<p>I call horsepucky on the " one drink doesn’t affect you".</p>
<p>I drink every week- a glass of wine one week- maybe a beer the next- if I am at a club- I might have a couple shots of tequila. ( I have a designated driver)
I feel the effects- with one glass of wine.
If I have two glasses- I am liable to feel the effects the next morning.
*That *is why I drink- I like the taste ( or I have convinced myself I do)
and I like the way it makes me feel.
Anyone who drinks & says different- is lying.</p>
<p>I weigh 185 lbs and a single glass of wine sipped over the course of dinner and desert at a restaurant does not affect my cognitive functioning, perceptions, emotional reactions or physical functioning at all. But for the taste, I could be drinking ice tea. The experience could very well be different for someone @ 120 lbs. My experience is hardly unique but yours could certainly be different for a myriad of reasons ranging from size, weight body composition, age, metabolism, how quickly the drink is consumed, whether it is consumed on an empty stomach etc. And I don’t drink for how it makes me feel, I drink because I enjoy the taste. If I drink enough for it to make me feel anything, it usually ends up making me feel tired, which I don’t enjoy, which is why I limit my drinking at dinner to one drink, usually a glass of wine.</p>
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<p>How can you say this? Have you undergone an ECG while you drank a glass of wine?</p>
<p>Before you even realise it, unconscious and autonomous responses have already begun. (And they are not necessarily “buzzing” effects.) It’s 0.17 mol of alcohol. That’s a lot compared to the lethal doses of many poisons, never mind the ranges at when effects start showing up. The only reason why a glass of wine doesn’t put you into immediate stupor is the alcohol dehydrogenase suppressing most of it (right away).</p>
<p>Galoisien, put down the chemistry books and get into the real world – you sound like a machine, not a human being. I don’t drink myself, except for the occasional glass of wine at a celebratory event. I have no ethical or moral objections – I simply don’t like the taste. But it’s self-evident to anyone who actually interacts with people as people as opposed to collections of chemicals that there are many people who enjoy how the taste of a glass of wine, margarita, etc. goes with and complements the foods they are actually eating, and it’s not because they are “getting buzzed.” And your statements about the faux-pretentious-upper-class just betray your glaring class envy and are irrelevant to anything. Plenty of people like a glass of beer at a barbecue or a margarita at a Mexican restaurant just as much as “pretentious upper-class snobs” like a glass of wine at a nice meal. Life is more than just biochemical pathways, you know.</p>
<p>Some people here seem to think that drinking alcohol in itself at under 21 years of age is illegal under US federal law. That is not quite correct, as Wikipedia helpfully informs us:</p>
<p>Contrary to popular belief, since the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, few states specifically prohibit minors’ and young adults’ consumption of alcohol in private settings. As of January 1, 2007, 14 states and the District of Columbia ban underage consumption outright, 19 states do not specifically ban underage consumption, and an additional 17 states have family member and/or location exceptions to their underage consumption laws.</p>
<p>And to the naive chemistry student who thinks that science can mimic a $2,000 bottle of wine and produce it at $2.99 a gallon: not in a thousand years!</p>
<p>I would posit that drinking a cup of coffee, eating a piece or taking a hit of pot, eating a piece of chocolate, or having a beer are all acts undertaken, to a significant degree, to experience the pharmacological effects of doing so. The fact that there are olfactory pleasures associated with a glass of wine strike me as a weak ground for asserting that the ingestion of alcohol is inherently morally superior to ingesting marijuana. There are those who rave about the aromatic qualities of different appelations of cannabis.</p>
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<p>Here’s an interesting experiment. (To achieve the full psychological effect, you can run this at a social event or whatever.) Do it double blind.</p>
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<p>I wonder if there’s any real basis to this “complementing” thing, It’s really just a centuries-old marketing ploy. And culture reinforces the “complementing” through placebo effect. </p>
<p>If the centre of power or taste had say been in another region of France or Europe, and the unfashionable had been quartered in Champagne and Bourdeaux and the like instead, you might have a dramatically-altered perception. The soil of Champagne would be regarded as inferior for growing wine while some randomly chosen place (say, Catalonia) would be touted as the producer region of the most expensive wines.</p>
<p>And there’s this “soil” myth going on too. I wonder if wine producers actually believe the **** they spew, or whether they have actually heard of a phloem or heard of something called “lipid membrane solubility”. If you planted the same variety in say, Bordeaux and another one in Champagne, and controlled for pH, nitrogen-potassium-phosphorus content, and content of the other basic minerals (iron, magnesium, etc.) and for heat, ventilation and light, I’m not sure there would be an actual difference. Compare a double blind test in which the tasters were told which variety they were drinking. The placebo effect (in my hypothesis) would be prominent. Sure your soil might have an interesting or unique composition in grain size patterns or whatnot, but producers are just telling you nonsense when they make you think it will have a direct effects on the tannins and terpenoids in the grapes.</p>
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<p>Why so doubtful? :p</p>
<p>The secret is discovering the regulatory proteins and methods of engineering regulation. As well as multi-gene splicing into a single locus. Once we crack those, we will be producing many industrial substances using genetically modified microorganisms.</p>
