Ok, then ban joints and pass around the brownies. Win-win.
Well joints have the advantage of more precise dosage control when pot is used medicinally as a treatment for glaucoma or the side effects of chemotherapy. Also for stress reduction. (I understand there’s an ongoing stress epidemic judging by prescription trends in California, Colorado and Washington state, but set that aside.)
There are other potential risks though. Those using pot are more likely to experience psychotic symptoms: there appears to be a dose-response relationship. That’s from a review of seven longitudinal studies by Theresa Moore of the University of Bristol and colleagues. It enhances risks by perhaps 40%. That’s for psychotic incidents. But bear in mind that there’s no evidence for any epidemic of schizophrenia over the past 50 years. Pot also enhances the odds of automotive accidents. Worse than alcohol? I doubt it.
My take though is that there’s a lot we don’t know and putting our health in the hands of Phillip Morris is a bad idea. They will cajole, lie, lobby and mislead just as they did with cigarettes. They will also reformulate weed, negating the reliability of previous studies. Whatever happens, we should monitor the effects and realistically the pot industry will oppose research that gives them bad publicity just as today’s politicians oppose research that opens them up to ridicule.
Richard Parker: Many of the supply chain problems can be addressed by limiting production and distribution to smaller scale outfits.
My point is about addiction not harm - nicotine being particularly pernicious.
Cigarettes are pretty much nothing without.
Probably still a majority.
People who were told back in high school “Drugs are bad m’kay”, and haven’t been educated otherwise since. There is also a bit of circular reasoning thrown in that goes like this.
Marijuana is illegal so by definition only criminals smoke marijuana. But we all know that criminals are bad so this implies tat marijuana is bad, therefore Marijuana should be illegal.
This same logic is also applied to undocumented immigrants, but that is a side track for another thread.
According to Pew, quoted upthread, 52% of the country favors legalization.
Well then I agree: nicotine is highly addictive.
Upthread, I flipped through my book on Marijuana and assembled the harms. The studies go in both directions, but the best ones seem to find some harm. Look closely at my claims and you may notice that they seem pretty manageable.
The costs might be overstated as well. Few are jailed for small scale pot possession. Some of the pot dealers (some) might be criminally inclined anyway so if they weren’t marijuana pushers they’d be arrested for something else. Part of that might be to low skills, part due to temperament. Still, remove demand for illegal services and we’d expect some “Shifting along the supply curve” - i.e. less illegal activities overall. My point is that the cost/benefit calculation is more difficult than it may first appear.
Marijuana isn’t harmless and it’s wrong to pretend otherwise (thankfully nobody has done that in this thread). The best evidence for that is to examine the 350,000 marijuana users admitted for drug treatment in 2009. This figure has gone up almost fivefold since 1992. Now over half of the them have been referred to by the criminal justice system. (Yay! It beats prison!) But that still leaves a minimum of say 175,000 with a confirmed problem (and good for them for stepping up to it). I think it’s naive to assume that these numbers wouldn’t go up by a factor if marijuana is legalized. Also, the 350,000 figure doesn’t include 12 step programs which are, you know, anonymous.
There are 17 million current users of pot, those who have toked within the past month. A fraction will have difficulties with the drug; many will experience denial. Those who claim that pot is safer than alcohol should be surprised if the number of current users doesn’t balloon after the drug is legalized. Which should have a proportional effect on those with substance abuse issues.
My general way of thinking about recreational pharmaceuticals is harm reduction. Citizens should maintain a health skepticism with regards to expansive drug legalization proposals.
I wonder* what proportion of these are actual problem cases versus something like a mom finding a joint in her kid’s room and immediately signing him up for drug treatment.
I agree with you that Marijuana use is not without consequence I’ve never used it, and probably wouldn’t even if it were legal. It just seems that given that both cigarettes and alcohol are legal its hard to argue that Marijuana shouldn’t be.
*note: actually curious not just snark.
Some. But I suspect we all know people who have problems with dope, just as we all know people who enjoy an occasional toke without issue. Similarly, some of those referred to treatment by law enforcement probably can benefit from it.
This is an area that deserves solid research but probably won’t get it anytime soon. Which is a shame.
Well I would argue that the harms of marijuana are more uncertain than the harms of alcohol, which I think is understood better. But let’s say marijuana is 1/2 as harmful. That doesn’t imply you want to legalize it or regulate it like alcohol. Once you end prohibition, there’s no going back: it’s pretty much irreversible as our experiment with alcohol prohibition showed.
The choices aren’t between alcohol or marijuana. The choices are both or just alcohol. I wouldn’t want to legalize one or ten drugs just because they are milder than another drug that was adopted by humans around 8000 BC or so. We should match policy to drug one at a time.
