Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


You do realise that the thread's about legalisation? Perhaps not.


All sugars are a killer, as is red meat.

Whether you like it or not, the laws banning marijuana in so many countries (introduced in the 1920s under puritanical US pressure) are being relaxed. Not least because, as established earlier in this thread, the current prohibition is not only ineffective but also dangerous. It isn't a coincidence that those jurisdictions that have already relaxed their policies tend to be the more enlightened and stable ones.


There are hundreds of strains, many/most of them easily available within driving distance of Poland however unless it's legal and quality controlled, how would anyone truly know what they're getting? That's the danger in artificially restricting the market.

Work / Working in Poland - Logistics, procurement, imports-exports [12]

There's a company with a very similar name. Their website is hespolska.pl. They're registered as a business, seem to have expat owners from (I think) Ireland and a fairly expensive business address (it's a large office building in the city centre with a lot of companies in). They do plant hire among other things. Is this the firm you're looking for?

Genealogy / Where did most Germans live in Poland in the 19th century? [26]

No, Ziemowit. In English, the word still can imply even now; so can yet in the right context. I doubt Konigberg/Kaliningrad/Karaliauèius/Twangste and its environs is about to secede from the Russian Federation and join Poland (or Lithuania) interesting though that would be. The predominantly Russian inhabitants are unlikely to go for that and geopolitics right now and in the foreseeable future also say a big no.

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Love / Too late for a serious relationship? or not - I'm 39 and looking for someone Polish [27]

39 isn't old at all (ask Tom Daley) and there is no shortage of divorced and separated ladies in PL.


He's suddenly aged (and badly) and in any case is much older than the OP.

Life / Where to buy the best quality sleep mask in Warsaw? [4]

The shop at the airport (the one just through the barrier) sells them. If you aren't planning on travelling, perhaps you know someone who is? Also Amazon stock them.

Genealogy / Where did most Germans live in Poland in the 19th century? [26]

Hi Archiwum. Don't forget that the two places you mentioned weren't Poland until after the war and one of them mostly still isn't.

Law / My wife's signature has been forged relating to a Polish will, is it worth hiring a lawyer? [16]


The one that missed 2 deadlines for me was an adwokat. The OP if he speaks Polish should look at some of the view sites - I wish I had. That or choose one of the bigger and better known firms.

Genealogy / Where did most Germans live in Poland in the 19th century? [26]


There were a lot around Warsaw and many were farmers although obviously not all. Lodz was by the way a German city even though it was in Russian territory. Also Poznan had a very large German population.

Law / My wife's signature has been forged relating to a Polish will, is it worth hiring a lawyer? [16]


Yes - this is very good advice. In PL there are more bad lawyers than good ones. Get a good one. Incidentally, there are websites where clients review lawyers and it might be worth having a look at a few of these.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

At the moment the movement for marijuana law reform is supported by people who can hardly be described as "the money". Liberal Poland would certainly want to base any reform on common sense and rather than be "pressured" by Western Europe or anywhere else, has an equal voice (and a favourably large voting bloc) in what goes on. Worth mentioning though that among that voting bloc (and Polish society in general) there is a great deal of diversity of opinion. Poland's centuries-old liberal tradition has traditionally cherished freedom which is a positive thing.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

Great that you've finally grasped what the thread's about, however things can and do change much faster than people sometimes expect, c.f. equal marriage in the UK, so you may well some day be surprised.

Personally I favour a Europe-wide policy since most borders are now open and more or less free of any sort of customs checks for private travellers.

Poland has borders with one country where marijuana is legal and another where it's already decriminalised and soon to be legally on sale) rendering (as mentioned earlier) the current laws to be so hard to enforce as to be laughable. There are even some divided towns (Cieszyn, Gubin/Frankfurt) where you can smoke in one part of town and not the other.

Change hasn't happened in Poland yet, though shops are still selling hard liquor to 18 year old kids.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


Did anyone suggest otherwise. To repeat, one of the two things you mention has a campaign to reform the current legal status. The other does not. What part of that don't you understand?

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


Fortunately only one of them, the topic of this thread, has a campaign to relax the legal restrictions on it.

Interesting you see yourself as a guest somewhere. A rather long stay given the length of time you've been hanging around in PLand unless you're sponging off the state for some reason, you're presumably a Paying Guest, whose opinion is no more or less valid as anyone else. Not really a case for "put up or shut up" if it's where you live permanently, pay taxes and vote in some or all elections. Engaging in current affairs in the place you live legally and officially is generally considered commendable, rather than as you amusingly call it "an insult".

Though personally I don't have time to get involved in campaigns in PL. I do however reserve the right to express my opinion, just as you are doing rather stridently on this issue. It seems you think your own personal opinion as expressed in this thread is acceptable but others should remain silent if they don't share it.

