Blog Dis
A psychoactive approach to living...
2026-06-18
Right under your very cute, button of a nose, there are people living next door to you, at least potentially, who might be cultivating, Heaven forbid, marijuana—what Christians would denounce as The Devil's Weed. The horror! Say it isn't so, even though you know it is so, days in and days out.
In the City of Ottawa, Barrhaven is a neighborhood that is approximately a 25-minute southwest drive from the downtown core. Ottawa Police have come to the conclusion that at least 90% of the grow-ops in this city, that is grow operations, are typically located in Barrhaven and that over $10 million in unreported income was made in one year alone. It's worth noting, too, that this was prior to the legalization of cannabis in Canada. That fact makes me wonder if legalization occurred because the Government got tired of missing out on taxing these profits. Yet, here we are, years later and there are still private growers who aren't quite yet ready and willing to give up their carefully cultivated business, nor their list of dedicated clients who prefer to buy from a private dealer, rather than a cannabis shop, out in the open.
Barrhaven has all the perfect surroundings for such operations: a constant flurry of new homes being built with new people moving in, and no one noticing what neighbors are getting up to and therefore creating a perfect climate to go undetected as you fill up your basement with plants, and draw from the city's hydro grid. This kind of side hustle isn't for all, because long-term damage to homes has been proven, regardless of how careful the set-up is to vent excess moisture. The bonus is not having to declare the extra income to tax authorities, and being able to spend the extra income, ironically for some on home repairs.😂
Plants... just plants, to think of the complete and utter stupidity of democratic governments who've siphoned millions, collectively billions of dollars from programs and other important budgets, such as cleaning up pollution, all in an effort to curtail the production and distribution of marijuana. Still! To this very day, we're waging this war, attempting to stop the illegal influx of Mary Jane from proliferating in Canada because these monies are, ostensibly and apparently, in turn being used to finance other drug operations, like the real dangerous drugs, opioids.
I watch plenty of news shows and one in particular, Border Security, highlights the busy border crossings, where officials are focused solely on preventing outgoing drugs from leaving Canada or from coming into Canada. Often, these might be entire shipments leaving our fine country on route to another country. Though, and this is according to W5 (another fine Canadian news reporting show that airs once a week, like 60 Minutes) has covered how we in Canada still have massive shipments of illegal marijuana entering our ports. Marijuana isn't like pills or powders which can be broken down into component parts and re-assembled in a lab elsewhere. Marijuana, at least in its plant form, comes packaged in large blocks, sealed in plastic with stems and all, or in the form of hashish, a compressed version of the flower, only decidedly more potent, and just as sticky.
It's a challenge for authorities to keep a good growth industry down.
I'd like to recommend to many in the know to read twice over Ian Mulgrew's book Bud Incorporated: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry. Ian had worked as a journalist for (30) years covering practically every angle and story there is on the subject of marijuana. Mulgrew came to the inescapable conclusion that not only should marijuana be legalized, which thankfully it is now the defacto standard in Canada, but that countries and security institutions in their infinite stupidity have only ensured the continued growth of marijuana operations by keeping it in their Criminal Code.
In April 2026, the US Administration had removed marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, to instead assign it as a Schedule 2 substance, which is to say marijuana will no longer be regarded as a 'drug' that belongs in the strictest category, one that doesn't have any viable medical use (though I would still beg to differ with this classification too). Schedule 1 drugs in Canada include opioids, heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and morphine, to include other opioids. Note, however, that a powerful drug like ketamine, which is popular, belongs to a different class of drugs, known as a disassociative anesthetic. However, and having said this, morphine in the form of Dilaudid is still used in local area hospitals in Canada to treat severe pain.
