Ok, I have never smoked marijuana and never plan to, but in my opinion, smoking marijuana is nothing more than if smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol were combined. I mean, smoking is extremely bad for you and drinking gives you an out of mind state, same as marijuana smoking. So why are smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol legal but marijuana not? Post your thoughts here.
Just… wrong.
They’re chemically different, their effects are different… it’s just not the same.
Your opinion can’t be supported by anything even resembling facts. There is absolutely no way to compare the two.
I don’t mean this in an insulting way, but it’s not easy to phrase this courteously. You say that you have never smoked marijuana. You obviously have never done any significant amount of reading about it. Yet you have an opinion.
Where’d the opinion come from, if not from experience and not from research?
Health class and Project Alert. I know that THC harms the brain, but so does alcohol. I’m just saying, what does marijuana do to hurt you that alcohol and tobacco don’t?
I suspect that the previous posters didn’t mean that marijuana is more dangerous than tobacco+alcohol combined, but at the contrary that it is significantly less harmful.
At least, that was my first reaction when I read your post : “Where on earth did he find the idea that marijuana could be as dangerous as tobacco+alcohol?”
As far as health effects go, in moderation alcohol does little to no harm, and has several benefits (depending on the alcohol). Cigarettes do more harm, and only have two real benefits: coolness and delaying the onset of alzheimer’s (yes, i’m joking about the coolness, don’t flame me). AFAIK, Mary Jane is roughly the same “amount of bad” for you as tobacco, with tobacco being slightly worse because of the extra chemicals most cig companies add in.
Just my $0.02
In moderation, booze or pot will/should not cause harm. The word is moderation. The effects of long term hardcore heavy drinking are well known. You can wreck your liver and supposedly destroy brain cells. Light or moderate occasional drinking may actually be good for you. It helps you relax, can give you a mellow fuzzy happy feeling (if you know when to say “I’ve had enough”). It can stimulate your appetite in small amounts. It is being said that some stuff (red wine) can be good for you in dealing with free radicals (whatever that is) and may be good “for the blood” as the old timers used to say.
Weed also can give you the warm fuzzy feeling of well being. It may be good for glaucoma (?). It is famous as an appetite stimulant. On the other hand, who knows how it affects the lungs over the long term.
First off each drug has different euphoric effects.
-ALcohol is a dissociative. It can allow you to “get away” from reality.
-Cigarettes for the first month give a nictotine rush (IME a throbbing wave overwhelming your body) and after that you are left with bad breath and smelly clothes. Some same it gives a calming effect when smoked.
-Marijuana is a psychoactive drug. THC combines with receptors in the brain to alter your nervous system. You will feel different and may even think different for the high. To most people it will just make you slow mentally and physically.
Each drug has their own negative effects, short-term and long-term. Here’s a short uncomprehensive list:
-Alcohol can make you do things you wouldn’t normally do sober. Besides being more risk-prone, it can lead to liver problems, heart problems and a leaching of vital vitamins and nutrients from the body.
-Tobacco can lead to cancer of the mouth, throat and lungs, shortness of breath, and an increased likelihood of suffering from bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses.
-Marijuana will negatively effect your short-term memory days after inhalation. I also believe it can hinder your immune system.
So in conclusion each drug affects the body in different ways and should be treated differently. I recommend you do some more research before you form your conclusions. Search the archives and google is your friend. Just make sure that a website can be corroborated by other sites out there. The web is like the TV, don’t believe everything you read.
There are many studies that implicate weed smoking as a teenager in the subsequent development of psychosis, for certain people.
The causal factors involved in a mental health disorder like schizophrenia are probably extremely complicated and inter-related, so its unlikely (IMO) that any study will ever establish a simplistic realtionship between weed smoking and mental illness. Nonetheless, its sobering to see that evidence is accumulating in this area, albeit for people that have a chronic (:)) weed habit.
As someone who has indulged in all three (and who continues to indulge in smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol), here’s my take:
Smoking, well, I wish I didn’t. At this point, after close to thirty years of smoking, I’m just avoiding withdrawal symptoms when I light up. Yes, a few of the cigarettes I smoke each day are pleasurable, but the rest are just scratching an itch.
Alcohol has its benefits. The health benefits of moderate drinking are documented. It relaxes one, and can make the transition from a difficult and frustrating day at work into an evening at home alone, or with a significant other, or with friends, much easier. It helps shy people like me be more social. If one knows when to stop drinking, and knows better than to get behind the wheel after a couple, it’s a very beneficial drug. And wine with dinner, and/or a cocktail beforehand, is one of life’s great pleasures. This is assuming, of course, that one lacks the gene or whatever it is that causes alcoholism. I seem to. I’d know by now.
