Having seen the effect of CBD Oil on someone who was terminally ill then that must be legalised now.
On the subject of recreational drugs, the revenues they produce, the care structure around that is important. So yes properly governed States or if it is NOT a religious issue, then legalise it.
UK? Couldnāt put together a Lego set at the moment so perhaps they shouldnāt be trusted.
But they will once Rees Mogg opens a fund to profit from it
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I think you may have missed the point here. What you describe isnāt what happens in Portugal, nor is it anything that Iād propose. All the same drugs that are illegal in this country are illegal in Portugal - therefore selling them is illegal, and they clearly canāt be taxed. Thereās a big difference between decriminalisation and legalisation.
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Mate, I hope that all works out for you. Sounds like some serious shit. Great that you and your son have that sort of relationship too. Hope you find your drug - if itās not to be alcohol or cannabis. We all need one.
Good to see you back on here, Anal One. Hang around - although youāll find most of us boasting about our alcohol consumption over the weekend.
Bletch
This was also discussed on the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast.
Ok lads and ladettes, hereās the word from the horses mouth on the subject that I have rarely told many, especially people I have yet to met on an internet forum. Soā¦
In the Autumn of '98, OzSaintDave moved out of home for the first time. No biggie one would think and he became pretty bored with life. What was his grand idea of the time? "I know, Iāll go back to smoking some dope! I know I smoked some in High School and had a pretty fun time (chilled out, listened to cool music and made runs to the petrol station at odd hours for food).
So began a magical journey. At first it was pretty fun to smoke when you wanted, hang out and listen INTENTLY to Bob Dylan music but I did start to recluse myself from the world a bit at that point. Then I started to need it more. And more. And more. It got to the point that I quit my job believing that I was going to go to the USA to be a rock star!
So here I was smoking heavily with no job and then an old school mate gave me some ultra uber stuff that, well, pretty much blew my phooffer valve and I ended up in the looney bin for 3 months because they could not get me down from my high. Needles to the buttocks and everything. People who scared the shit out of you even though they were probably there for the same reasons. Literally for half that time I was so high I didnāt know if I was Arthur or Martha! So, after I roamed around the Psych Hospital for three months, I was honorably discharged into the care of my shell shocked parents who really had no clue as to what to do with me.
You would think that that would be the end of the story no? Well, two years after, I met a fellow who convinced me that dope doesnāt harm and is therapeutically good for you. Silly OzSaintDave believed all his rational and started smoking again. The best way to describe what happens when you go back to the trough for a second round is itās a bit like a pregnant woman, in that the second child comes quicker. So I went from smoking for 6 months (which is in no way a long time!) to having my second episode in 6 weeks! So back I went to a Psych Hospital for some rest and recuperation.
Once released, I went back again home with my mum as dad had passed away two years prior and the following years were dark, depressing years. I did however (and to this day I still do not know how I managed to do this) manage to save/win enough gambling to get myself over to the 2006 World Cup. Good times they were.
End of the story? NO! After meeting my now wife, in 2009 we were trying to have a child and good ol OzSaintDave thought āif I go off my meds (without doctors permission), maybe we will have a better chance of conceiving!ā The only outcome that had was straight to the Psych Hospital for round three!
So to tie the story all together, due to smoking weed I have experienced the goings on a 2 Psych Hospitals, met my wife, finally had two OzSaintDave jnrs, was retired from a job I held for 10 years on medical grounds onto a small but life-long pension and have managed to be on the road to owning the house I live in.
I have been dope free for 16 years and would I do anything any differently? No way! Iām a firm believer that everything is synchronicity and it has made me who I am today. Yet choose wisely, you might just get what you wish for 
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Thanks for sharing that @OzSaintDave.
Wow, a powerful story - with what sounds like a relatively happy ending. Youāre in good company here as many of us have confessed our own mental health challenges.
I grew up in Gosport and had my first exposure to drugs at 14. I have known lads that, well, just arenāt alive any more because for them cannabis was a gateway - ultimately to heroin. Four lads I went to school with died within about 3 months of each other. Ugly. I have mates that still smoke daily but are now incredibly paranoid and anxious. I also have mates (and I fit into this category myself) that can take or leave it and just dabble every now and then.
I guess my question to you is, were you unlucky? Was there something about your wiring that made you likely to have such a reaction?
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Thanks @saintbletch for the kind words. Yes, happy ending in the end, thankfully. It could have gone v differently I guess but for the grace of doing a school report on Heroin and itās, well, potential finality I decided it was never going to be a gateway drug.
I do also believe that I am hardwired to be susceptible to dope as my dad also had a disposition to slight epileptic fits which thank the universe wasnāt passed down.
