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Lol. I'll wager that marijuana causes as much anxiety as it treats. In fact I stopped using it because it became so much more potent and caused me to have panic attacks.
This is directly correlated to the amount of THC you consume. (And secondarily it has to do with your age - in your younger years you are more able to tolerate it.)
We´ve talked about a lot of things here, but the crushing classism and poverty hasn´t been mentioned yet. Yes, I get it, groups like the FARC lost their ideals long ago, but it doesn´t mean that everyone is pro-government and is just waiting to get the guerrilla out of their hometown. And they did have ideals. The ELN was founded by an ex-Jesuit priest.
When presidents like Samper, Pastrana and Uribe let right-wing paramilitaries run amok in poor communities across the most forgotten parts of the country, it left scars in the psyche of the people. Depending on who you ask, those guys were the worst of all. Of course the land owning families at my private school would not admit that though...to them the paramilitaries sometimes were the ¨necessary evil¨...make no mistake about it, they were evil. Now their remnants and some former guerrillas are working for smaller groups, something between private armies and street gangs known as the BACRIM.
Never mind that this video is now 20 years old, this was all going on well into the 2000s:
Social leaders from indigenous and Afro communities are still being killed to this day, as are labor union organizers. We hear all about the evil Communist guerrilla, but the ultra right wing is no better. My students have given me their take on it, about it being a necessary evil and how Álvaro Uribe was the greatest president ever. I´ve been down to el Putumayo and spoken with indigenous people who swore that the FARC never harmed them and just ran roadblocks to extract tolls off outsiders passing through...it was just a job to many of them.
In some form or another, I think Colombia will always have this problem so long as there is so much desperate poverty at the bottom. Sure, many people have moved up to ¨middle class¨ (it´s nothing like being middle class in the North America or Europe though, not even close), but we still have many people living in shanytown ¨invasiones¨, little girls forced into prostitution by their mothers or by neighborhood thugs, young boys aspiring to be hitmen or work for the budding drug gangs....it will keep going. I can only hope that such sad cases will diminish in the future, but we have a long way to go.
That being said, a tourist can now come and visit and see none of this unless they look for it. My priviledged students can drive all over the country and visit their fincas without worry. It´s not the nightmare it was before...but it´s not over either.
"Most drugs in the US are domestically produced. Marijuana, crystal meth, opiates (from the prescription painkillers) etc.
Also everyone does some kind of drug . Drink coffee or strong tea to wake you up in the morning? That's caffeine is a stimulant chemically similarly to cocaine.
Aspirin is a painkiller people take to get rid of painkilling symptoms. And so on."
NyWriterdude, if you think a cup of tea, aspirin and crystal meth are kind of similar or the same, your credibility is gone. Amen.
It's all about unchecked greed and corruption at the top, man. The majority of the population would change things for the better if they could, but they've got no way of enforcing checks and balances on their government.
Quote:
That being said, a tourist can now come and visit and see none of this unless they look for it.
This is absolutely correct. I get a lot flack from people (foreigners, tourists, gringos, expats) on these forums (Mexico, New Mexico, Colombia) who are looking at things from an outside perspective, they don't see how things really are because they don't have the experience. So, they don't believe it when someone who's lived through things and seen how things are tells them about it.
Quote:
My priviledged students can drive all over the country and visit their fincas without worry.
Eh, not always without worry. There's been an ongoing spate of armed robberies at fincas outside Armenia recently. You can tell your students about it. Of course they probably won't believe it, or will consider themselves immune from it (which they probably would be if they only spend the occasional weekend at their farm.)
caffeine is a stimulant chemically similarly to cocaine.
No it's not. Cocaine is chemically processed. To understand how little it resembles any kind of natural plant or substance, take a look at how it's made, all the way from picking the plant to the final product. It's nasty all the chemicals and crap that go into it, stuff you wouldn't normally think about putting into your body.
No it's not. Cocaine is chemically processed. To understand how little it resembles any kind of natural plant or substance, take a look at how it's made, all the way from picking the plant to the final product. It's nasty all the chemicals and crap that go into it, stuff you wouldn't normally think about putting into your body.
