Not Your Father’s Woodstock Booze: States push for higher potency beer
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:23 am | By: Radical Russ
Make it more potent for the taste of it! Yeah, that's it!
When it comes to the popular recreational relaxant that is non-toxic and cannot kill you, its increasing potency is a cause for alarm:
(TIME Magazine) 25% of BC Bud is made of the psychoactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In contrast, the pot that the hippie generation smoked in the 1970s had only 2% THC content, and most pot consumed in the U.S. today averages about 7% THC.
(Chicago Tribune) One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s. Today’s leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are “more plastic, more sensitive to being modified,” are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
(ABC News) With stronger pot, emergency rooms have reported more associated accidents. Just this week, seven people were killed when the driver — drove the wrong way on a New York highway and collided head on with a pickup truck. Although the drivers family has disputed the results, toxicology tests showed high levels of alcohol and marijuana.
(New York Times) “It’s like drinking beer versus drinking whiskey,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency and a strong opponent of legalizing marijuana. “If you only have access to whiskey, your risk is going to be higher for addiction. Now that people have access to very high potency marijuana, the game is different.”
(Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics) The new marijuana in the market place is not the 1 percent to 2 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the psychoactive ingredient that produces the “high”. Today’s new cultivation methods are producing a drug with up to 30 percent THC, or 3,000 percent higher than the old 1960’s-1980’s available marijuana.
But if it is a popular recreational intoxicant that is toxic and can kill you, it’s increasing potency is a victory for connoisseurs and retailers:
(USA Today) A growing number of states are moving to allow higher alcohol content in beer, despite concerns from some substance-abuse experts.
Alabama and West Virginia have passed laws increasing the legal alcohol-by-volume cap for beer from 6% to as high as 13.9% this year. Similar efforts are underway in Iowa and Mississippi, two states with very restrictive limits on the sale of high-alcohol beer, said Sean Wilson, former president of Pop the Cap, North Carolina’s successful grass-roots effort that raised the state’s limit in 2005.
Vermont raised the cap to 16% and Montana to 14% last year.
The average alcohol content in beer is 4.65%, and in wine 11.45%, according to a 2002 study by the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, Calif.
Twenty states still place some kind of limit on the amount of alcohol in beer, Wilson said.
Paul Gatza, director of the national Brewers Association based in Boulder, Colo., said limiting alcohol content restricts flavors and styles because “you can’t put as much malt or other sugars in your beer as you may want to.”
Gatza said consumers of specialty or microbrewed beers, also known as craft beers, “don’t drink to get drunk. They drink to appreciate the flavors.”
Right… and I smoke pot because I appreciate the scents. This is a theme that goes back to the days of Nixon: the idea that people don’t drink to get drunk, they do it to socialize, but pot smokers are only smoking weed to get high. Tell you what, next time there’s a cocktail party, swap out all the beer for O’Doul’s, all the wine with grape juice, and all the cocktails with soft drinks, and let’s see how much the alcohol drinkers can socialize without getting a buzz on.
The reason alcohol drinkers can make this absurd statement is because they differentiate between the “socializing” (getting a buzz on) and the “getting drunk” (alcohol poisoning). They don’t conceive of a similar state for marijuana consumption. In their mind there’s “not smoking pot” and there’s “stoned out of your mind”, with no intermediate step. This is often because marijuana is illegal, so people who may have experimented a time or two did so under conditions that required smoking it all and smoking it quickly. They’ve never experienced an Amsterdam-like nice mellow joint followed by a productive day. So an increase in cannabis potency, to them, means the pot that used to get them “stoned out of your mind” will now get their kids “way stoned out of your mind”.
Meanwhile, having worked for fifteen years in bars every weekend, bars with parking lots full of cars that I can guarantee weren’t all driven by designated drivers, I can tell you that consumers of microbrews are doing it to get drunk. The guy who was pounding 4% beers at $2 a glass will be more than happy to pound 16% beers at $5 a glass, knowing that his $20 in beer money may only get him four microbrews compared to ten tap beers, but he can get drunker quicker and take fewer pee breaks for the effort, and the beer tastes better.
Isn’t it amazing? Here we have a drug we know kills 35,000 people a year directly from ingestion and another 40,000 due to its effects, a drug that is proven to cause serious harm to every organ in the body, a drug at the heart of a vast majority of domestic abuse cases, crimes, and assaults, and not only are states deciding to allow it to be up to four times more potent, but the marketers of the drug are boasting that it also tastes better and the increased potency doesn’t matter. But marijuana that kills no one, is non-toxic to cells and organs, and brings people together in peace and communion, when that becomes up to four times more potent it is serious cause for alarm.
