Denver continues in a boom in the midst of an oilfield recession.

Everyone knows that the oilfield is in a recession, if not a depression. But Denver is still booming and housing prices there are through the roof.

Why?

Nobody is certain, but it appears that marijuana may be the reason.

And according to the New Republic, the boom in LoDo and HiDo is so marijuana centric that space for that industry has crowded out the arts scene that was booming down there.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 18 Updated.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 18:

2014.  Nebraska and Oklahoma filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court seeking to have leave to sue Colorado on a Constitutional basis.regarding Colorado's state legalization of marijuana.  The basis of their argument is that Colorado's action violates the United States Constitution by ignoring the supremacy nature of Federal provisions banning marijuana.

While an interesting argument, my guess is that this will fail, as the Colorado action, while flying in the face of Federal law, does exist in an atmosphere in which the Federal government has ceased enforcing the law itself.

Entertainers and Drugs. Why?

Recently Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose.  This has been reported as a terrible tragedy, and of course it is.

Not more so, I'll note, than the hundreds of anonymous people who likewise die the same way, but whom aren't well known, or known at all.  Their deaths are equally tragic.

One of the odd things about something like this, as well, is the impulse to excuse away the tragic results of addiction on the basis that addiction is a disease.  As in this posts which maintains that addicts have no free will, and therefore cannot help themselves.  Addiction is a terrible thing, and indeed depending upon the type of addiction it is, they can become lethal, both in the need for the drug and in effects upon the body upon withdrawal from the drugs.  But the tendency in the modern world to label any vice seems self indulgent.  There is hardly any evil of any kind that somebody will not excuse away as a compulsion driven by addiction.  We all have our failings and weaknesses, to be sure, but some act against them and some act with them.  Many do both at different times, or even at the same time. By excusing every vice as an addiction, compulsion or personal quirk serves to excuse them, when perhaps the opposite is more in order.

There is, apparently, a rise in heroin use.  That catches me by surprise as what heroin mostly causes me to recall is the television police shows of the 1970s in which the police were always chasing down somebody distributing heroin.  From what i read in an article in The New Republic the other day, that in fact had its basis in truth as apparently the drug, which is amongst those which is most likely to kills it users, was in fact in big circulation in the 1960s and 70s amongst the poor.  It's a really bad drug, causing a true physical addiction that can result in the user's death.

That leads to the question of why the return of heroin now, and amongst those who don't fit into a dispossessed underclass.  According to the article, the reason has to do with prescription opiates.

Now, I'm not a pharmacist or a doctor, so that narcotics are generally opiates is something I wasn't aware of. But apparently they are, and the article claimed that prescription drugs are the modern gateway to heroin, the same way that marijuana once was.  I don't know that I'm fully convinced of this (it seems a stretch) but that prescription narcotics are now widely abused and stolen is well known. Apparently Realtors now ask people who are showing their homes to remove them from their drug cabinets, because people cruise open homes just to steal them. Anyhow, the thesis is that this has introduced opiates to a new class, who become addicted to them and then move on to an even more dangerous, unregulated drug.

I guess I have to count myself lucky here, and to be careful about being judgmental (which we should always be careful about anyhow) as I have a very hard time imagining why people want to use these drugs in general.  That is, in part, as the few times I've ever had prescriptions in this category, they've made me really sick and I determined after about a day of use that I'd rather just endure the pain, which wasn't as bad as the sad effects of the drugs.  And I can't see what effect they have that a person would enjoy. The one time I've had morphine, after ending up in the hospital due to a horse accident, I couldn't stand it, even though it didn't make me ill.  It made me sleep a weird chemical sleep that is just horrible.

I don't even like the feeling that conventional alcohol gives a person.  I like beer okay, but I don't like to feel any effect from drinking it, which means that I wouldn't be too inclined to sit and drink that much of it.  This doesn't make me virtuous, it makes me lucky.

Anyhow, having said that, even if it is true that the heroin boom is due to prescription drugs, I still can't see why this is so common amongst entertainers.  The most common cited reason is stress.  I guess I can see that a bit, as people in really stressful occupations are more subject to drug and alcohol abuse, and other sorts of vices.  I know that drug and alcohol addiction (as well as other addictions) are regarded as an occupational hazard for lawyers and most state bars have programs to address it.  But that just seems different to me.  Acting as a job wouldn't seem to be stressful in and of itself, although getting roles would be extremely stressful, I'd guess.  For that reason, I'd guess, most actors probably would want to have a back up career, but maybe they don't. And I'd guess that perhaps if a person has been successful that might actually prevent them from having one.  Still, I know that at least some, like Wilford Brimley or Paul Newman have, in the form of farms.  I guess it's easy for me to not appreciate the stress they're under.

Still, it does seem that as a class they're bizarrely subject to problems of a personal nature, and always have been.  It's certainly the case that going all the way back to the silent film days you can find examples of actors having extreme personal problems.  Is this unique to them, or is it perhaps that the vices that average people are subject to simply become better known amongst them. Or perhaps they have the means and opportunity to exercise their failings in a way that average people do not.  Probably the fact that people cater to their vices doesn't help, whereas most people have to hide theirs.  And at least in musicians, drugs have long been a problem.  There are jazz songs dating back to the dawn of recorded music that have drugs, sometimes in a hidden fashion, but often quite openly, as their topic. 