When I consider the small number of persons serving time in US prisons, for mere possession of marijuana, (around 150), I'm left scratching my head as to why those charged with the so-called heinous crime of manufacturing and distribution of marijuana are left to rot in prison. These numbers range in the tens of thousands of persons, serving time. How come their sentences cannot be pardoned or reduced along with those who smoke marijuana for recreation? These growers and distributors are not showing up on anyone's doorstep, pushing plants on kiddies. Instead, they were arranging deals behind closed doors with other adults who in turn would distribute to cities and places to the adults in their remote communities. I call this lending a helping hand.
We are now 25 years into the 21st Century, and it has long been over-due for hardline policies on cannabis production and distribution to change. Alcohol is still available, and far more destructive, as is smoking cigarettes. I've argued with persons before, which should come as no surprise to you, given that I admit to arguing with people online all the time. One middle-age woman stated to me, "People who smoke marijuana are pot-heads!" to which I had countered, "Excellent. So if a woman has one glass of wine every night, after a long day, does this make her an alcoholic?" And she replied, "Of course not, not even if she were to drink two glasses of wine a day."
You cannot argue with the illogical, to point out that decompression from stress by way of indulging in one marijuana joint will provide a brief period of euphoria, maybe 20 minutes at best vs two glasses of wine that will achieve the same result. One is openly distributed and welcomed, while the other has to be illegally and secretly distributed.
I realize that Canada's former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wasn't liked by all. I didn't dislike him, and there's a difference. What I appreciated about him was his mature stance on abortion. When asked at a town hall gathering in Quebec, "What are your views on abortion?" Justin replied, without blinking, "What a woman does with her body is her business and hers alone." I think the same mature attitude should be applied to marijuana distribution. Mr. Trudeau and his Liberals get the credit for ushering in the legalization of marijuana in Canada, across every province, and this occurred in Oct 2019. Since that time of cannabis shops opening up in cities across the country, the taxes collected from selling marijuana and edibles have contributed $75 Billion to our Gross Domestic Product, what all governments track to measure the total market value or revenue of their success.
The cannabis industry also sustains about 98,000 jobs, and apparently the employees are all chill and quite happy to be working at these shops. HaHaHa!
If economies are struggling, and inflation feels as though it's running rampant, then it's high time for North America, all of North America, to look at new ventures to bring in more dollars to prop up sagging GDP numbers. We can't rely on oil dollars forever, any more than we can continue to gouge the bottom 50% of the population, to pay more in taxes, to pay more at the grocery check-out. I researched this week that since the pandemic, groceries prices in Canada have risen 27% in the last 5.5 years. That's a lot of hijacking going on with Canadian earners, who have no choice to buy groceries. No wonder why they need to spark up a twisty, just to cope.
I find it all so confusing. Ultra-Conservative right-wing types are convinced that if everyone turned to the Bible and just stopped horsing around with hallucinogenic substances, that the world would be put right again. Yes, of course, I believe that too and I also believe that lions would look dandy with zebra stripes, and even more so if they were all reading the Bible wearing a pair of coke-bottle glasses, while clutching a tumbler of the finest bourbon.
Allow me this brief moment to list the host of social and health issues derived from the consumption of alcohol: fetal alcohol syndrome, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, vehicular homicide, domestic abuse... to name nary a few of the problems caused by drinking the devil's rocket fuel. The consumption of alcohol is in fact associated with 60 medical conditions, to even include cancers, as well as neurological and brain disorders. Yet, man legalizes his man-made invention and demonizes marijuana, what was put on this Earth to grow freely, naturally. The debate about marijuana has raged for decades, as they say, waging war on Mom and Pop operations out of the home from people simply trying to supply the demand of a substance that clearly over six million Canadians partake in on a regular basis, over and above their beer!
Marijuana is still trafficked in the USA, and enters their borders, and sometimes even from the USA, coming into Canada. But, and for the most part, the drug-taking public are not entirely satisfied with weak-ass marijuana, and prefer instead the hard opioids, and various other chemical concoctions. The blame game of pointing the finger at marijuana, to accuse it of being a gateway drug, is still trotted out like some old stubby roach left in the ashtray for days.
