Do you really think that the average professional employee in a position in which intoxication would constitute a safety hazard would be subject to random drug testing for a legal substance? I’ve held a bunch of jobs, and I’ve never once been drug-tested, even working for the Justice Department. (They instituted across-the-board drug testing for new hires shortly after I was hired.) Nor have I ever known anyone else who had to take an employer-mandated drug test.
And even if a drug test came up positive, would it be legal to discriminate against an employee for using a legal substance, as long as the employee was not intoxicated at work? Heck, my employer doesn’t even have a written policy against being drunk at work, although I imagine they’d find a way to fire someone if that became an issue. And I work for a law firm.
It’s not that hard to grow tobacco, and it’s positively easy to distill alcohol. People just don’t tend to do it, because they can get good quality cigarettes and liquor legally. It’ll probably be the same for marijuana.
That was my bad. It was a poorly phrased way of saying that they wouldn’t be criminals. You got it right.
The market for the other drugs wouldn’t go away, and having lost the market on weed they’d likely be more aggressive in getting people to use them. I don’t subscribe to the theory that weed would cease to be a gateway drug if it were legalized, BTW. I actually think it would become more of a gateway drug since people would seek a better high once the novelty of legal marijuana wore off, not to mention the greater exposure with the populace at large.
Yep. I think so. If you’re dead flat broke, what better way to escape then to be chronically high? It’s the same as the wino phenomenon. Poor people as a population group naturally gravitate to alcohol because it’s inexpensive and it takes your mind off of your problems.
I think that a pack of joints might cost about the same as a pack of regular cigarettes. Pot is easier to grow and process than tobacco. If the tax on it were too high, people would just grow their own.
In the workplace it would be treated similarly to alcohol. No indulging on the job, but the Christmas parties should be more fun. I doubt there would be any testing anymore than they test for alcohol.
People would be more hesitant to become dealers of other drugs.
No one would be in prison for dealing marijuana or possessing marijuana or stealing to be able to buy marijuana.
Television viewing would go down. Music sales would go up.
Stocks in Beatrice Foods and General Foods would go up.
Domestic abuse, child abuse, and divorce rates would decline.
Each of these results would have their own effects and nothing would ever be quite the same again.
I wouldn’t propose anything less than 21, but certainly I’m for marijuana being legalized or decriminalized. If done right, it would take the huge profit margin right out of it, unless they put some ungodly heavy tax on it. I would make it illegal to advertise for marijuana just like tobacco. I’m not sure I would even want it smoked in cafe shops. We’ve got enough people irresponsibly driving and drinking. I’m convinced that these harsh sentences people are getting for small amounts of marijuana are far more harmful than the drug ever was to them. We’ve learned clearly that long sentences hasn’t worked in stopping it. All that did was shoot the prices sky high, therefore creating even huger profit margins for those risk takers that are always going to be in unlimited supply who will be willing to roll the dice. This also helped drive many marijuana cultivators indoors, and they started breeding more selectively, and nowadays the THC levels are approaching 20% for some strains, compared to twenty-five years ago, 3% THC was considered great weed. Twenty five years ago marijuana was being bought for $50.00 a pound. Today, some of the best coming out of British Columbia, Canada is being sold for $3,500 a pound there, and if you can get it across the border, you can resale that same pound for $6,000-$7,500 in the States. I remember an article by William F. Buckley who said on the federal, state and local levels, the money being spent to fight this drug war was 100 billion annually. That was for fighting it, and the costs also involved for incarcerating drug offenders. That article was about ten years old, and I’m sure the money spent to fight it hasn’t went down since then. With alcohol and tobacco being legal, there just isn’t much incentive to produce it illicitly. Legalize it or at least decriminalize it if someone wants to have their own small plot, and probably allow for some companies to manufacturer it. I think the solution to the other illegal drugs is to legalize those too, but have it to where those could be obtained by prescription, if tests shown they already had a habit. I believe it was on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace where they showed in one country (Britain?) had done just that. It showed where burglaries and other crimes went down when those addicted to drugs didn’t have to go out and steal for their habit. And I couldn’t distinguish the man in the interview smoking the heroin cigarette acting any differently than if it was just a tobacco cigarette. Perhaps others act differently. Also by having those drugs being obtained by prescription, we could also be in a better position to treat those with that kind of a problem, and eventually, and hopefully wane their use to where someday they could get off it entirely.
The Berkeley studies shown that marijuana carcinogens are one and a half times more carcinogenic than tobacco, but this was from smoking the broad leaf. The flowers, which virtually everyone smokes from, has one third or less tars as tobacco leaf, and if I’m not mistaken, most, if not all of that can be removed by using a water pipe, or using some other pipe which heats the buds. “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Jack Herer is a worthwhile read for anyone wanting to research a great deal more of this.