I guess we better not tell them that the marijuana tastes better these days.
Here’s what the guy in England who was fired from his job as the government’s scientific advisor on the misuse of drugs had to say about it:
“The big problem, as he sees it, is that while politicians love to be “tough” on classified drugs, their response to the far greater danger posed by the most dangerous drug of all, alcohol, has been “puny”.
“We are not taking the tidal wave of damage seriously enough. If we want to reduce deaths, alcohol and heroin are the issues. I have four children, now aged 18 to 26, and at almost every party they went to in their teenage years, a child was taken to hospital with alcohol poisoning.
“Liver disease will become a worse killer than heart disease within twenty years. Scotland already has the highest proportion of people with sclerosis of the liver in the world. There are hundreds of kids lying in hospital beds waiting for transplants that will never come. But when Sir Liam Donaldson [the Government's chief medical adviser] put forward a radical approach to reduce alcohol consumption by increasing the price, within seconds the government rejected his proposal.”
Nutt is not a puritan. He confesses to “liking” alcohol, to having binged occasionally when he was young, and to having tried some drugs as a student – but not cannabis, because he has never smoked. The worst problem with alcohol, he says, is that it is “insidious”: people develop a strong head and aren’t aware of its toxicity. But the main issue is that moderation doesn’t seem to be possible for many people, especially the young.
He has asked his own children why their friends set out to get wasted and break the windows of the Keynsham church. “They say it is the excitement of not knowing what will happen.”
His matrix isn’t going to stop them experimenting, so what would positive action should politicians take, short of sacking their advisers? “We cannot make alcohol illegal. We need a structural approach. The real price of alcohol has dropped by half since Labour came to power and the use has doubled. To bring consumption down, prices should be doubled, maybe tripled, and the drink-driving limit should be reduced. We could even change the age at which it is legal to start drinking. In the US, since most states switched back from 18 to 21 (in the late 1980s), 170,000 lives have been saved in road traffic accidents. A shifting of the starting age would also reduce the damage to brain and body and the likelihood of young people becoming dependent.”"
See the full article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6502750/Professor-Nutt-If-we-want-to-reduce-deaths-alcohol-and-heroin-are-the-issues.html. This guy (Professor Nutt) has become a popular national hero. Really – Forgive him for having never smoked (He could never have attained such an influential position if he had and it’s exactly because of his position that his views are doing so much for cannabis education.) and read the article.
“I can tell you that consumers of microbrews are doing it to get drunk.”
Russ I may have to disagree with you on this one. Whenever I drink beer (at most a couple times a month) I prefer to drink a great microbrew simply because I love the taste of a hoppy India Pale Ale. I don’t enjoy getting shit faced so I always cut my self off at 3 beers.
Just because we are strong supporters of marijuana legalization doesn’t mean we should attack small microbrews because they are getting better brakes. And microbrews aren’t the ones shelling out the money to fund the anti marijuana campaigns. It’s the big money making brewers like Budweiser that do that.
Good points. However, not knowing your size, if you’re drinking three India Pale Ales within an hour, you’re probably considered legally drunk at the time. OK, maybe not “shit faced”, but enough to blow .08 on the breathalyzer.
I understand the notion of a tasty brew. But drinking beer is foremost about an intoxication effect, or else “near beers” that taste like beer but have little alcohol would sell better.
I’m not necessarily against microbrews – I live in Portland, Oregon, the microbrew capital of the world. I’m just tired of the hypocrisy that accepts more potent alcohol while demonizing more potent marijuana.
Yes I’m tired of the hypocrisy as well. And I see that is the point you are trying to make. I just thought that particular quote of yours was not representative of the entire group of microbrew consumers. It’s like when the anti pot groups say “everyone who smokes marijuana is doing it just to get high, even the cancer patients”.
This one really pisses me off, we see all these negitive effects from alcohol and they say how can we make marijauan legal when we cant afford the cost of alcohol? So now they want to take the most common consumed alcohol, Beer and make it stronger?
OMFG these prohibitionests, if they dont jump all over this and demand this stop or try to regulate it back down? Well that will only prove to the world that they are only fighting Marijuana to hold down a segment of citizens by discriminating against them/us.
Man this really shows they could care less about Cannabis(or getting High), its about who we are as a people, our livestyles and our safer, peaceful and greener view of life. Its Discrimination!