The wider debate, much broader than just our small region of Europe, continues and so far most changes in the law relating to marijuana have been exactly as or close to the title of this thread. Well worth looking at the circumstances under which some countries (including I think PL) originally criminalised this benign herb.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

Obviously, you're entitled to your opinion, however illogical it may be, however the fact remains that improving the old laws on marijuana to bring them in line with reality is an issue which keeps cropping up.

You even started a thread on here about it yourself, though clearly you have one quite extreme point of view, at one point even equating smoking a joint somewhere to getting in a car and driving on a public road while drunk!,

Interesting that you, a foreigner, seem clear on what ''Poland does not need'' and are expressing that strongly while suggesting in the same post that another foreigner should not similarly express their point of view.....

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

That whole post doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever or add to the discussion about whether or not marijuana should be legalised in a country where more dangerous intoxicants are widespread.

Of course you can prefer the status quo, but in those countries with a more liberal and better thought out and debated policy there are sound reasons for removing the prohibition.

But hey, you can always support an existing system where an 18 year old can legally buy and consume 90% Spirytus but an adult can't legally smoke a joint.


Please please never try to become a lawyer. By the way, I also know where to buy an antique candelabra but am not in any way knowledgeable about the tat market.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


Tell that to the folks in Saska Kępa


Hard to know how you figure that one out. Did I say I import it?


So you 'may want' to respect any law you disagree with rather than lobbying for change?


Your silliness knows no bounds sometimes. a. Did I say I smoke dope in Poland or b. Do you think smoking a joint, say, at home is the same as getting in a ton of metal with an engine while using a dangerous intoxicant?

Of course your daft drunk driving analogy falls at the first hurdle. If I were to use marijuana in Poland I would be harming nobody including myself. A drunk driver however is risking her or his life as well as that of others. So Warszawski, by your logic, when you exceed the speed limit by 2km per hour you are on the same level as a serial rapist, how do you feel about that.

Life / Is 10500 monthly is enough for a family to live in Warsaw Poland [136]

Rental contracts are usually for a year however there's always a notice period (generally a month) if you want to quit earlier.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


That's the whole issue really. Should we have a law that reflects reality or one from decades ago that doesn't.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


Who said it was? Though freedom of goods is part of the EU's four freedoms and some day in the future policies about intoxicants will need to be harmonised to iron out inconsistencies and eliminate opportunities for organised crime.


It's very astute indeed Warszawski. Perhaps you're also suggesting that the border guards are 'not very astute' since they predicted this would happen back in 2006. Anyway, it isn't 'importing' since that concept is now largely an irrelevance when moving personal items between Poland and Germany. Fortunately we no longer have a border and only some outdated laws remain to be removed as the campaigners want to do. Much better to be practical about it and have a unified policy. The big question is whether that policy should be joined up thinking and realistic or something from the past that didn't really work well ever and is now at best an ostrich mentality pretending there isn't a respectable market for it and at worst has created a situation where organised crime in Poland or businesses outside Poland grab all the money from that market.


Very hard to say what being a foreigner has to do with anything. Are you suggesting that a foreigner should only buy from Polish dealers rather than get a better deal in a nearby city?


Sounds a lovely place. Much the same as some of the bars on the other side of the river a few years ago - the city (during the PiS administration) licensed some bars for their cronies to run but didn't allocate any budget for policing them. The relatively easily available marijuana made for a friendly peaceful atmosphere however the lack of police enabled other problems among the people who weren't smoking pot so as soon as the kaczynski gang were out of office the situation was sorted and there's no longer a lawless atmosphere.

Incidentally there's plenty growing further down the river bank but it gets picked as soon as it's ripe. You'll notice it if you walk from the main road to the naturist beach at Błota.

Work / Career as an English teacher in Warsaw Poland [28]

Think about how many teachers there are in Warsaw. It's true that most survive from private language schools and maybe a few private students, but there must still be a significant percentage doing the quality work - like the specialists you mention. As for being a 'gifted self promoter', fine for the gifted ones, but any training freelancer has to learn how to self promote if they want to make a good living.

A new arrival would have to be lucky to clear 5000 net, though that wage is above average for Warsaw. It isn't impossible though. People with good qualifications can also have extra income streams as an examiner. When I was teaching English in Warsaw a few years ago, after the first year I always made much more than that even though I refused privates.

Salaries have dropped a bit (and not as many salaried teachers in Warsaw as there once were) however it's still very possible to do well if you put your mind to it and have a certain amoun of both charisma or luck. The OP here is however not genuine - he's trolling a particular poster who is not around at the moment.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

At the moment, there's a strong possibility that coffee shops are going to open later this year or early next year just down the road (really only a short drive from several Polish cities) in Berlin. Marijuana is more or less legal there; it's freely available in public (Hasenheide and the wonderful Görlitzerpark, also I noticed dealers last Sunday standing on Skalitzerstrasse by the u bahn and also in the pocket park on Fugger Eck); it's generally good quality and the quantities (at Görli anyway) are reliable. Easy to get wholesale quantities too.