Reality is that we are a species who loves to indulge in a wide range of hallucinogens and alcohol, any kind of stuff really, be it beer or pot or food or chemicals or hockey, in the case of Canadians. I like to think of our boys as pot-smoking, beer-drinking, hockey-watching males, and this isn't said as a negative. Rather, many Canadian males are perfectly fine with this state of mind and being, so long as no one encroaches on their good time.
I cannot state the number of persons addicted to anti-depressants but if the actual number were readily made available, I'd probably find it alarming. However, I've never been one to begrudge anyone from indulging in anything they choose to take, so long as they don't act like an idiot, to dump their problems on someone's else's lap. I, too, am not an exception. I love my chocolate, as I've confessed on numerous occasions. I also love a very, very cold Corona beer with lime in the summer. And, at one point in time in my life, though, this is no longer the case, I'd regularly pop Ibuprofen the curse presented itself, because I didn't want to suffer month after month needlessly through the pain of cramps and back pain. If someone, however, had decided that OTC's (over-the-counter) medication should all be deemed illegal, I'd probably have turned instead to marijuana to help alleviate the pain.
It comes down to this, does it not? Alleviated pain. I'm convinced the Government of Canada and the United States revere pain, so much so that they'll argue and insist on continuing to demonize organically derived substances, like magic mushrooms—still illegal under Federal law in Canada... because governments love the pain of being able to bitch about having to deal with this issue. A smart politician would divert all monies that are assigned to curtailing grow-ops and dump it into education, beginning with little kiddies. But now that the Government of Canada was bold enough to legalize marijuana and to get into the business of controlling its distribution, they didn't see the drop off in usage, nor did they see a wild increase in usage either, more like a modest increase.
The percentage of marijuana users in Canada hovers around the 6% range vs the 76% of Canadians who drink alcohol. However, and when it comes to alcohol, usage has dropped steadily for the past four years, which has translated into a drop of 18% overall. That is huge! One might conclude that because the usage of alcohol has declined, the use of marijuana would increase, yet it hasn't. Statistics suggest that a generational shift is responsible for the decline in alcohol consumption, being pushed by young men between ages of 15 to 34 years... not that I want to suggest that 15 year-olds should or could be drinking in the first place. Regardless, this is an important distinction.
I've personally held the belief that when we drop one bad habit, we tend to replace it with another.
Spend one week in Amsterdam, which is the perfect example of a live case study that's been operating for over (50) years. Their teenage population has the lowest percentage of marijuana and alcohol use in the country, right in a City where anyone can walk into a coffee shop and purchase as much weed or hash as they want. And, this is the irony: tell someone they shouldn't or can't be doing something, and they'll go out of their way to prove to you that it is their God-given right to do that very thing, even if they have to destroy the walls and foundation of a house to grow it for themselves.
Marijuana was put on this Earth to green the planet, and to fill the atmosphere with more oxygen, clearly a substance that seems to be lacking in the brains of politicians. Marijuana is a hardy plant, and is self-pollinating, not requiring bees or birds to pollinate it, and this alone should be justification enough for all countries in the world to ease up on their approach to curtailing the ingestion or smoking of something that has been with us, as long, if not longer than we've been alive.
Most notably, and on social networks, I've observed an increasing trend of alcohol distribution companies posting more studies on the negative side-effects of marijuana, somehow managing to miss the range of damage that alcohol has done for hundreds of years. We all live it, how the world is a funny place, rife with illogic pushed out by the masters of obfuscation. One might be inclined to think that more are smoking up behind closed doors, to leave their brains behind. Or maybe they've had one too many DMT trips with a pocket-full of magic mushrooms waiting in the wings.
The best joke I've read on the Uddernet lately was this: put five people in a room with all the booze they can drink and a fight will break out. Put the same five people in a room with all the pot they can smoke, and they'll form a rock band. 🎸
So, which psychoactive approach would you vote for in this day and age? I know my answer. I'd love to see a rock 'n roll revival.