In the end, I guess, I don't know what to make of this topic. But I do feel that one of the tragedies of a tragedy like this, is that we don't really take note of the average people who fall prey to the same ill.

Marijuana and statistics.

1.  10%, apparently, of marijuana users become addicts. That's with it being illegal. 

2.  15% of alcohol consumers become addicted.

3.  Worst reason for legalizing marijuana.  "Well, surely if alcohol is legal with all its problems marijuana should be."  No, that'd be a really good reason to make alcohol illegal, but it's a really bad one to make marijuana legal.  Just because something might be no more destructive than something destructive, doesn't amount to a supportable argument to make the second destructive thing legal.

4.  Most missed point in item #3.  Alcohol has such a long association with human beings that the best evidence is that the current population of humans, for the most part, has actually evolved to be able to consume it.  Alcohol, after all, is a poison.  Second most missed point in item #3 is that at the low dosages that were consumed per unit weight, prior to the invention of distilling (and keeping in mined that in ancient times the wine, one of the two most common alcoholic beverages, was routinely very much watered down), was not and is not generally consumed to the point of intoxication.  Marijuana for recreational use is only consumed to the point of intoxication.

5.  Scariest marijuana fact discussed since Colorado legalized it.  Those using it in their teens experience a 6 to 10 point drop in their IQs as an adult.

Colorado, Marijuana and poor thinking.

As everyone no doubt knows, our neighbor to the south, Colorado, has legalized marijuana.

This is something I've wondered about, in terms of it being a wise move, for a long time.  I've concluded its a bad one.

I debated it, however, not because I think it'd be fun to use it.  I never have and I'm not going to. Rather, I've debated it because the United States sends so many people to jail for drug convictions.  In some ways, it's a national scandal.  So, it's hard not to consider the possibility of decriminalizing something that so many people use, as long as the conduct isn't harmful, or perhaps they're harming only themselves.  But, at the end of the day, marijuana doesn't meet that description.

The best debate on the ethical nature of marijuana use I've heard is found on the podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know.  In their discussion of it, they distinguish marijuana from alcohol and tobacco on philosophical grounds, with the distinction being that marijuana is a drug ingested only for the high.  That is, in my mind, a huge difference between it and alcohol, to which its frequently compared. This is not to say that alcohol and tobacco cannot be destructive, they clearly can be, but they need not be.  A person can argue about tobacco, but it would be possible to use tobacco on a very limited basis, say the occasional cigar, and not end up addicted and not go out of your head.  Alcohol is clearly that way.  As destructive as alcohol is, the long human adaptation to it, going back so far that tolerance for the poison of alcohol (which is what it is) is written into most human beings genetic code.  Most consumers of alcohol do not become addicted to it, and most do not drink it to the point of becoming drunk every time they drink.  Indeed, some of the most frequent drinkers limit their ingestion and essentially use it as a type of food, reflecting what was likely the oldest use of it.  Marijuana is apparently completely different in this last point.

This makes it a public hazard, not just to the immediate user.  People are buying something just to get stoned. That would be the equivalent of buying something just to get drunk.  If there was a type of alcohol that got its consumers wasted over 50% of the time they ingested it, I'd be opposed to that too.  Indeed, so would society, which over the past twenty years went after brands that were basically marketed in that fashion.  Ironically, therefore, just after wiping out heavy duty malt liquors and cheap fortified wines, we're opening back up the intoxication products again.

And just after getting rid of Joe Camel, we're bringing back pot, weed, reefer, etc.  Colorado can pretend that this stuff isn't going to end up in the hands of kids, but it will.  There's no doubt about it.

And regarding kids, it's now been clinically proven that marijuana produces long term mental deficits in humans who use it as adolescents.  So, after a forty year period where we've made sure to get lead out of paint and have seen IQs rise as a result, we're going to work on depressing them again through a "recreational" drug.  Not very smart.

And we're also creating a whole new category of criminals, by "decriminalizing" marijuana.  It remains a controlled substance at the Federal level.  Having something legal and licensed at the state level and illegal and unenforced at the Federal level breeds contempt for the Federal law, in an era where contempt for it is already extraordinarily high.  Last year we saw an effort by Wyoming's legislature to take an end run around Federal firearms provisions.  It failed, but using the logic that seemingly applies here, why not?  If the Federal government gets to pick and choose the laws it enforces, which right now its particularly bad about doing (the new health care law, immigration law, and now drug law, are all areas the Federal government is selective about application of the law) why shouldn't states regard the Federal law as optional.

Which doesn't mean that the US will continue to act in this fashion.  It could change its mind overnight, with a new Administration, and we'd find all this conduct illegal once again in every sense, but with a lot of people now trapped due to having been mislead by selective enforcement of the law.

And it remains illegal in the states bordering Colorado, including Wyoming. We're already getting some stoned drivers up here, who get busted as a result, and that was as a result of Colorado's medical marijuana provisions, which provided a think excuse for its consumption (thin indeed, as synthetic THC is available for those who might really need the relief the active component of marijuana provides.

So, after decades of working on getting brain damaging chemicals out of public ingestion, and working on getting public intoxication down, Colorado, and soon Washington, are going to give it a boost.

Those who do not learn from history. . .