Most importantly, there are no real border checks between Berlin/Poland. The train is cheap, the bus is even cheaper and you can be home in Warsaw in 5 hours or Poznan in 2ish.

People can rail about how they disapprove of this that or the other, but some things can't be stopped so easily once a ball is rolling. Better to apply excise duty, vat etc and bring this already existing sector of the economy into the mainstream. Whether the cost of alcohol treatment or the other direct or indirect costs of alcohol, like the high levels of alcohol related crime, child neglect etc are covered by those taxes is a moot point. But if there is an existing social cost to marijuana use, why not recoup some of that in the same way that we do with alcohol?

Poland would lose nothing by legalising it (they may have to one day anyway, depending on how the EU develops) and everything to lose from the present policy of allowing alcohol to be more freely available than marijuana. As a policeman said to me during the decriminalisation debate a few years ago, he'd rather go into a room full of pot smokers than a room full of drunks.

By the way, Warszawski, your last post is mostly a word for word quote from a particular source. Don't you think you should mention that?

Work / Career as an English teacher in Warsaw Poland [28]

Plenty on here already in at least a dozen threads to answer your question. For the record, plenty of language teachers in PL do very nicely, especially in the capital, "don't gag me yo".

News / GERMANS WANT TO GERMANIZE KOPERNIK (COPERNICUS)! OUTRAGE! [1016]


Aside from the fact that calling him a scientist is just historically lazy, it seems there's a lot of doubt. The various threads discussing that on here are a tiny and barely relevant part of the wider discussion about his nationality which is a complicated matter since the changes in meaning of that term since the period he lived in.

If you still believe or pretend to believe that


why not do something very simple. Google 'Copernicus German' and see how many things come up. Thousands and thousands. But hey, you say there's


.

Life / Living Costs and life in Poznan? [70]

As Dominic rightly says, that's a low wage, especially for a foreigner. People do have to live on that, however not always very well. To illustrate, Pb98 gasoline is $6.86 per US Gallon (5-something pln a litre), a Big Mac Meal is about 15 pln, the cost of finding somewhere decent to live might surprise you (a very small apartment with bills would take at least half your salary) and one of the benefits of being in Poznan (travel) would be compromised, since you'd be on a very tight budget.

Having said that, you don't say how old/young you are, why you want to come to PL and what sort of work you're talking about. If you want to experience a new country, perhaps spend only a year here or do the job as a stepping stone to another one and don't mind being very careful with money and/or sharing an apartment, it might not be a bad idea.

Work / Career as an English teacher in Warsaw Poland [28]

I remember that article from when it came out. There's a lot of truth, but the writer is unnecessarily bleak. There are good jobs in language teaching and it can open the doors to other opportunities. Plus it can be well paid, though that is increasingly rare in PL.

News / GERMANS WANT TO GERMANIZE KOPERNIK (COPERNICUS)! OUTRAGE! [1016]


At the last free elections they took part in, they didn't get a majority. They took advantage of a crisis to get into office.


More a case of being unable to do anything about it once the fascists had taken power.

Whoever or whatever Copernicus was; that identity doesn't exist today. The concept of nationality was different, citizenship in the modern sense was non-existent, the idea of the nation state was different, the population was tiny compared to today, ideas and information were disseminated differently and people's cultural identity was different.

Pretending that Copernicus was a Pole or a German just because someone happens to be one him/herself is meaningless and laughable. At least he's entitled to have statues of himself in two countries, one of which has far greater scientific achievement both past and present than the other and one of which gets quite passionate about him.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

I've heard of that. Most insist on wine though. At least one religion uses a drug called DMT in their ceremonies and of course, closer to the thread topic, one well known one uses marijuana.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]


Both have been tried and neither has worked, especially alcohol. Anyway, religious organisations would object to an alcohol ban unless they got exemptions in which case Rastafarians (there are a few in Poland) and various other religious groups who use substances currently prohibited would justifiably expect an exemption from substance laws too.


At the time of the change in Czech law, several people said to me (none of them drinkers or smokers especially) that people in Poland can deal with certain freedoms less well and require strong laws to compensate for a lower inner self-discipline and rationality than Czechs. I thought that's a bit extreme at the time however there may well be something in that. And by the way, some did enjoy communism just as some today support very controlling political parties.

Life / Legalising Marijuana in Poland. Therapy available? [76]

There's one campaigning group who organise a Marsz Konopi however it's still more of an alcohol culture here, that and a mood of conformism.

Travel / Is it safe to travel to Poland? [194]

No more than in a lot of the world and £ódż is fairly OK. A nice city to study in.