In the City of Ottawa, Barrhaven is a neighborhood that is approximately a 25-minute southwest drive from the downtown core. Ottawa Police have come to the conclusion that at least 90% of the grow-ops in this city, that is grow operations, are typically located in Barrhaven and that over $10 million in unreported income was made in one year alone. It's worth noting, too, that this was prior to the legalization of cannabis in Canada. That fact makes me wonder if legalization occurred because the Government got tired of missing out on taxing these profits. Yet, here we are, years later and there are still private growers who aren't quite yet ready and willing to give up their carefully cultivated business, nor their list of dedicated clients who prefer to buy from a private dealer, rather than a cannabis shop, out in the open.
Barrhaven has all the perfect surroundings for such operations: a constant flurry of new homes being built with new people moving in, and no one noticing what neighbors are getting up to and therefore creating a perfect climate to go undetected as you fill up your basement with plants, and draw from the city's hydro grid. This kind of side hustle isn't for all, because long-term damage to homes has been proven, regardless of how careful the set-up is to vent excess moisture. The bonus is not having to declare the extra income to tax authorities, and being able to spend the extra income, ironically for some on home repairs.😂
Plants... just plants, to think of the complete and utter stupidity of democratic governments who've siphoned millions, collectively billions of dollars from programs and other important budgets, such as cleaning up pollution, all in an effort to curtail the production and distribution of marijuana. Still! To this very day, we're waging this war, attempting to stop the illegal influx of Mary Jane from proliferating in Canada because these monies are, ostensibly and apparently, in turn being used to finance other drug operations, like the real dangerous drugs, opioids.
I watch plenty of news shows and one in particular, Border Security, highlights the busy border crossings, where officials are focused solely on preventing outgoing drugs from leaving Canada or from coming into Canada. Often, these might be entire shipments leaving our fine country on route to another country. Though, and this is according to W5 (another fine Canadian news reporting show that airs once a week, like 60 Minutes) has covered how we in Canada still have massive shipments of illegal marijuana entering our ports. Marijuana isn't like pills or powders which can be broken down into component parts and re-assembled in a lab elsewhere. Marijuana, at least in its plant form, comes packaged in large blocks, sealed in plastic with stems and all, or in the form of hashish, a compressed version of the flower, only decidedly more potent, and just as sticky.
It's a challenge for authorities to keep a good growth industry down.
I'd like to recommend to many in the know to read twice over Ian Mulgrew's book Bud Incorporated: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry. Ian had worked as a journalist for (30) years covering practically every angle and story there is on the subject of marijuana. Mulgrew came to the inescapable conclusion that not only should marijuana be legalized, which thankfully it is now the defacto standard in Canada, but that countries and security institutions in their infinite stupidity have only ensured the continued growth of marijuana operations by keeping it in their Criminal Code.
In April 2026, the US Administration had removed marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, to instead assign it as a Schedule 2 substance, which is to say marijuana will no longer be regarded as a 'drug' that belongs in the strictest category, one that doesn't have any viable medical use (though I would still beg to differ with this classification too). Schedule 1 drugs in Canada include opioids, heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and morphine, to include other opioids. Note, however, that a powerful drug like ketamine, which is popular, belongs to a different class of drugs, known as a disassociative anesthetic. However, and having said this, morphine in the form of Dilaudid is still used in local area hospitals in Canada to treat severe pain.
When I consider the small number of persons serving time in US prisons, for mere possession of marijuana, (around 150), I'm left scratching my head as to why those charged with the so-called heinous crime of manufacturing and distribution of marijuana are left to rot in prison. These numbers range in the tens of thousands of persons, serving time. How come their sentences cannot be pardoned or reduced along with those who smoke marijuana for recreation? These growers and distributors are not showing up on anyone's doorstep, pushing plants on kiddies. Instead, they were arranging deals behind closed doors with other adults who in turn would distribute to cities and places to the adults in their remote communities. I call this lending a helping hand.
