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Why is marijuana illegal? Ask a cop, "Because it’s a gateway drug!" WRONG. There is
no chemical in marijuana that makes you want to try other drugs. The only reason
that some people who smoke try other drugs is because they are in an environment
of other types of drugs. In other words, if all you did was smoke marijuana, you
would have no urge to try other things like cocaine or crack unless you had some
kind of outside influence, such as somebody around you smoking crack or snorting
cocaine.
Originally marijuana was brought into the country by Mexicans, in order to get rid of
the Mexicans, the government illegalized MJ. This failed; thousands of Mexicans
immigrate into the country each year. Another reason was MJ has many other uses,
hemp is used for many things, and some cultures use it for fabrics, ropes, and paper.
Hemp has been proved to be stronger and longer lasting than regular pulp in terms
of making paper, and the fabric made from this is so much stronger than that of
cotton, and corporate America with their wood cutting companies couldn’t keep up.
Yes MJ is not good for you, studies have proved that it destroys some short term
memory capabilities in users, and has been known to cause some illnesses similar to
cigarette smokers, but yet cigs are still legal? What about alcohol? MJ has been
around for over 5000 years, and until recently nobody had a problem with it.
Government propaganda has trained the American society to believe that this drug is
so detrimental to progress in society and users should be shunned. Disregard these
facts and only prove my point more that you are a product of your government’s
control.
"Gateway Drug"
The term is often used by governments, pressure groups and the media to describe the
scientifically controversed concept that illegal drug use is a continuum. According to this
concept, using one "soft" non- or only slightly addictive drug will lead to the use of other
"harder" drugs and the associated criminal and social consequences – the first drug used
is thus described as a gateway to further abuse.
There is no scientific evidence to support the idea that use of one drug will lead to use of
other drugs – that physiological and neurological changes make it unavoidable.
Individual social histories show that "hard" drug users do progress from one drug to
another, but the drives behind this are not clear enough to generalize a gateway.[1]
Furthermore, some "hard" drugs, such as alcohol, may be legal, while other "soft" drugs,
such as marijuana, may be illegal.
In 1998, a French scientific report, led by Dr. Pierre-Bernard Roques from the INSERMCNRS, classed different types of drugs according to their lethality and addictiveness.
Heroin, cocaine and alcohol were classed in the most addictive and lethal category;
benzodiazepine, hallucinogens and tobacco in the medium category; and marijuana in the
last category. Health secretary Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières,
declared that: "Scientifical facts show that, for cannabis, no neurotoxicity is
demonstrated, to the contrary of alcohol and cocaine."
In case you didn’t catch that, there is no scientific proof, and there is not enough data to
generalize one drug as a gateway drug. Propaganda. Rest my case. However, I can rest
assured that there are some people who will refuse to listen and will disagree with me no
matter what with no refutable evidence.
Behavioral effects
It is sometimes observed, and generally stereotyped, that systematic changes in a person’s
lifestyle, ambitions, motivation, and personality happen when a young person starts
smoking marijuana. In fact, in many situations when people are asked to describe the
personality traits of a marijuana user, they will most likely portray a person of apathy or
loss of effectiveness: a person with diminished capacity or willingness to carry out
complex long-term plans, endure frustration, concentrate for long periods, follow
routines, or even successfully master new material. [12]
The term "amotivational syndrome" is often applied to young individuals who have
changed from clean, assertive, upwardly mobile achievers into the sort of person just
described, with marijuana as the culprit. The syndrome, like other correlational
phenomena, raises a chicken-and-egg type problem; marijuana use can just as easily be
seen as the result of such a personality shift as it can be the cause of it. Regardless,
studies to raise this and other questions, like the prevalence of such "syndrome" in the
population, and proving a biological or psychological connection of the "syndrome" to
substance use, have not happened. Instead, a political tug of war has ensued with each
point of view claiming their own scientific research as evidence.
Government studies often point to statistical data accumulated by methods like the
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), the Monitoring the Future study
(MTF), and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program, which claim lower
school averages and higher dropout rates among users than nonusers, even though these
differences are not great. However, the problem is that in many cases, like with NHSDA
and MTF, these surveys are usually self-administered and may or may not be anonymous.
The likeliness of over or under representing data definitely undermines the effectiveness
of these instruments. [2] The MTF study is conducted anonymously, but only seeks
information from a sample of people who have been arrested for drug-related offenses.