Well, actually, this was the subject for my term paper for English class last semester, so I have a whole stack of books on my shelf that I’m feeling too lazy to cite…
Basically, if mj were legal, the use of harder drugs would decline because mj smokers wouldn’t be exposed to an environment where the hard stuff was available.
Nobody has ever died directly from smoking pot. There has not even been one single case of cancer attributed to pot.
Studies in Jamaica and Costa Rica involving people who smoked more weed in a day than I could get through in a couple of weeks showed no decline in cognitive function or worker productivity over non-mj smokers.
Mj does not cause brain damage or decline in IQ. The “amotivational syndrome” has long since proven to be a myth- if a pot smoker seems un, or a- motivated, it is likely because the person is suffering from depression and using the weed to self-medicate. In other words, heavy mj use, along with “amotivational syndrome” is likely a symptom of depression, rather than a cause of, well, lack of motivation.
With all of the studies done, it seems that the only real health hazards of mj are a slightly increased risk of respiratory infections in heavy (like, 5-6 joints per day) smokers and an increased risk of accident while stoned, due to slowed reaction time.
Incidentally, an Australian study found that a person under the influence of mj was less likely to cause an accident than someone who had used no drugs at all, because the stoned driver was aware of his/her impaired state and therefore drove more cautiously. This may be somewhat offset by the fact that slowed reaction time may make it more difficult for the driver to avoid crashing into the idiot who cuts them off in traffic, or the pedestrian who suddenly darts into the road without looking for oncoming vehicles, but in any case, the mj smoker is still not the at-fault party in such cases.
And what UCLA study are you referring to? Some former colleagues of mine at UCLA are currently doing research on the effects of marijuana smoking. They have recently published a series of papers that provide evidence that marijuana smoking impairs the normal function of the immune system and creates changes in tissues associated with malignancy. Sounds toxic to me.
The folks doing this research are not right-wing zealots, not soldiers in the War on Drugs willing to lie, cheat and “create” data that proves that marijuana is pure evil. I know these people well, some of them are good friends of mine. They are level-headed, fair, logical scientists who are using the scientific method to answer whether or not marijuana use poses a risk to human health and to what extent it does, if it does. I’m also rather familiar with their work (as a non-smoker, I was even a part of their studies as one of their control subjects), and I’m confident in it’s accuracy.
Because of the illegality of marijuana use, tracking the effects of marijuana smoking in humans has been much more difficult than for cigarette smoking. Should marijuana become widely legalized, the sample size for these studies will grow tremendously and I would not be surprised if marijuana is proven conclusively to be something best avoided or at least used in great moderation.
I might add, the libertarian buried deep inside me says…“eh, so what, let 'em smoke pot and die, it’s their life…as long as I don’t have to pay for their medical bills via Medicare or higher insurance premiums”
This is an interesting article. Thanks for the link.
Taking the article at face value, I’ll concede that it shows that marijuana use can–under extreme circumstances–be toxic. But other than that, does this really show anything? Besides, didn’t we know that already? Isn’t it the first principle of pharmacology that ANY substance in sufficient quantities is toxic?
Contrast this with how many millions of deaths have there been directly attributable to tobacco and alcohol. The quotes from the conservative politicians in the UK demonstrate the hysteria surrounding marijuana policy. In–I don’t know–one hundred (or more?) years that marijuana has been available in the UK, ONE PERSON has died from smoking it.
Compare that to alcohol, tobacco, tylenol, over the counter sleeping pills, showers (where people slip and fall), golf courses (where people get hit by lightening), automobile accidents, red meat, peach pits (that cause choking), ski slopes, bee stings.
As with anything else, one should not make blanket statements. See, lung caner was basically nonexistent until cigarettes, specifically inhaling the smoke, took off in the early part of last century. Make marijuana more widely available and you’re rolling the dice that it won’t happen again. Perhaps only one person has died because most people weren’t 60 joint a day tokers. Open up that possibility and I’ll bet in 50 years people start dropping like flies.
Again, I want to see the stuff legalized, but I’m not going to sit here and be all rah-rah about what will happen when it is. It’s a drug. As with any drug, there are good repercussions and bad ones. The question is, do the bad ones outweigh the good ones? I say yes, but I still think about the consequences.
It might vary from state to state at first, some 18 some 21. After a while it would become apparent which works out better.
Cigarette companies would be more than happy to grow it. In addition, the number of private growers would probably increase; it’s called “weed” because it grows like one.
I heard the number of annual deaths was zero but Gyan9 cited an article where it seems to have occurred for the first time ever.
Probably more than we think since people are reluctant to admit to breaking a law with such stiff penalties attached.
