, but the attitude that gave us Prohibition didn’t want anyone having fun.
It doesn’t exactly stop pain, but it does make it so you don’t care so much about the pain, as well as easing some of the side effects of pain like nausea. Compared to most pain medications marijuana’s side effects are almost comically mild. Yeah, making fun of stoners is good fun, but you should see what muscle relaxers typically prescribed for back pain do to me — BAM! I’m a drooling moron for the next six hours. As versus merely mellow and relaxed. Right now I can still get by without pain medication other than the occasional Advil (which if you start taking a lot of it will rip your stomach lining into shreds and you’ll bleed out your rear), but if it gets to the point where I need something stronger, you betcha that I’m going to seek out a doctor for a medicine card, because I’ve had “real” pain medication before and it makes any high from marijuana seem as mild as a Midwestern meal of meat and potatoes.
If we lived in a reasonable country you could get marijuana for your pain without becoming a Federal felon. Alas, we don’t.
It’s almost as if people don’t understand what the ‘standard’ drugs that are prescribed actually do to people. Most of the heavy duty pain meds makes you worthless. The pain may be gone, but so is most of what you need to walk and talk. There are all kinds of things prescribed that have warnings about driving or operating heavy machinery because of possible side effects.
All of the NSAIDs including aspirin are blood thinners and can cause internal bleeding.
Lance Mackey won 1000-mile dogsled races while using marijuana for the effects of the chemo for his cancer. That sort of shows that ‘grass’ is not as debilitating as the standard drugs.