Entorpecentes: o mais engraçado é que ...: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Antes de mais, pecao licenca para uma pequena observação prévia. Quem escolheu o título da minha palestra fui eu. Eu sou o responsável. Hoje acho que eu  deveria ter formulado de forma diferente, como por exemplo: "Controle de entorpecentes: o mais engracadoé que a solucao é diante dos nossos olhos; o problema sendo que a gente olha, mas nao vê."

Nunca pensei em falar do engracado dos entorpecentes em sim. Se tivesse sido diferente, eu provavelmente falaria da maconha. De todas as drogas - com excecao do óxido nitroso, o gás do riso - parece que esta erva é a mais engracada. Como disse Walter Benjamin já nos anos 20 sobre o haxixe:  

"as cores tornam-se mais claras, mais luminosas, e os objectos mais belos, ou então mais toscos e ameaçadores…Tudo isto não acontece de forma contínua; o mais comum é uma mudança ininterrupta entre estados oníricos e de vigília, um vaivém constante, e por fim esgotante, entre diversos estados de consciência; este afundamento e esse emergir podem dar-se no meio de uma frase… De tudo isto o tomador de haxixe dá conta numa forma que a maior parte das vezes se afasta muito da norma. Devido ao corte frequente entre cada lembrança e a precedente, o nexo entre as coisas torna-se difícil de estabelecer, o pensamento não ganha forma de palavra, a situação pode tornar-se tão irresistivelmente hilariante que o consumidor de haxixe '''durante minutos não consegue fazer mais nada a não ser rir'''… »

Todos nos conhecemos fumantes de cigarro. Alguns frustrados porque querem parar mas nao conseguem. Outros simplesmente adoram fumar, como o ex-chanceler Alemao Helmut Schmidt, nascido em 1918, hoje com 96 anos, fumando até durante debates ou entrevistas. As leis antifumo nao lhe interessam. Ele faz o que quer, desafiando cada lei antifumo. - Do outro lado é um fato que cigarro pode matar, pode cuasar cancer, pneumonia, embolia pneumonar, infarto, impotencia, sinusite, e queda de cabelo. Fumar pode perder a graça e começar a desbotar. A cada ano, na Alemanha, se realizam 10 000 amputações de pernas, 99% destas de fumadores; como o proprio Saci Pererê (quem fumava pito/cachimbo). Cada maço de cigarro nos informa deste e de outros fatos reais, negativos, ligados ao consumo duma droga - legal ainda mais.

O mais engracado é que funciona melhor e respeita a liberdade e nao tem efeitos nocivos.  

tonga da mironga; declaration of independence kenna.

" Se as palavras  ' vida, liberdade e busca da felicidade ' não incluem o direito de experimentar com a sua própria consciência, então a declaração de independência não vale a pena o cânhamo em que foi escrita. " - Terence McKenna

Many people think the funniest thing about drugs is laughing your ass off when you are high on marihuana or watching people doing that YouTube. That can be funny. But then you grow up and you notice that fun is not the only thing. You might lose a friend or a family member. If you are such a person, you probably do not find anything funny in drugs. Nor in speaking jokingly about drugs. And you are right. Drugs have these two sides of life and death, of pleasure and pain, of perception and of ignorance.

It is true that drugs can bring pleasure, but it is equally true that they can bring pain, and there is nothing funny about that.  

This is why we need drug control and drug policy. Drug control is about harm prevention and risk minimization, and drug policy is about where to draw the lines and how to govern the production, distribution and the use of drugs.  

In the time of the ancient Greek cities, where everybody knew everybody else, things were relatively simple. Nevertheless, some real bad experiences with hordes of severely drunk young men brought the question of drug controls on the political agenda. As we know from the remarkable book by Michael A. Rinella (Pharmakon; 2010), in the classical period of Socrates and Plato, we can already find two opposing lines of thought that resemble today's prohibitionists on the one and today's harm reductionists on the other hand.  

The fact that alcohol was not prohibited in ancient Greece was a good thing for Western civilization and especially the fine arts, but this did not mean that there was a complete absence of control. Much to the contrary, there was a lot of regulation done by cultural customs and rituals. In other words, there was no state control and especially no penal prohibition, but there was a well-functioning autonomous social control, and the citizens of Athens themselves saw to it that things did not get out of hand.  

