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The Legalization of Marijuana: I’m Sorry? What Health Dangers?

Katerina Gribkoff

The News, Choate Rosemary Hal

Sunday 02 Oct 2011

For 10,000 years, people have been smoking cannabis: it's only been illegal for the past 100. But tobacco is the number one killer in America, beating out aids, heroine, alcohol, coke, car accidents, fires, and murders, combined. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists that cigarettes claim over 400,000 lives per year, and alcohol follows with 80,000. Even too much caffeine can help kill up to 10,000 a year, while common pain medicine kills 7,000, according to filmmaker Brett Harvey in the documentary, The Union: The Business Behind Getting High. Surprising, isn't it? So how many deaths are caused by marijuana use each year? Hundreds? Thousands?

How about none?

Not a single death has ever been attributed to smoking marijuana, according to Dr. Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School and Daniel Denoon of WebMD, but not many people know that. Just as not many people know that smoking marijuana does not cause lung cancer, though cigarettes remain the number one cause of cancer today and are sold at pretty much every gas station in America. According to COED magazine, marijuana has actually been proven to have health benefits, relieving symptoms of PMS and migraines, and helping treatment of glaucoma, tumors, and ADD/ADHD. Biochemist Dr. Hornby tells us in The Union: The Business Behind Getting High that for marijuana to kill, someone would have to smoke about 15,000 joints in 20 minutes. That's quite a challenge.

But, marijuana is obviously terrible because it kills brain cells, of course! This rumor was sparked by the Heath/Tulane study of 1974, supported by Ronald Reagan, in which monkeys that were supposedly given the equivalence of 30 joints a day started to die off after 90 days when their brain cells quit. This became the foundation of the government's anti-marijuana campaign. 6 years later the actual procedure for the experiment was released. Jack Herer, in the book The Emperor Wears no Clothes, explains that the strength of 60 joints had been pumped into the monkeys’ lungs for five minutes every other day, suffocating them and indeed killing their brain cells (no oxygen equals no functioning brain cells), without any direct correlation with marijuana. The press, however, did not cover this information very well.

People also fret over marijuana being addictive like other drugs. This is a hard point to argue: marijuana is more habituating than addictive. A long time smoker suddenly forced into a 'treatment' facility may notice changes in his life and want his dope back, but as Harvey explains in The Union, he won't experience any of the withdrawal pains of heroine, coke, cigarettes, alcohol, or even caffeine. Perhaps you’ve heard; as her father told Britain’s Sun magazine, Amy Winehouse recently died from alcohol withdrawal.

Then there's the notion of a "gateway drug": the concept that marijuana leads people to want to try harder drugs. Notes Harvey, in reality, only 1 per 104 marijuana users also uses cocaine, and even less use heroine. All hard drug addicts probably didn't snort coke as their first experience with drugs, but an alcoholic was brought up drinking milk and juice, right? That doesn’t mean all milk and juice drinkers become alcoholics. It's all a matter of perspective.

So maybe pot isn't so bad, but why should it be legal? What can we possibly accomplish while being high on marijuana? Ask Steve Jobs who created Apple Computer after experimenting with marijuana and LSD. The truth is, if you smoke marijuana, you won't become enraged and go home to abuse your wife. You won't get cancer, you won't get dumber, and you definitely won't die. What's so wrong about that?

http://thenews.choate.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1010%3Aim-sorry-what-health-dangers&catid=3%3Aopinion&Itemid=2

 

 

 

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