The classic “slippery slope”. 
This is . . . odd. Before 25, parts of your brain that make long-term decisions aren’t fully developed. But there’s a tremendous bell curve of ability, and there are plenty of 15-year-olds who make better-weighed long-term decisions than plenty of 40-year-olds.
What other decisions would you deny people in their early 20s? Should they be unable to choose whether to go to college? Unable to open bank accounts? Unable to buy a house? Unable to book airline tickets?
A single factoid about brain development should not imply the massive denial of rights to tens of millions of adults.
The specific age of 16 probably isn’t an experimental result, but a largely arbitrary input. That is to say, they took all of their data points, divided them into two bins of “under 16” and “over 16”, and then compared the aggregated outcomes in those two bins. The results could mean that 16 is the critical age, with all of the data points below having bad outcomes and all of the ones above having good outcomes… Or they could mean that the critical age is somewhere above 16, and all of the points in the below-16 bin had bad outcomes while only some of the ones in the above-16 bin (i.e., those between 16 and the real critical age) had bad outcomes. Or they could mean that the critical age is below 16, and all of the points in the above-16 bin had good outcomes, but only some of the points in the below-16 bin (those between the real critical age and 16) had problems. But they’d probably have gotten a similar result if they had binned their data with 15 as the cutoff, or 17, or any other age.
And of course, all of this is complicated further by the fact that there probably isn’t actually any single critical point, and there are probably a few 40-year-olds who had problems and 12-year-olds who didn’t, and the “safe age” is a blurry range.
All you can really conclude from that result is that starting at some age before 16 is worse than starting at some age after 16 (without knowing what those “some ages” are), and probably that waiting until older ages in general is better.
I think you’re correct, Chronos, that there’s nothing special about age 16.
Absolutely not true.
One’s tolerance of LSD shoots to high heaven almost immediately after taking the first dose.
A second dose, taken an hour or two hours later, will therefore have no effect whatsoever.
Tangent: is it possible to get marijuana in something akin to an asthma inhaler or an Advair device?
I have never smoked anything in my life. I don’t want to start now. However, I can see the writing on the wall … and it seems likely that in my fast-approaching old age, marijuana-based medicines may become mainstream treatments for various ailments. But I would hate to have to learn to smoke just for that one thing. I would rather take it orally or with a directed inhaler.
Tangent 2: Why would marijuana be so hard to deliver orally as opposed to through respiration? Most other drugs can be delivered orally – what’s different with MJ?
I’ve made cannabutter, then made cookies. Each batch is an unknown strength, made with weed whose potency is unknown. I’ve also made alcohol tinctures. Again, the weed I used was an unknown potency and the end product was also unknown strength.
Smoking, you can stop dosing when you feel you’ve had enough. Eating, there is a long lag until you feel the effect.
Medicinal marijuana will never be administered via smoking. Once it’s actually medicinalized, you’ll have inhalers, or pills, or injections, or whatever the medical community determines is the most efficacious delivery mechanism, containing just the active ingredients that have been determined to be effective against whatever they’re trying to treat, in a carefully-determined and controlled dosage. What gets called “medical marijuana” nowadays has none of that, and is probably the biggest impediment to actual medicalization of marijuana.
**Chronos ** got to the heart of the matter: are there any specific technical obstacles to the manufacture of a 200mg (or whatever) marijuana pill? Obstacles above and beyond well-trodden ground in the pharmaceuticals industry, that is?
I’m claiming this now and you’re all my witnesses:
The Pot Patch
Like nicotine patches, only MJ.
This thread reminded me of this.
Of course they have medical marijuana pills. My buddy took a marinol once and said it was like smoking the best weed ever and it lasted 8 hours. Sounds good to me. I can’t wait for my dealer to stock it.
They have those too. I tried them. My ex who had chronic pain said they worked amazingly well for her, but I only use pot recreationally and it had no noticeable effect at all.
.
Marinol isn’t marijuana, it’s isolated tetrahydrocannibinol.
Being a reefer enthusiast from way back, I tried a couple of Marinol pills when I got the chance and was left underwhelmed by the experience.