Much responsibility rested with the person who presided at a collective drinking occasion, i.e. a party with music, dancers, discussions, and wine. Such an event, not uncommon in ancient Athens, was called a symposion, and the toastmaster who was in charge of the event was called the [[symposiarch]]. He determined the ratio of water to wine and therefore the strength of the alcoholic beverages, but also the degree of drunkenness that was to be reached at the end of the event. Like this, things did not get out of hand, ore: they only developed into outright orgies when that was the intention.

These '''symposia''' during the times (and with the participation of) Socrates and Alcibiades were a good example of functioning autonomous control via a common drug culture. In a common drug culture everything has its specific time (during Socrates' days it used to be from 9 p.m. onwards). One meets at a special place (the "andron") and surrounds oneself with pleasurable objects and instruments. Things have a beginning and an end, and they develop according to an inner order that has evolved over time out of experience. Experience turns into ceremony, ritual, and rule. This internal order and its outer form, the ritual, inform about the right use of drugs, and prevent misfortune and destructiveness. In a beneficial common drug culture like that in ancient Greece - and in the cannabis social clubs of the times of Baudelaire in Paris or of today in Madrid or Montevideo - it is the right and obligation of the knowledgeable to guide the novice into the new terrain. The right use of drugs is a part of culture, because it expresses a careful, skilled, and cautious behavior with relation to something elementary, fundamental, and venturous (cf. Marzahn 1983).

Today the symposia of ancient Greece seem to return in the form of the so-called cannabis social clubs. This concept that dates back to the pan-European non-governmental organization ENCOD (European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies). In 2005, this organization proposed social clubs as a way to enable legal production and distribution of cannabis for adults. Cannabis Social Clubs are non-commercial organizations which organize the professional, collective cultivation of very limited amounts of cannabis, just enough to cover the personal needs of their club members.

Cultivation, transport, distribution and consumption are subject to security and quality checks, and are done without publicity or advertisement of any kind. The members finance the system by subscriptions, according to their needs. Each member gets a value card with units, according to his credit, with a maximum limit per month and per year. The members are prohibited from reselling any cannabis purchased, and are required to ensure that it is not consumed by minors. Cannabis Social Clubs, which - in contrast to the Cannabis Buyers Club - are not limited to medical marihuana use only, exist in 8 central and western European countries.

....

In Ancient Greece, in the Athens of Socrates, the most widely used drug was - as in our days - alcohol. The control system in place then was both simple and efficient, and in some ways it was closer to perfection than anything we have today. So we can look back with envy. There was not much chemistry involved in the process of production. People who drank the wine knew the producers and the production processes, and fraud or poisoning for profit was virtually unknown. The alcohol was a soft drug, not a hard drug. Destillation and sugar cane - and therefore: cachaca - were not known yet, and the alcohol content was low. More importantly, people controlled themselves, they did not need that state to tell them what to do. At the symposion, the typical occasion to get drunk and to risk your health and reputation, it was the symposiarch who was elected by his peers and who consulted with his guests before proclaiming the decision about the quantity, quality, and velocitiy of consumption. Marzahn.  

Modern alcohol control is not so terribly different. Most people try - with differing degrees of luck - to control their own consumption. Most people can trust the quality of the beverages, even if impersonal industrial production has replaced personal acquaintances between the producer and the consumer. The state has stepped in to control the quality standards and fulfills his role in consumer protection.

The law creates zones of control: it prohibits the drug for those who have no legal capacity to decide on their own (small children, mentally ill), it allows it for everybody else, but it holds everybody accountable for misdeeds and for excessively risky behavior (drunk driving). It strikes, in other words, a compromise between civil liberties (which are respected, but not without restrictions) and the general welfare.  

 

Does this system work? It depends how you look at it. There are millions of deaths, thousands of car accidents, tens of thousands of violent crimes including homicides... so it is the worst system imaginable - except, of course, all other known forms of control. And especially it is better than prohibition used to be from 1920 thru to 1933.  

The funny thing is that - with regard to some drugs like marihuana and cocaine - we have a control system that does not work and does not respect civil liberties, and that produces more problems than it solves.