It was the speed at which I unraveled at which really took me by surprise
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I guess you were lucky to have a support system around you. And the word lucky probably doesnāt do it justice.
Anyway, if I donāt go get some sleep my support system will be shouting at me tomorrow.
Gānight.
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Just a question
Does anyone know if they are building up to a mental health āincidentā or does it just happen?
I get sad/ unhappy with life. As we all do. I worry about how to look after the olds, I care deeply about making sure my wife and kids are provided for by following a career that ultimately pays the bills (&more).
Why some days do I not wake up & go to work with a spring and a jump in my step?
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I think there are signs to look out for but it will be different for everyone. A couple of years ago (just before I joined sotonians come to think of it) I had moved myself to Nottingham for this āamazingā job, only to find it anything but. I was stressed all the time, not sleeping, waking up on my days off in a blind panic thinking I had overslept, constantly behind on paperwork that kind of thing. I discussed these things with my boss and a colleague and sadly for me it was all kind of dismissed as worrying over nothing, until one day Iām driving to a training course, get lost in Sheffield and that was the final straw, my brain snapped and I just pulled over and wailed uncontrollably for about 20 minutes. Needless to say I left that job soon after and to be honest I donāt think I ever fully recovered. So yeah there are signs and you should speak to someone if things are concerning you, and if they dismiss it speak to someone else.
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tl;dr donāt fixate on those feelings of sadness, but donāt ignore them either. Sometimes all we need is to learn some techniques to keep us focused on the positives and stop the chains of negative thoughts from starting or dominating. Happy to chat over PM.
Does it just happen?
Donāt know about others Cobber but I now know that I was depressed during most of my professional life. I didnāt realise it at the time and I was āstrongā enough to just carry on.
I had a very high-pressure job that involved lots of travel and stress which impacted on my sleep and physical health but some drive within me just pushed me forward and made me ignore just how unhappy I was most of the time.
It was like I was on auto-pilot and it was only if I missed my weekly game of football due to travel commitments that Iād start to be aware of the stress. Iām the calmest person youāre likely to meet IRL, but on a football pitch Iām a real cunt. Football really was a stress release and without it, Iād notice the build up in tension to the point where I started to wonder if this was a ānormalā feeling.
Thatās not to say that I went around moping and unhappy all the time, far from it. I had great times socially during that period and my work colleagues would have thought that everything was fine - as did I really I suppose. Looking back, it was the mood swings and hair-trigger temper - usually reserved for the family that hindsight tells me wasnāt typical behaviour.
I moved out of direct corporate life and worked for myself as a consultant for 10+ years and, again hindsight informs me that I started to become quite insular. I worked from home most of the time and short, lucrative projects meant that I could, if I wanted to, have 6 months of the year āoffā. My quality of life had improved but I wasnāt getting the levels of human contact I needed. Iād often spend the morning in Costa Coffee āworkingā just to see people milling around me.
And then my Dad died and that was the trigger for my depression to slowly come to the forefront of my life. I took 3 months off work to look after my mum and afterwards I had no drive to network or look for the next contract. The ones I took werenāt as lucrative and I started to need to work but couldnāt face it.
I love walking and during this time that I had patchy work I would go for very long river/countryside walks and consider my situation. I told myself that I needed to get out and do something but all I did was get out and obsess about the problems I was facing. Everything felt wrong and I felt helpless to find a way out of where Iād got myself.
During the walks I would, and Iām told this is classic, look at trees and identify the good ones to hang myself from. I canāt now tell you that I was seriously suicidal but I can clearly remember the stark contrast between the complexity of solving my problems in life with the apparent simplicity of just going to sleep forever. At some points it felt like the logical and sensible thing to do.
I stayed in this fugue-like state for a long time, and people that knew me would probably not have guessed the depths of my unhappiness because I didnāt share it with anyone - not even my closest mates. Iād hide it and try to stay strong for those around me but the pressure was increasing all the time.
I pretty much knew I was depressed by now and remember playing scenes in my head of going to the doctors and asking for help. I didnāt because of some sort of pride or refusal to acknowledge my weaknesses. Until one day I was in the doctorās surgery for an unrelated condition and she said: āIs there anything elseā. And I said, āYes, actually, I think I might be depressedā.
Iāve no idea where that came from. Seconds earlier I hadnāt planned to say it, but it came out. And with hindsight, it was the easiest thing in the world to do and it set me on a path towards being the happiest person I can possibly be.
Nowadays I do all I can to remove the stigma around male mental health issues. Sharing this is part of that process.