<p>There will be at most a limited range of active substances that are actually contributing to the flavours, yes, even those subtle flavors and woody/full/whatever. Just duplicate them in the appropriate ratios by biosynthesis … and you have the same flavor, tada.</p>
<p>" The fact that there are olfactory pleasures associated with a glass of wine strike me as a weak ground for asserting that the ingestion of alcohol is inherently morally superior to ingesting marijuana."</p>
<p>Who has said anything about moral superiority??? The OP’s question was whether a parent would allow their kid to drink or smoke pot in front of them. I posited that the former could be appropriate under certain circumstances but that the former would not be because one can ingest alcohol for reasons, purposes and an effect that does not result in intoxication while smoking pot recreationally is for the specific purpose and effect of becoming intoxicated and always results in that outcome to one degree or another. You can let your kid drink a glass of wine, a beer or even a “hard” drink without your kid getting intoxicated but you can’t smoke a joint or a bowl of pot (particularly of today’s varieties) without getting high (and if you don’t get high, then you’ve been ripped off). When’s the last time you observed a person having a drink without becoming intoxicated? Compare that to the last time you saw someone recreationally smoking pot who did not get high. If you can’t recognize that there is an “outcomes” based distinction between the 2 behaviors, then apparently you don’t have much experience with either substance.</p>
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<p>No you can’t, not unless you consume wine in absurdly small amounts (teaspoons). Intoxication already starts when BAC reaches the tens of parts per million. Remember the intoxication-versus-BAC function, as with most active substances, is logarithmic. </p>
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<p>Neither can you drink a cup of coffee or eat a bar of chocolate without receiving a caffeine intoxication.</p>
<p>Come again?</p>
<p>“You can let your kid drink a glass of wine, a beer or even a “hard” drink without your kid getting intoxicated but you can’t smoke a joint or a bowl of pot (particularly of today’s varieties) without getting high (and if you don’t get high, then you’ve been ripped off).”</p>
<p>My original point was about nomenclature. You’re defining being under the influence of any amount of marijuana as “getting high,” or “becoming intoxicated” while defining alcohol intoxication as requiring consumption of more than something more than a single beverage. </p>
<p>My point is there is nothing intrinsic to the effects of either alcohol or marijuana that leads to this conclusion. You’re using value-laden terms, and reasoning backwards from them to draw moral distinctions between the behaviors you’re describing. (Yes - moral distinctions. That’s what’s implied when you say one, unlike the other, would be “inappropriate”.)</p>
<p>Regarding my own experiences, or lack thereof: suffice it to say that I worked as a professional musician for many years, and had the experience of sharing the band stand with individuals who had ingested the full spectrum of psychoactive substances. There were legions of musicians with whom I have performed who took a hit or two of pot before performing, and I recall no instances where I noticed that their playing suffered for it in the slightest. I cannot say the same for those whose drug of choice was alcohol.</p>
<p>Greybeard, what’s “inappropriate” is not the substance, the ingestion of the substance or even becoming “under the influence” of the substance. With regard to those matters, I could care less about whether a person consumes alcohol or pot and I certainly do not hold any moralistic judgmental views about anyone who indulges in either. What I find inappropriate is a parent encouraging their minor child to indulge in behavior designed to result in becoming “under the influence” or providing their minor child with the substance to do so. And in this regard, there certainly is a qualitative difference between consuming alcohol or pot. Those musicians you talk about, why do you think they took a hit or two. If it was not for purposes of altering their mood, perceptions, mellowing them out a bit, enabling them to get into the groove, getting a buzz on or however you might want to describe the psychoactive effect those couple of hits had, why were they doing it? It has nothing to do with whether they appeared “impaired”. It has everything to do with becoming “under the influence” regardless of the degree. And that’s where I think pot and alcohol diverge. You consume the former with the purpose and intent of “becoming under the influence”, to whatever degree you want at the time. That is always the endgame. That is not the case with alcohol.</p>
<p>And by the way, I have spent the last 30 years of my life representing professional orchestral musicians and most of them would not indulge in pot smoking before getting on stage or into the pit because of the concern that it would impact on their playing, even if they didn’t perceive it at the time.</p>
<p>One last post on this subject: I simply don’t believe that “becoming under the influence” is not the end game of consuming alcohol.</p>
<p>I suspect that most of your classical musicians would likewise refrain from drinking any alcohol before getting on stage or into the pit. That’s one of the differences between classical music and improvisational forms of music. Stefan Grapelli always had a drink (just one) right before he played, and Louis Armstrong generally smoked pot before he played.</p>
<p>parents crack me up. let ur kid drink, or he/she will go do it in a more dangerous way behind your back. i’m 19 and my parents let me drink around them, and i do not have a problem. they also know that i smoke weed from time to time, but never in front of them, and i do not let it negatively affect my schooling or my job. if your kid can figure that out, then let him/her do what he/she wants to do. maturity, respect, and moderation are key to the above though.</p>
<p>i do not let it negatively affect my schooling or my job.</p>
<p>You cannot possibly know that- because you do not have a * control* you that is substance free.</p>