Please read my post again. That quote is from NyWriterdude and it is complete nonsense. The guy thinks aspirin, tea, and crystal meth are all the same, after all, drugs are drugs, he thinks.
We´ve talked about a lot of things here, but the crushing classism and poverty hasn´t been mentioned yet. Yes, I get it, groups like the FARC lost their ideals long ago, but it doesn´t mean that everyone is pro-government and is just waiting to get the guerrilla out of their hometown. And they did have ideals. The ELN was founded by an ex-Jesuit priest.
When presidents like Samper, Pastrana and Uribe let right-wing paramilitaries run amok in poor communities across the most forgotten parts of the country, it left scars in the psyche of the people. Depending on who you ask, those guys were the worst of all. Of course the land owning families at my private school would not admit that though...to them the paramilitaries sometimes were the ¨necessary evil¨...make no mistake about it, they were evil. Now their remnants and some former guerrillas are working for smaller groups, something between private armies and street gangs known as the BACRIM.
Never mind that this video is now 20 years old, this was all going on well into the 2000s:
Social leaders from indigenous and Afro communities are still being killed to this day, as are labor union organizers. We hear all about the evil Communist guerrilla, but the ultra right wing is no better. My students have given me their take on it, about it being a necessary evil and how Álvaro Uribe was the greatest president ever. I´ve been down to el Putumayo and spoken with indigenous people who swore that the FARC never harmed them and just ran roadblocks to extract tolls off outsiders passing through...it was just a job to many of them.
In some form or another, I think Colombia will always have this problem so long as there is so much desperate poverty at the bottom. Sure, many people have moved up to ¨middle class¨ (it´s nothing like being middle class in the North America or Europe though, not even close), but we still have many people living in shanytown ¨invasiones¨, little girls forced into prostitution by their mothers or by neighborhood thugs, young boys aspiring to be hitmen or work for the budding drug gangs....it will keep going. I can only hope that such sad cases will diminish in the future, but we have a long way to go.
That being said, a tourist can now come and visit and see none of this unless they look for it. My priviledged students can drive all over the country and visit their fincas without worry. It´s not the nightmare it was before...but it´s not over either.
I heard a bomb went off a couple days ago in Colombia. Unclear whether it's a lone crazy person with no agenda (U.S.-style) or if some guerrilla group sent them (South American style). If the latter, I would say it's a portent of things to come. Not suprising. You have a bunch of disbanded former FARC people looking for things to do - some of them still have their ideals. Others don't but still need something to keep them occupied. Some of the other paramilitary groups are still around. In other words there's still plenty of fertile ground for these types of things to regroup and reorganize themselves.
All signs point to a hardened member of the ELN. The vehicle was registered in his name and the plates are out of Arauca. I have a lot of my malcontent Petrista friends on social media saying it´s all an inside job, that no way could this wanted man drive halfway across the country and pull this off, but from what I understand the police academy (where the attacks took place) had been monitored for months, so they knew what they were doing. It was a kamikaze attack, so there´s no one to parade around on the news...until they bust the explosives team of the ELN behind it.
Uribe had the nerve to blame Santos and the peace process with the rival FARC for this, on the day it happened to boot. No class, no restraint.
The ELN is proving harder to dismantle than the FARC. Las FARC clearly tried to hold territory and at times fight conventionally against the military, which became impossible as time wore on. They were so beat down that they really meant business at the negotiating table, in spite of the few dissidents who fight on or have been absorbed into the BACRIM.
The ELN keeps a much lower profile, and doesn´t try to hold territory. I don´t think they´re interested in any sort of peace process, not only due to their terroristic nature, but they also watched as the FARC turned its weapons over first to the UN, and then had most of the rehabilitation and infrastructure segments of the process delayed or cancelled due to all the opposition coming from the Right, especially the Centro Democratico (which is neither centrist, nor very democratic).
The other thing to realize is that a lot of those former FARC people are going to end up being involved in other groups (guerrilla organizations, narco organizations). There's no incentive for them to reintegrate themselves into society, because there's nothing for them there.
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