Clearly, the case can easily be made that socially deviant behavior will be found more
frequently in individuals of the criminal justice system compared to those in the general
population. In response, independent studies of college students have shown that there
was no difference in grade point average, and achievement, between marijuana users and
nonusers, but the users had more difficulty deciding on career goals, and a smaller
number were seeking advanced professional degrees. [13] Laboratory studies of the
relationship between motivation and marijuana outside of the classroom, where
volunteers worked on operant tasks for a wage representing a working world model, also
fail to distinguish a noticeable different between users and non users. [14]
Different and fewer risks than tobacco
The process most popularly used to ingest cannabis is smoking. Tobacco smoking has
well-established risks such as bronchitis, coughing, overproduction of mucus, and
wheezing. Similar risks for smoking cannabis related to airway inflammation have been
suggested in a study of healthy cannabis users who exhibited similar early characteristics
to tobacco smoking. [23]
The effects of tobacco and cannabis smoking differ, however, as they affect different
parts of the respiratory tract: whereas tobacco tends to penetrate to the smaller, peripheral
passageways of the lungs, cannabis tends to concentrate on the larger, central
passageways. One consequence of this is that cannabis, unlike tobacco, does not appear
to cause emphysema. Also unlike tobacco, regular cannabis use does not appear to cause
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, either. [24]
It is important to note that in some cases, a cannabis user may encounter commercial
tobacco in joints (popular in Europe), added tobacco with hash in chillum (India), or
cannabis rolled in tobacco leaves (seen occasionally the U.S.), which would expose the
user to the additional risks of tobacco, though nothing on the same order as regular
tobacco use.
No cancer link
A recent study [26] on a much larger population sample (about 1200), however, not only
failed to establish a cancer risk, but showed a slight negative correlation between longterm cannabis use and lung cancers, suggesting a possible theraputic effect. This followed
an even larger 1997 study [27] examing the records of 64,855 Kaiser patients, and
concluding no correlation between cannabis use and cancer. It has been noted, separately,
that THC, a dilative agent, may help clense the lungs by dilating the bronchia, and could
actively reduce the instance of tumors. [28] Yet another study failed to establish a link
between cannabis use and oral cancer. [29]
Although the carcinogenicity of tobacco is thought to be caused mainly by tar, it has been
suggested that it could be the result of radioactive substances present in tobacco soils.
This problem may not pertain to cannabis, the vast majority of which is grown in wild,
organic, or hydroponic conditions.
Attempts at harm reduction
Often, the risk has been simply presumed, leading many to make harm reduction
recommendations such as choosing bongs or vaporizers. Although vaporisers, by heating
the cannabis oils to be inhaled without combustion, avoid altogether the risk [30], bong
users may not fare so well, as they reduce the concentration of THC, necessitating
inhalation of a greater quantity of smoke in order to receive the same amount of THC.
A 2000 study conducted by NORML and MAPS found that the unfiltered joint
outperformed all devices except the vaporizers, with a ratio of about 1 part cannabinoids
to 13 parts tar. This ratio is still rather low; according to the report, "This poor ratio may
be explained by low-potency (2.3%) of the NIDA-supplied marijuana used in the study".
Short term memory loss? Sure, but only temporary.
One of the primary effects of marijuana in humans is the disruption of short-term
memory, which is consistent with the abundance of CB1 receptors on the hippocampus.
The effects of THC at these receptor sites produce what is called a "temporary
hippocampal lesion." [1] As a result of this lesion, several neurotransmitters like
acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and glutamate, are released that trigger a major decrease in
neuronal activity in the hippocampus and its inputs. In the end, this procedure leads to the
blocking of cellular processes that are associated with memory formation. There is no
scientific evidence to suggest that these effects are permanent, and normal neurological
functionality is usually achieved as the drug is metabolized.
Legal and political constraints on open research
In many countries, experimental science suffers from legal restrictions because cannabis
is illegal. Thus, cannabis as a drug is often hard to fit into the structural confines of
medical research because appropriate, research-grade samples are impossible to obtain
legally for research purposes, unless granted under authority of national governments.
The phenomenon of legitimate scientific curiosity in conflict with governmental agenda
was most recently exemplified in the United States by the clash between
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an independent research
group, versus the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a federal agency charged
with the application of science to the study of drug abuse, under the general control of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), a White House office responsible for
the direct coordination of all legal, legislative, scientific, social and political aspects of
federal drug control policy.
The cannabis that is available for research studies in the United States is solely controlled
by the NIDA, which even has veto power over the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
to define accepted protocols. Since 1942, when cannabis was removed from the U.S.
pharmacopoeia and its medical use was prohibited, there is no history of a legal (under
federal law) privately funded cannabis production project. The result is that a very limited
number of research opportunities take place, and these must use the product that NIDA
produces, which is generally of very low potency and inferior quality.
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2. ^ Schultes, R. E., and A. Hofmann. 1980. Botany and Chemistry of
Hallucinogens. C. C. Thomas, Springfield, IL., pp. 82–116.
3. ^ Small, E., and A. Cronquist. 1976. A practical and natural taxonomy for
Cannabis. Taxon 25: 405–435.
4. ^ Schultes, R. E., et. al. 1974. Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect.
Harvard University Botanical Museum Leaflets 23: 337–367.
5. ^ Anderson, L. C. 1974. A study of systematic wood anatomy in Cannabis.
Harvard University Botanical Museum Leaflets 24: 29–36.
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7. ^ Hillig, K.W. 2005. Genetic evidence for speciation in Cannabis (Cannabaceae).
Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 52: 161-180.
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