Ethan: The kid had at least smoked it, he's actually quite the stoner. I just took what he said as a typical generalization of kids trying to be cool by doing drugs. He wouldn't have wanted to fight had he actually been high. The full story is that a group of people there wanted to see he and I fight so they really did the starting of it and he let his own rage go from there. By the time I got outside (I see the obvious ring of people waiting for a fight) I asked what was going on, then I got tackled from behind.
qqwref: One of the first things (if not the first) alcohol does is affect your judgement. This will cause a chain reaction for the events to follow. Since alcohol is a depressant, it relaxes you. When you get relaxed you're more comfortable with acting more like yourself rather than watch how you act in front of people. Your judgement is flawed so now your actions become even more exaggerated. Mix this with the fact that people go to parties with the expectation to be loud and obnoxious and you can quickly see why this can make a downer look more like a stimulant. Try taking a few shots on your own, keep your (expected) environment completely out of it. Try to also keep your expectations out of it. Notice after these few shots you are tired. This is the depressant working. So what about those angry drunks? If it's such a depressant why don't they just curl up in a ball and fall asleep? The fact is that the "angry drunks" are just showing that they might have normally bottled up. When people are sober they usually try to avoid confrontation. A drunk person doesn't have the same judgement, so what they're actually thinking is more prone to come out rather than something non-confrontational. A good example of this is when I drink and I hear loud music (my girlfriend likes dancing with her girl friends), I get annoyed and say something about turning it down a lot quicker than when I'm sober (although this may not be completely accurate because I'm pretty quick to turn down the music even when sober). If the music wasn't as loud, I'm not near as sober. I was jokingly called an angry drunk when I tried to fight a buddy of mine (drunk pretty bad). I didn't want to fight at first, only wrestle around a bit, but he didn't want any part of it. For whatever reason I got offended and had I been sober I'd have just ragged on him all night about how he's scared of me and try to shrug it off. Instead I let the offense build up. This isn't a product of the alcohol making me "crazy," it's a product of the alcohol affecting my judgement. The effect is no longer alcohol's affect on you, it's how you've felt the entire time, but you express it now in a differemt manner because you care less about how it affects other people.
I'm not sure how much marijuana affects judgement, so I can't really speak about that. If it kept judgement intact then that'd be quite a trump card as to why it's still a downer and gives you that relaxed feeling whereas alcohol can but "seems" to make people act like they've taken an upper instead.
My main point wasn't that though, but more based off how you said intuition. If you understand both substances are both downers, how can you not question how one substance seems like it's more of a stimulant than it is a depressant? Have you never heard about high people being obnoxious? Giggly? Ready to prank each other? I just feel like the negatives of alcohol and positives of pot are the only things being evaluated instead of all of them for each.
It's the best part because it should be obvious that even somebody who is against any sort of drug (including medicine such as acetaminophine aka Tylenol) can see the upsides to legalizing this. I wonder if part of the reason it's staying illegal is the "how far will it go?" type of question that would be spurred if it ever became federally legal.