Smoking marijuana seems to be a pleasure for many (again, we’re talking about those who can do it in moderation, and don’t drive while stoned). They also find it relaxing and pleasant. The drawbacks, in my mind, are the fact that one joint makes one more intoxicated than one drink. And marijuana intoxication is less social than alcohol intoxication. And for me, marijuana always made me sleepy. And stupid. So I gave it up more than twenty years ago. I understand that moderate use of marijuana has few health risks (although I could be wrong on this one).
Oh my god, this sounds like my MIL talking here. Now if there was some pot smell coming off the PC and this could be a virtual tour of her house. I know this isn’t really the answer to the OP but my answer for her is you can buy cigarettes and alcohol at the gas station down the street. You have to go to a public high school to buy pot. You can have 2 kegs and a carton of marlboros at home and the local cops will come in and watch sports with you…Have that much weed and you might have problems(okay, so that depends on the cops, but this is assuming that they are "good"cops.)
Sorry, just had to add my 2 cents.
I am no longer a pot smoker. I smoked pot occasionally about 10 years ago. It made my lungs hurt, so I didn’t do it often.
That said, I think far more crimes are committed from abuse of alcohol than from abuse of marijuana. Rarely are violent crimes linked to potheads, and I don’t believe that pot is the first step toward heroin addiction, either. It just doesn’t wash. But IMO, pot use does support crime in an indirect way.
I think pot should be legalized, and the taxes collected on it used to educate people about the downside of the drug. But I don’t know how police would be able to test whether a person was too stoned to drive - enforcement might be a problem.
Surely alcohol and tobacco are addictive, and marijuana isn’t.
Tobacco is responsible for thousands of deaths annually in the UK alone. has anyone ever died from marijuana?
Alcohol is a pleasant social stimulant in small doses, but marijuana has useful possibilities as a pain reliever.
Tobacco and alcohol companies make donations to politicians (who also like the guaranteed tax revenue). You might think this makes politicians greedy hypocrites - I couldn’t possibly comment. 
As it happens, I don’t use any of these drugs myself.
I’d say that marijuana, while not technically addictive, can be strongly habit forming in the way that anything you find pleasant can be.
As to the OP’s assertion, when I regularly smoked pot many years ago, I found the effects to be radically different from those of alcohol. Marijuana had a way of opening my ears to music; it was as if I could hear the notes separately and how they sounded together, all at the same time. Additionally there was a sense of time dilation, so that 2-1/2 minute Doors song My Eyes Have Seen You seemed to go on for six or seven minutes. There is definitely an effect on the perception of music, which is probably the main reason the drug is so strongly associated with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians. On the other hand, alcohol, for me back then, was just a relaxant. Too much of it, and I didn’t get anything out of listening to music.
I’m much older, and have long since stopped smoking marijuana, but I will say that now, after a couple of drinks, my perception of music is strangely sharpened, much the opposite of my experiences years ago, and it reminds me of the effect I used to get from pot. I don’t know why that is. And when I had a couple of opportunities to smoke pot a few years ago, and availed myself of them, I didn’t enjoy it at all. It just gave me an edgy, uncomfortable feeling. Maybe the drug’s different from what it used to be.
Actually, marijuana can be addictive; I’ve seen it, but whether it’s psychological or physical, I don’t know.
Do you mean ‘addictive’ in the sense that chocolate is?
Are you comparing this to the almost instant and powerful addiction of nicotine?
How easy is it to give up marijuana?
We could use Qadgop in here. Until he does come and give us a professional’s insight, I’ll suggest the possibility that “addiction” should be understood as a range of habit-forming potential. People do get addicted to pot, but I can’t see it in quite the same light as addition to, say, heroin, alcohol, or tobacco. I never heard it was anywhere near as difficult to give up smoking pot, as alcohol or tobacco. On the other hand, if you have a disaffected teenage who’s toking up, and he is forced into rehab, common sense says that he’s probably going to start using pot again if he continues to face the same environmental factors, associates, and so on, that he did before he was caught. So in that case, is the pot really a monkey on his back, or is it just an escape mechanism in which he indulges?
The physical and mental effects of marijuana are so different from the effects of alcohol and cigarettes that the OP’s statement is rather like saying “I think sour cream, semen, and Elmer’s Glue are pretty much the same thing. They are all sticky and white, aren’t they?”
You ever listen to music?
You ever listen to music… on weed?