If anyone else reading this can relate to any of it, talk to someone about your feelings and seek help. It feels fucking fantastic to find a way to let the happiness in.
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Thanksā¦Iām luckyā¦I love that you are all able to share.
Thatās why I love this placeā¦hmmm maybe I too am in need of help. 
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Hey C-S, Iād recommend talking to your doctor. It may be just a period of sadness like everyone has, or it may be something more. Like the old cooking a frog analogy we become acclimatised to our state of mental health. When my GP told me I had depression it was hugely liberating in a weird way, because the alternative was to continue believing that I was actually the worst person alive and that I should be dead. Itās quite nice sometimes to have someone tell you youāre just normal really.
Re drugs, when theyāre eventually all legalised as they should be, as the āwar on drugsā costs hundreds of thousands of lives, hopefully all the people incarcerated for selling drugs will get to be released and become the new entrepreneurs of the industry, rather than the already massively wealthy white men who own every other industry.
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Thanks everyone.
Really appreciated.
C_S
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Thereās some gold in this thread. Possibly a group of āburnedā swf-ers driving it. When I say 'gold ', I mean genuinely meaningful and useful statements. Iām going to check out the mental elf thread I noticed and contribute to the appropriate one. Eventually.
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As Iāve eluded to a bit previously, Iām not exactly a straight kind of guy. Iāve dabbled with various things, and will more likely than not do so again in the future.
My views on legality are a bit more confused. I strongly believe that āthe war on drugsā has been an utter fucking failure. One that has caused damage that far outweighs any ābenefitsā it may have done. Iām unsure whether Iād argue all drugs should be āLegalisedā, but perhaps fall more on the side of Decriminalised.
That said, Iām not a huge believer in a lot of the scare stories around legalisation. I donāt really believe that it will lead to a mass rush of people suddenly becoming compulsive abusers of various narcotics. The obvious point, is that there are a number of drugs that are legal, and people choose not to indulge in those. Also, there are a number of articles doing the rounds at the moment discussing how younger generations are actually shunning drink & drugs in larger numbers than previous generations.
I donāt believe that it will see a massive increase in ākidsā taking drugs, if anything I think it will see a decrease. The reason kids (read teens) take drugs, is that itās a lot harder to get alcohol underage now than it was previously - even compared to when I was a teen.
Are there potential health concerns related to the use of narcotics? Well yes, of course. Itād be daft to ignore this. However, there are plenty of other things legally available that cause health issues, be that cigarettes, booze or even unhealthy foods. We havenāt, yet, banned those. A regulated industry could, imo, work to alleviate the worst parts of this. Firstly, people will actually know what they are getting. The more dangerous strains of things can be phased out. And heck, itās not as if making these things illegal is stopping people from taking them. So right now, all that money is going straight into crime, so there is no public compensation for the health issues that the NHS has to deal with. Tax revenue could help with this.
And, as I touched on above, it will absolutely kick the legs out from underneath the criminal/gang aspects of the drugs trade. If big companies do get involved, there is absolutely no way 99% of drug lords would be able to compete.
Just to clarify, I am not and do not encourage other people to take drugs. I donāt think it is particularly big or clever. It can be fun, but it can be a fucking nightmare. I just want to mitigate the harm as much as possible, in the most sensible way.
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Would definitely second this @Cobham-Saint. Itās only in the past year through talking to my GP/Counsellor that it isnāt normal to be so fucking paralysed by anxiety that every minor decision is gut wrenching, or that itās not normal to be utterly crippled by self-loathing and self-doubt. Itās been a huge relief to learn that, actually, this is the warped form a pretty severe form of anxiety can take, but most of all it is something you can learn to manage and in time control.
As @dinger said, it may just be a bit of a glum spell. Without wanting to sound horrible, I hope that is the case, and it passes soon. But itās definitely worth the conversation with your GP. If it is something else, itās not the end of the world. There is help out there, in all sorts of forms. And with time, and a bit of effort, you can get through it.
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Hey krg, what age group do you sit in? Iām nearly 50, fwiw.
The scare here in oz is meth/ice, whatever, Iām no expert. Iāve seen it in teens /neighbours and I see craziness, but no benefits.
Iām 29.
I donāt really know too much about meth, itās not such a big issue here. I only really know what Iāve seen on telly, such as the Louis Theroux doc.
Iāve no doubt itās pretty ruinous, similar to something like Heroin or crack. Again, Iām not sure if Iām hugely in favour of legalisation, but certainly breaking the cycle of criminalisation. I think the issues created from drug abuse should be a matter of public health, not crime.
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If the Govenment legalised drugs they would eventually get 100% of the money you earned as opposed to the 98% that they already get.
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