Now convince me i'm wrong!
Gladly.
There are over 10,000 scientific studies that prove marijuana is a harmful addictive drug. There is not one reliable study that demonstrates marijuana has any medical value.
10,000? Cool.
I'll deal with the second part of this in a second.
Marijuana is an unstable mixture of more than 425 chemicals that convert to thousands when smoked. Many of these chemicals are toxic, psychoactive chemicals which are largely unstudied and appear in uncontrolled strengths.
Interesting. What happened to those 10,000 studies?
The harmful consequences of smoking marijuana include, but are not limited to the following: premature cancer, addiction, coordination and perception impairment, a number of mental disorders including depression, hostility and increased aggresiveness, general apathy, memory loss, reproductive disabilities, and impairment to the immune system.
Says who? Either way, is there a reason why we shouldn't be able to do what we wish with our own bodies, for better or for worse?
The Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Public Health Service have rejected smoking crude marijuana as a medicine. Medical marijuana has been promoted for "compassionate use" to assist people with cancer, AIDS and glaucoma. Scientific studies show the opposite is true; marijuana is damaging to individuals with these illnesses. In fact, people suffering with AIDS and glaucoma are being used unfairly by groups whose real agenda is to legalize marijuana.
As opposed to their "fake" agenda of... legalizing marijuana?
AIDS: Scientific studies indicate marijuana damages the immune system, causing further peril to already weakened immune systems. HIV-positive marijuana smokers progress to full-blown AIDS twice as fast as non-smokers and have an increased incidence of bacterial pneumonia.
Cancer: Marijuana contains many cancer-causing substances, many of which are present in higher concentrations in marijuana than in tobacco.
Glaucoma: Marijuana does not prevent blindness due to glaucoma.
If I'm correct, then very few people think that marijuana can truly "cure" diseases. The point is that with patients who have such conditions as terminal cancer, marijuana may help ease their pain more effectively than other conventional pain medications. I detect a strawman argument here.
Marijuana is currently up to 25 times more potent than it was in the 1960's, making the drug even more addictive.
Addictive how? Most agree that marijuana doesn't create physical dependence.
Americans take their medicine in pills, solutions, sprays, shots, drops, creams, and sometimes in suppositories, but never by smoking. No medicine prescribed for us today is smoked.
Cool. Relevance?
While a biomedical or casual relationship between marijuana and the use of hard drugs has not been established, the statistical association is quite convincing. 12 to 17 year-olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine than those who do not. 60% of adolescents who use marijuana before age 15 will later use cocaine.
This makes sense, and doesn't necessarily point to anything bad about pot itself. The type of person who seeks out pot just so happens to be the type of person who also seeks out coke- is that really altogether surprising? More importantly, does this have anything to do with pot itself?
These correlations are many times higher than the initial relationships found between smoking and lung cancer.
Does that mean we should ignore the whole "marijuana damages your health" rant?
Major medical and health organizations, as well as the vast majority of nationally recognized expert medical doctors, scientists and researchers, have concluded that smoking marijuana is not a safe and effective medicine. These organizations include: the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, National Sclerosis Association, the American Glaucoma Association, American Academy of Opthalmology, National Eye Institute, and the National Cancer Institute.
Terminal cancer patients care very little for safety. They care about spending their last days / weeks / months pain-free.
In 1994, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug: highly addictive with no medical usefulness. The court noted that the pro-marijuana physicians had relied on non-scientific evidence.
Yes, I suppose that well-reasoned philosophical appeals to the expansion of personal liberty are "non-scientific".
The California ballot initiative will make marijuana available without a written prescription, bypassing all established medical guidelines for dispensing drugs. The Arizona ballot initiative will legalize all Schedule I drugs for medical use. Schedule I drugs are drugs that have a high potential for abuse and have no currently accepted medical use in treatment. Examples of Schedule I drugs are marijuana, LSD and heroin. Under Arizona's proposition all of these drugs would be essentially legalized for any so-called medical use.
The problem being?
These ballot initiatives were passed through a major disinformation campaign financed by wealthy individuals from outside these states. The billionaire financier George Soros gave over half a million dollars to support these initiatives. Other significant contributors include George Zimmer, president and CEO of the Men's Warehouse clothing store chain, Peter Lewis of The Progressive Corporation Insurance company in Ohio, and John Sperling, CEO of the Apollo Group, a Phoenix holding company for numerous educational institutions.
I don't know much about these particular ballot initiatives... but
this,
this, and
this are all Prop 19 advertisements, and contain zero misinformation.
The true agenda for Prop. 215 and 200 is revealed when you examine the backers of these initiatives. The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML), the Drug Policy Foundation and the Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco have spearheaded the passage of the propositions. The radical legalization agenda of these groups leaves little doubt about their broader goal to legalize marijuana and other drugs. As reported in High Times magazine, the director of NORML expressly stated that the medical use of marijuana is an interal part of the strategy to legalize marijuana. A former director of NORML told an Emory University audience that NORML would be using the issue of medicinal marijuana as a red herring to give marijuana a good name.
Yes, this seems rather obvious. Problem?
If we want to see marijuana use among youth equal to alcohol and tobacco, then we should go ahead and legalize marijuana.
Legalizing marijuana means that the government can more easily control it with minimum ages, taxes, etc. I suspect that the number of pot smokers under 18 would decrease with its legalization, rather than increase.
Legalizing marijuana would add a third drug that combines some of the most serious risks of alcohol and tobacco. Marijuana offers both the intoxicating effects of alcohol and the long-term lung damage of tobacco.
Several things wrong with this. You're allowing people to smoke tobacco and drink beer anyway, so your appeal to personal health is rather nonsensical. Plus, there's no reason why people should be barred from hurting themselves anyway.
On a separate note, the only reason why people should care about the "intoxicating" effects of alcohol and pot are the potential dangers someone poses to others while they're intoxicated, especially while they're driving. No one is stupid enough to suggest legalizing marijuana without introducing legislation that would prevent someone from driving high.
And, the link between pot and lung cancer is dubious.
Tobacco companies similarly advertised cigarettes as medicinal until the Federal Trad Commision put a stop to it in 1955. Medicinal marijuana is the "Joe Camel" of the promarijuana lobby, since it is children, the first time users, who are most impressed by these erroneous health claims.
This, like everything else relating to health, is basically irrelevant to what we're talking about. The subject of the thread and the wider discussion generally speaking is recreational use. Its lack of positive health affects (disregarding the obvious comfort it might lend to terminally ill patients) and potentially adverse health effects aren't important unless you're suggesting that the government should keep pot illegal solely on the basis of its health concerns. Big brother much?
Also, I'm almost positive that you copied this from an article you found online. I don't know where you got it, but I suggest you credit your source, rather than mindlessly copy and pasting.
Apart from the intellectual dishonesty, you also chose the wrong article to rip off. Whoever wrote what you posted seems to have been writing against medicinal marijuana, not recreational. Try again.
I'm sure that this will get alot of you all heated up but let's try and keep this on an intelligent level please.
Sir, yes sir.
Edit: Okay epically ninja'd on a couple of these points. They still stand though.