As for the claim that marijuana permanently impairs brain function, I’d like to see a cite. Whatever toxicity it does have must be considerably less than tobacco or alcohol (otherwise we’d hear of more deaths) so my WAG is that legalizing it wouldn’t cause a major increase in annual fatalities.
Well, the person who died smoked six joints a day, not sixty. And plenty of people in absolute terms smoke six joints a day. In fact, if you think about it, this is an article about ONE person dying. Why is it even news? Because the cause is UNIQUE. It says so in the article that he’s the first person ever in Britain known to die of cannabis toxicity. And cannabis has been around for thousands of years. Even if you take a cut-off date in the 1960s (start of widespread usage), it’s still the first case. It’s not as if people started smoking weed within the last few years. Millions have been smoking since decades.
Secondly, one should be alert to distinguish between toxicity of the drug and toxicity incidental to drug use. NIDA says that HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis are “health hazards” of heroin use. Now, what has heroin (diacetylmorphine) got to do with HIV? Nothing. Heroin’s IV administration via shared contaminated needles puts you at risk of getting infected. The heroin is incidental. You could fill the syringe with any other substance and you could claim the same “health hazards.” Pretty disingenuous.
Marijuana doesn’t have to be smoked. And if you want to smoke it, it doesn’t have to be smoked unfiltered.
When you’re debating about the “dangers” of a drug, highlight the non-avoidable and non-incidental dangers of the drug itself. The other dangers often are a side-effect of the unregulated and illegal status that prompt various creative and unwise/unresearched/unrefined usage methods and products.
Gyan9, I’m wondering about the case you cited. While doing research for my term paper, I happened upon an article about a case of death by cannabis toxicity that turned out to be a hoax. I’m just wondering if this was the same case. I’ve got my search engine looking for it, but I’m search engine challenged, so it may take a while. If this turns out to be genuine, it would still be the first death in all of human history due to cannabis intoxication. Aspirin has a worse record. The lethal dose of THC is about 40,000 times the amount that it takes to get you noticibly high. If this guy was smoking weed that had such a high THC content that he could OD by smoking six joints in the course of a day… man, I want to lay my hands on some of that shit.
As for the studies that show impaired immune function, “pre-cancerous lesions” etc, I tend to take these things with a grain of salt. I checked out a couple of the linked abstracts, and there was no description of the methodology. Many, if not most, of the studies that show that mj is extremely hazardous to your health are conducted using methods that don’t apply in real life situations- things like injecting the subjects with artificially high doses of pure THC, or dumping it on cells in a petri dish. If the methodologies are sound, the results are not replicated in other studies- many studies have been done that show that mj smokers have no significant decrease in immune function. Also, any lesion in the lungs is considered to be “pre-cancerous”, even if it is just a patch of minor irritation.
Mj is certainly not without risk. Inhaling the smoke of burning plant material is most decidedly bad for the lungs, and it has not been proven that filtering the smoke through a water pipe reduces the health risks. Anyone who has ever cleaned a bong can tell you that there is a lot of lovely resin that can be smeared on a rolling paper or added to the next bowl you smoke… which means that THC is being filtered out, so you have to smoke more with a water pipe to get the same effect. The major benefit of a water pipe is that it cools the smoke, which may reduce lung irritation.
In any case, the only people who have any measurable health risks from smoking cannabis are that 1% of users who smoke, like, eight joints a day, man… The person who smokes daily but only 1-2 joints, or the person who only indulges once or twice a week, isn’t really putting themselves at risk. The major risk comes from exposing the lungs to smoke several times per day.
I took a look at your link. How this coronary determined that it was cannabis toxicity that was the cause of death would be interesting to know, since, many doctors and studies have gone on record to show that marijuana toxicity does not exist. Unless they have changed it as of late, both the Bureau of Mortality Statistics and the National Institute on Drug Abuse have always listed marijuana deaths at zero. I think other coroners, doctors and researchers should take a look at this autopsy report to determine how this particular coroner arrived at this conclusion before this is confirmed as an actual known death.
stochastic if the hamsters cooperate, I’ll have a post for you shortly.
I’m familiar with Dr. Donald Tashkin at UCLA from which your on your first link quotes from all of them I think. There are also the Crancer Study done at UCLA which was US funded that might be of interest to you, although it concentrated on other social aspects of marijuana such as marijuana users having the same or lower incidence of murders and highway deaths and accidents than the general non-marijuana smoking population.