The Alcohol Prohibition as an experiment was an experiment in prohibition, not legalization. The result was:
It didn’t work.
The War on Drugs is an experiment to enforce prohibition. The ongoing results:
It doesn’t work.
I’m not saying we should have Futurama-esque heroin vendors on the streets, but prohibiting people from getting what they want to get high on just plainly doesn’t stop them.
The reason I don’t mind marijuana being legal is from this view. We have a massive police apparatus in this country operating to do nothing but take money from people (sometimes without due process), put people in jail, or otherwise make their lives miserable for something that, in all respects, doesn’t do much damage to them.
Worse, it’s continually stated that we are doing this for the benefit of society and the benefit of the users. I personally do not believe in arguments for adults without cause to be directed on what to do. And society has had no benefit from the War on Drugs, and no real benefit from Prohibition was ever realized. Well, except for the companies the people worked for.
One thing that a lot of people never realized about Prohibition (Because the public face was mainly women who were abused/divorced-and-left-destitute) was that the industry leaders were are large driving force to ban alcohol because they had a high rate of absenteeism that they attributed to alcoholism. This was causing them to lose productive working time and, thus, money. They lobbied for the 18th amendment quite a bit.
M4M and XT have mentioned a link between cancer and marijuana. I recall reading that many researchers have looked for such a link, but none have proved one.
Intuitively, cancer certainly seems like an obvious result. Still, a link to a cite where the link is proven would be appreciated.
I’m not claiming marijuana is without negative consequences. I just don’t believe it causes cancer- heck, doctors prescribe it to cancer patients.
I’m guessing anyone in this thread claiming cancer is talking specifically about smoking joints. That is, smoke causes cancer therefor marijuana causes cancer. Even if the amount pot consumed recreationally were equal to that inhaled by pack-a-day smokers, there are always brownies. Though, if you ask me, diabetes and heart disease from an excessive case of the munchies and special-brownie consumption would probably be the more serious health concern, but it doesn’t sound as menacing as cancer.
Cigarette smoke causes cancer; marijuana smoke does not contain those carcinogens AFAIK. The atmosphere is full of all kinds of particulates, and mostly they don’t cause cancer.
I suppose different ingestion methods are separate questions.
It was my understanding that the smoke of any plant is going to contain all sorts of carcinogens. But my understanding of this isn’t based on much, other than doctors in California tell you to use a vaporizer when they write you a script.
I should say that I don’t necessarily think lung cancer is the central issue. I drew my discussion from the book linked upthread. It said not clear: “the published research shows mixed results”.
Amazon has a “Look inside” feature. The cancer discussion is on page 65-67. It has more nuance than my brief presentations.
Here’s a pdf I found googling for Aldington, author of a pot causes cancer study: http://www.eurad.net/filestore/PDF/CannabiscombineddocumentFeb2012.pdf
On page 46, there’s a cite: On March 26th 2007, Dr Sarah Aldington of The Medical Research Institute in Wellington presented a paper to The Thoracic Society conference in Auckland. She said that “Approximately 5% of lung cancer cases in those aged 55 and under may be attributable to cannabis, equating to 15 new cases a year. In 2002 306 people were diagnosed in New Zealand with lung cancer. “The younger someone starts smoking cannabis, the higher the risk of lung cancer”, she said. The risk of developing the disease increased by about 8% per year for people whose cumulative exposure equated to smoking one joint a day, about the same as a person with a pack a day tobacco habit. We should proceed with caution when legalizing marijuana, because our decisions may be irreversible in practice, once pot smoking becomes more socialized.
Great idea. MJ is certainly a good candidate for legalization. And I agree with others that harder drugs should be a treatment issue, not a criminal one when it comes to use. In terms of manufacturing and selling, I’m not against the sale of recreational drugs per se, but I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the idea of prescriptions and food/drug safety standards.
I don’t agree with Measure for Measure’s premise.
Saying that Big Company X would somehow make MJ addictive, sounds awfully close to conspiracy theory to me. Also, Big Company X would have to be insane to do such a thing considering the beat down tobacco companies got for doing that very thing.
Also, let’s not forget about market demand. The overwhelming majority of pot smokers aren’t going to smoke MJ with a lot of additives added to it. Unlike tobacco smokers*, pot smokers know what pot is supposed to taste like. If you try to stick them with something that’s loaded with additives, it’s going to taste like crap to them and they aren’t going to buy it.
*The tobacco in a name brand cigarette and pure straight tobacco are worlds apart, taste wise. Most tobacco smokers don’t realize this because they were introduced to smoking vis a vis the name brand cigarettes.