We are now 25 years into the 21st Century, and it has long been over-due for hardline policies on cannabis production and distribution to change. Alcohol is still available, and far more destructive, as is smoking cigarettes. I've argued with persons before, which should come as no surprise to you, given that I admit to arguing with people online all the time. One middle-age woman stated to me, "People who smoke marijuana are pot-heads!" to which I had countered, "Excellent. So if a woman has one glass of wine every night, after a long day, does this make her an alcoholic?" And she replied, "Of course not, not even if she were to drink two glasses of wine a day."
You cannot argue with the illogical, to point out that decompression from stress by way of indulging in one marijuana joint will provide a brief period of euphoria, maybe 20 minutes at best vs two glasses of wine that will achieve the same result. One is openly distributed and welcomed, while the other has to be illegally and secretly distributed.
I realize that Canada's former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wasn't liked by all. I didn't dislike him, and there's a difference. What I appreciated about him was his mature stance on abortion. When asked at a town hall gathering in Quebec, "What are your views on abortion?" Justin replied, without blinking, "What a woman does with her body is her business and hers alone." I think the same mature attitude should be applied to marijuana distribution. Mr. Trudeau and his Liberals get the credit for ushering in the legalization of marijuana in Canada, across every province, and this occurred in Oct 2019. Since that time of cannabis shops opening up in cities across the country, the taxes collected from selling marijuana and edibles have contributed $75 Billion to our Gross Domestic Product, what all governments track to measure the total market value or revenue of their success.
The cannabis industry also sustains about 98,000 jobs, and apparently the employees are all chill and quite happy to be working at these shops. HaHaHa!
If economies are struggling, and inflation feels as though it's running rampant, then it's high time for North America, all of North America, to look at new ventures to bring in more dollars to prop up sagging GDP numbers. We can't rely on oil dollars forever, any more than we can continue to gouge the bottom 50% of the population, to pay more in taxes, to pay more at the grocery check-out. I researched this week that since the pandemic, groceries prices in Canada have risen 27% in the last 5.5 years. That's a lot of hijacking going on with Canadian earners, who have no choice to buy groceries. No wonder why they need to spark up a twisty, just to cope.
I find it all so confusing. Ultra-Conservative right-wing types are convinced that if everyone turned to the Bible and just stopped horsing around with hallucinogenic substances, that the world would be put right again. Yes, of course, I believe that too and I also believe that lions would look dandy with zebra stripes, and even more so if they were all reading the Bible wearing a pair of coke-bottle glasses, while clutching a tumbler of the finest bourbon.
Allow me this brief moment to list the host of social and health issues derived from the consumption of alcohol: fetal alcohol syndrome, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, vehicular homicide, domestic abuse... to name nary a few of the problems caused by drinking the devil's rocket fuel. The consumption of alcohol is in fact associated with 60 medical conditions, to even include cancers, as well as neurological and brain disorders. Yet, man legalizes his man-made invention and demonizes marijuana, what was put on this Earth to grow freely, naturally. The debate about marijuana has raged for decades, as they say, waging war on Mom and Pop operations out of the home from people simply trying to supply the demand of a substance that clearly over six million Canadians partake in on a regular basis, over and above their beer!
Marijuana is still trafficked in the USA, and enters their borders, and sometimes even from the USA, coming into Canada. But, and for the most part, the drug-taking public are not entirely satisfied with weak-ass marijuana, and prefer instead the hard opioids, and various other chemical concoctions. The blame game of pointing the finger at marijuana, to accuse it of being a gateway drug, is still trotted out like some old stubby roach left in the ashtray for days.