Unlike the Heath/Tulane Univestity and other studies, I have respect for what Taskin has to say. I’m glad that you participated in some of those studies, and also glad that your link lists Dr. Donald Tashkin, at UCLA, because Jack Herer who authored that particular book I cited, also participated in some of those studies with Dr. Tashkin too, and frequently quotes from him. Dr. Tashkin has had decades of pulmonary research, and I‘m always interested in hearing what he has to say. In 1986, Jack Herer asks Dr. Tashkin about an article he was preparing for the New England Journal of Medicine. Tashkin was going to indicate that cannabis smoking caused as many or more “pre-cancerous lesions” as tobacco in ‘equal’ amounts. I think it’s important to note what is meant by “pre-cancerous lesion” and as Herer points out, it’s simply any tissue abnormality, whether it is redness, abrasion, or eruption. Also Herer notes that , THC-related lesions contain no radioactivity, but the tobacco lesions are radioactive. Jack Herer and his group asked Tashkin “how many people had gone on to get lung cancer in these studies–or any other studies of long-term smokers like Rastas, Coptics, etc.?” Taskin replies, “Well that’s the strange part. So far no one we’ve studied has gone on to get lung cancer.” Jack asked him if this was going to press. Tashkin, said “Well, it’s in the article, but no one in the press even asked. They just assumed the worst.” Tashkin also got a tip from Jack Herer concerning how marijuana effected emphysema sufferers. Taskin looked into it, and had presumed marijuana aggravated emphysema, but after reviewing evidence found that, except in rare cases, marijuana benefited emphysema suffers due to it opening and dilating the bronchial passages. It doesn’t constrict them like tobacco. This was also confirmed by emphysema patients.
Dr. Tashkin sent to Gabriel Nahas at the Rheims, France, Conference a report since it was about the potential cannabis medical dangers. In Tashkin’s report he found only one area (the large air passage way) of 29 areas that marijuana was more of an irritant than tobacco. Some areas marijuana was either neutral or showed positive results. The US government had previously de-funded Taskin for two years earlier, possibly because Taskin was finding more encouraging news about the therapeutic results with marijuana/lung studies, but since his study did find marijuana was an irritant to the large passageway, the government gave him another grant afterwards, but limited his studies only to the large air passage way! Taskin, also acknowledges that the “biggest health risk in the lungs would be a person smoking 16 or more ’large’ spliffs a day of leaf/bud because of the hypoxia of too much smoke and not enough oxygen.”(ibid) Again, most of what I’m quoting from is over ten years old, but I doubt that too much of his position has changed since then because he had already had decades of research in this area. And there is also a great deal more positive news that marijuana has for medical benefits, that I don’t have time to put down here for now.
There is an ample of supply of volunteers already, and plenty of regular marijuana smokers going back to the sixties. They are not in shortage to find volunteers, that I’m aware of. And there are a great deal of studies already out there.
Sorry, I hope most people realized it was a typo, and I meant “coroner.”
While I’m here I think it’s also important to note that the Surgeon General C. Everett Koop also thinks it is the radioactivity that is probably responsible for most tobacco-related cancer.
And again, no radioactivity exists in the cannabis tars.
Your nose and upper respiratory tract filter, heat and humidify what you inhale. When a user tokes on a bong, he bypasses his nose and subsequently inhales significantly colder gas. This can actually cause the airways in the lungs to become inflamed and constrict. Mechanical ventilators used in hospitals are equipped with heating and humidifying devices to protect the lungs from exposure to drier, cooler gas. They ensure the patient breathes F 98.6 (C 37) 100% humidified gas. You can draw your own conclusions on what is the optimal bong water temperature. Just think of how it feels to take a deep breath outside on a very cold winter’s morning.
I remember about 20 years ago hearing about a phenomenon in Germany where soldiers in their late teens and early twenties were reporting for sick call with diseased lungs as bad or worse than the disease state of long time cigarette smokers. These hash smoking twenty year olds had the chest xrays of their cigarette smoking Sergeant’s Major. Pot is probably not as hard on the lungs than hashish, but no one can deny that smoking anything is a significant health risk. Everyone knows that inhaling a superheated, oxygen depleted, mixture of tar and carbon monoxide is bad for you. And your body has to do something with that same black shit you scrape out of your bowl. AFAIK THC is not water soluble.
I think its important to recognize that dope can be introduced into the body in other ways than smoking it. The government allows nicotine gum and patches. They allow caffeine pills. Why not allow THC pills or for that matter, THC Rice Krispy Treats? Am I showing my age here by remembering the classic Hash Brownies? The bottom line is that many, but not all of the arguments against legalization can be eliminated by forgetting the Dope Must Be Smoked mindset. IIRC, one of the government’s arguments against legalization of medical dope was that if it was that therapeutic, why couldn’t it be offered in pill form to chemo patients, allowing for better control on quality, dosage and safeguards over illicit abuse?
The right and left seem to support at a minimum decriminalization. Until the day comes when mainstream American politics swings either way, dope will remain illegal.