All smoke causes damage to the lungs, which, when it happens repeatedly, can lead to scarring, which can lead to cancer.
Cigarettes increase that chance because they’ve been sticking harmful chemicals into the things for 65 years, which increases the damage the smoke does and shortens the time span needed for scarring and cancer to show up. You can buy cigarettes that are raw tobacco leaves, which aren’t as harmful as the other kinds of cigarettes, but ARE still harmful, because you are taking smoke into your lungs, which your lungs can’t properly handle.
Marijuana carries the same smoke-related issues if you smoke it. You are basically turning yourself into a fire fighter…all of the horribleness of cancer without the outdoor exercise and heroics. 
Water (in the form of humidity, no one inhale a glass of water please), however, our lungs are A-OK with, which is why vaporizing is recommended by doctors and the like to smoke things.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of emphysema? Because scarring takes place on a tissue level, whereas cancer, as I understand it, involves a genetic mutation that causes cells to grow in a haywire fashion, triggered by either a carcinogenic molecule or a mechanism like radiation.
For example, here is a list of carcinogens in cigarettes. As I understand it, those chemicals (especially, I thought, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are why cigarettes cause cancer, and not ‘because it is smoke’, or ‘scarring’. I haven’t had a chance to examine M4M’s cite yet, but at first glance it doesn’t appear to identify a carcinogen either, and the rate of lung cancers attributed to marijuana seems small enough to fall within a margin of error.
I could be wrong- that’s why I read this board, to quit being wrong about things. Am I wrong about how cancer comes to be?
I’m saying cigarette advertising, marketing and let’s not forget lobbying were highly effective. I’m saying that the cigarette companies received drama, not tough policy. There was discussion of “Pay for performance”: penalties would go up with teen smoking incidence and down as it decreased. The cigarette companies blocked that move, just as they stopped effective anti-smoking advertising in California.
This isn’t conspiracy theory: it’s direct observation. If marijuana is legalized, Phillip Morris or its equivalent would be in charge: physicians and public health officials would be a sideshow. Actual experts would get coverage in the media, but they would not call the shots. And politicians or perhaps “Washington” would receive the blame.
Ok, thanks, I appreciate the reference. I’ve started digging in to the cancer chapter, and right off the bat there are warning flags all over the place:
The very first words in the chapter amount to an excuse about why it is hard to link cancer to cannabis. That is followed by a fallacious argument that volume of evidence/research is what proves a conclusion. The first paragraph concludes with a somewhat false assertion that cannabis is ‘new’ compared to tobacco, and therefore we’ll have to wait decades for the effects of cannabis to appear. Looks like she intends to assert the effects of cannabis will be just like the effects of tobacco.
Then she goes on with her special pleading while continuing the false premise that cannabis is ‘new’. It is mentioned in the Bible; it was used in Roman times; it was no secret in the Middle East- safe to say it has been around in Western society for quite some time, depending on how one defines ‘Western society’ I suppose. Not to mention that it has been more than 30 years since the early '70s.
Then she floats the false premise that cannabis and tobacco are inseparable, essentially declaring that this is going to be a chapter about the effects of tobacco + cannabis.
followed by the reiteration that it is hard to study this question. If we don’t have the sample size for a case-control study, I’ll settle for the identification of a carcinogen.
followed by another way to intimate that she is going to elide the distinction between tobacco and cannabis.
I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the identification of a carcinogen, but let me just point out that articles in, say, Nature don’t proceed in this way.
Not that any of this confirms my belief. I simply want the debate to proceed from true premises. So far I’m inclined to think the linked article is not a reliable piece of scientific research and therefore cannot confirm any hypothesis, based on the first few passages. Even in the interest of discouraging cannabis use, we’d want to avoid a ‘this is your brain on drugs’ effect, in which the official advertising against drugs is so laughably inaccurate that it actually persuades a lot of young people that there is no danger associated with drug use.
Without solid proof, we’d be doing a serious disservice to the public to assert a link between cannabis and cancer.
FTR, I vouched for the book I linked to at Amazon. I couldn’t find the original Aldington study. I did find a reference to it in a .pdf, which I linked to. I can’t vouch for the quality of the .pdf itself, except that I’m inclined to trust that the characterization of the Aldington study is roughly accurate. It’s consistent with the good citation at least.
Read the title page then page 3. The .pdf was essentially written by an amateur (Mary Brett BSc (Hons), not Aldington) with an ax to grind. If you want a professional assessment of the literature, try Look Inside at the Amazon link. See especially the comments on risk assessment in a policy context, near the end of the section.