Don’t stress - all is well. Just some ideas flying around on a spinning platter somewhere in Chicago in the middle of the night. Your opinion is as valid as mine since actual study of the subject is largely prohibited and that was my only point.
As mentioned in the documentary The union business behind getting high, inhaling any heated plant matter is detrimental to the lungs and the throat. However, not nearly as bad as tobacco.
The only real issues are with mental health. If you smoke everyday for an extended period of time you will notice some quirks. Occasional short term memory loss and maybe anxiety/paranoia. As an ex-smoker I can tell you that regulated and moderated use produces no negative side effects.
If you abuse it it can make you awkward in social situations, paranoid, anxious and forgetful.
I use marijuana two to three times a week and notice no negative side effects. I’ve been a heavy smoker for 2-3 years (2-3 joints a day) and a light user for 2 years and all the negative effects have gone.
People who say marijuana is harmless are wrong. In the wrong hands, it can mess up your life, not as bad as alcohol though. People who use it too young and don’t know how to control it is why marijuana gets such a bad name.
Edit: Marijuana is not physically addictive. But that doesn’t mean it’s not addictive. If you like banana’s enough, you can become addicted to them.
Scientists have just proven that smoking marijuana causes a pronounced loss in …errr…I forget.
I’ve made pills (more accurately they were capsules). Capsule production kits are pretty inexpensive. They’re primarily marketed to herbalist? type people.
Crazyhorse, thank you for those cites. They go far towards explaining why I had to ask this question, and I agree there is a need for more study on this. Do you know if such studies are being done in countries which haven’t outlawed marijuana, or is the opinion there that they don’t need to? I could also see that research done in such countries could easily be discredited by countries which have outlawed it… “well, yer all a bunch of pot-smoking hippies, so obviously you can’t do real science…”
Until we can gather enough data to convince the masses, this assertion is just as valid as all the other here. However, observation should lead one to believe that the mellow, relaxed, and generally calm demeanor that marijuana induces is far more likely to bring about world peace than the belligerent, feisty, angry drunk that alcohol produces. I’ve never heard of people getting high and then deciding to get into a fight, but I’d like to have a dollar for every bar fight that’s broken out in the last year.
For the first claim or the rest? For the first I have anecdotal evidence. A good friend and collaborator of mine who smoked weed constantly. He went from being a really fine mathematician (somehow in a higher class than me) to spouting not so much nonsense and uninteresting inconsequential “mathematics”. You had to be there. Then he had a bypass operation that he said was caused by all the incidental tobacco he had inhaled. Then he underwent a total personality shift, then died.
As for my other claims, well, the first two, comparing it to cigarettes and alcohol, that hardly needs evidence. Known any alcoholics? I have. Known any people who died of lung cancer? I have. The statement about prison just seems too obvious to require any evidence.
So, no cites. Thanks!
Marijuana prohibition has always been political. There has never been any medical basis. When it was first made illegal by the Mariuana Tax Act of 1937, it was viewed as a way to harass Mexican, who we were having a tiff with at the time. When the act was passed, there was a complaint from the medical establishment because they were not invited to give medical opinions at the proceedings.
When it was added to Schedule in 1970, it was to suppress “those damned hippies”.
This notion that “more study is needed” is baloney. CrazyHorse posted a nice list of some of the studies that have been done. I’ve read some of them. They mostly come to the same conclusion: Mostly harmless. It’s just that the establishment doesn’t like that conclusion. The one by the Shaffer Commission was commissioned by Richard Nixon at the start of the War on Drugs. He was so sure that they would discover all sorts of horrible things about the drug to support this effort. When they came back, like most all the other studies with a finding of “Mostly harmless. Shouldn’t be illegal”, he promptly trashed the report and it never received any further attention.
I concede the extreme position. Too much of anything is not good for you. You can die from drinking too much water (hyponatremia).
And please stop comparing it to alcohol. Drinking too much alcohol is lethal. It happens every year in colleges. Cannabis is non-toxic. You cannot smoke yourself to death. Further, it’s been recently discovered that humans actually have natural cannabinoid receptors. This means that your body is actually designed to accept this substance.
Yeah, common sense dictates all things in moderation. But I’m really tired of the continued ignorance of facts by the government on this issue.
This is the only thing that I disagree with in your post, but it’s pretty egregious. Cannabinoid receptors do NOT mean “that your body is actually designed to accept this substance.” All they indicate is that the body produces chemicals that happen to be chemically analogous to substances found in marijuana.
Well, from another Wikipedia entry:
Cannabinoid receptors are activated by three major groups of ligands, endocannabinoids (produced by the mammalian body), plant cannabinoids (such as THC, produced by the cannabis plant) and synthetic cannabinoids (such as HU-210)
I’m not a doctor or a chemist, but this says to me that these receptors respond to the cannabinoids produced by your body, the cannabinoids in the cannabis plant, and synthetic cannabinoids. In other words, the receptors don’t care where the cannabinoids originate. I think this supports my contention, don’t you?
No I don’t. How does the fact that humans and some plants happen to share enough biochemistry that a chemical in one will react with a receptor on the other mean that the other was “designed” to consume the one? Designed by whom? Are you proposing that this is evidence for a creator deity who morally intends for humans to use weed? Or are you proposing an evolutionary pathway by which the cannabinoid system in vertebrates (or just in humans?) evolved specifically due to selective pressure favoring the ancestors of weed smokers?
Whooeee! I thought the excerpt I posted was simple and straightforward. I don’t have any idea how all of these things you mention come into play. I have no intention of following you there.
Well what do you mean when you say “your body is actually designed to accept this substance”? Only that your body does accept it? Ok, no argument there; obviously our bodies accept THC. I thought you were saying something more than that.
dataguy-The 1937 date is what I was thinking of when I said,“turn of the century.” Didn’t realize it was that deep into the century.
Marijuana smoke contributes proportionately as much to COPD as tobacco smoke.
As I understand it, however, one doesn’t generally chain-smoke joints, so in practice it’s less.
So I guess the body was designed for morphine, pethidine, and diacetylmorphine since they are ligands of the mu-opiate receptor? Alas it is not, no matter how wonderful dope is.
In the first pic…under the coffee table…is that a gravity BONG?:eek:
ETA: your post about biting urself made me laugh
Better question : Does marijuana’s second hand smoke affect people to any significant degree? If so, then well it may be legalized, but smoking it will be banned pretty much everywhere …
I guess people forget America is not Amsterdam.
Unfortunately, we are reminded of that fact daily.