Reality is that we are a species who loves to indulge in a wide range of hallucinogens and alcohol, any kind of stuff really, be it beer or pot or food or chemicals or hockey, in the case of Canadians. I like to think of our boys as pot-smoking, beer-drinking, hockey-watching males, and this isn't said as a negative. Rather, many Canadian males are perfectly fine with this state of mind and being, so long as no one encroaches on their good time.
I cannot state the number of persons addicted to anti-depressants but if the actual number were readily made available, I'd probably find it alarming. However, I've never been one to begrudge anyone from indulging in anything they choose to take, so long as they don't act like an idiot, to dump their problems on someone's else's lap. I, too, am not an exception. I love my chocolate, as I've confessed on numerous occasions. I also love a very, very cold Corona beer with lime in the summer. And, at one point in time in my life, though, this is no longer the case, I'd regularly pop Ibuprofen the curse presented itself, because I didn't want to suffer month after month needlessly through the pain of cramps and back pain. If someone, however, had decided that OTC's (over-the-counter) medication should all be deemed illegal, I'd probably have turned instead to marijuana to help alleviate the pain.
It comes down to this, does it not? Alleviated pain. I'm convinced the Government of Canada and the United States revere pain, so much so that they'll argue and insist on continuing to demonize organically derived substances, like magic mushrooms—still illegal under Federal law in Canada... because governments love the pain of being able to bitch about having to deal with this issue. A smart politician would divert all monies that are assigned to curtailing grow-ops and dump it into education, beginning with little kiddies. But now that the Government of Canada was bold enough to legalize marijuana and to get into the business of controlling its distribution, they didn't see the drop off in usage, nor did they see a wild increase in usage either, more like a modest increase.
The percentage of marijuana users in Canada hovers around the 6% range vs the 76% of Canadians who drink alcohol. However, and when it comes to alcohol, usage has dropped steadily for the past four years, which has translated into a drop of 18% overall. That is huge! One might conclude that because the usage of alcohol has declined, the use of marijuana would increase, yet it hasn't. Statistics suggest that a generational shift is responsible for the decline in alcohol consumption, being pushed by young men between ages of 15 to 34 years... not that I want to suggest that 15 year-olds should or could be drinking in the first place. Regardless, this is an important distinction.
I've personally held the belief that when we drop one bad habit, we tend to replace it with another.
Spend one week in Amsterdam, which is the perfect example of a live case study that's been operating for over (50) years. Their teenage population has the lowest percentage of marijuana and alcohol use in the country, right in a City where anyone can walk into a coffee shop and purchase as much weed or hash as they want. And, this is the irony: tell someone they shouldn't or can't be doing something, and they'll go out of their way to prove to you that it is their God-given right to do that very thing, even if they have to destroy the walls and foundation of a house to grow it for themselves.
Marijuana was put on this Earth to green the planet, and to fill the atmosphere with more oxygen, clearly a substance that seems to be lacking in the brains of politicians. Marijuana is a hardy plant, and is self-pollinating, not requiring bees or birds to pollinate it, and this alone should be justification enough for all countries in the world to ease up on their approach to curtailing the ingestion or smoking of something that has been with us, as long, if not longer than we've been alive.
Most notably, and on social networks, I've observed an increasing trend of alcohol distribution companies posting more studies on the negative side-effects of marijuana, somehow managing to miss the range of damage that alcohol has done for hundreds of years. We all live it, how the world is a funny place, rife with illogic pushed out by the masters of obfuscation. One might be inclined to think that more are smoking up behind closed doors, to leave their brains behind. Or maybe they've had one too many DMT trips with a pocket-full of magic mushrooms waiting in the wings.
The best joke I've read on the Uddernet lately was this: put five people in a room with all the booze they can drink and a fight will break out. Put the same five people in a room with all the pot they can smoke, and they'll form a rock band. 🎸
So, which psychoactive approach would you vote for in this day and age? I know my answer. I'd love to see a rock 'n roll revival.
