Do we still think pot is harmless?

From The Week:

A huge new study has found that teenagers who smoke marijuana daily are 60 percent less likely to complete high school and seven times more likely to attempt suicide. In one of the largest projects of its kind, researchers gathered data on the cannabis use of 3,725 students from Australia and New Zealand, and monitored them for seven developmental outcomes up to age 30. Controlling for various factors, including socioeconomic status, use of other drugs, and mental issues, they found “clear and consistent associations” between regular cannabis use and high school and college graduation rates, suicide attempts, other illicit drug use, and cannabis dependency. Significantly, they also found that the risks of negative outcomes increased with the frequency of cannabis use. “The findings are timely given movement in some states in the U.S. and Latin America to decriminalize marijuana,” lead author Edmund Silins tells TheGuardian.com. “Because our study has shown the potential harms of adolescent use, particularly heavy use, policymakers must be aware of this, and reform efforts should be carefully considered to protect against this.”

 

Who says marijuana is harmless? I'm pretty sure that one would find a correlation between adverse outcomes and daily use of *any* recreational drug.

 

people will find links between anything and adverse outcomes.

 

Quite a few people argue that it is.

The problem with the study is the data is pretty muddy. A Considerable amount of the underlying data is based on reporting by law enforcement. While I agree with the principals, they didn't account for the likelihood that certain kinds of drug drug use may be more prevalent in police interactions.

The top five items are the most widely encountered in calls and stops, and this skews the study.

I think we are generally in denial about the level of harm to ourselves that all of these substances cause.

 

I'm always interested in the timing of these "new studies', especially when they pop up out of no where like this.
Do you have the link for this one?
The last one I saw was using old data and was basically being brought out to try to stop a legalization vote.
It's always interesting to see where the money is coming from to pay for them.

We're going to have a vote here in AK to make it treated the same as alcohol.
As someone who smoked in high school and did just fine thank you, I find this chicken little BS really funny.
Both my daughters smoked in high school and one is an assistant bank manager while the other is going to graduate school.
Kevin Smith, Bill Mahr, Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, take your pick.
I'm not saying that it's wonderful but that its any more harmful than tobacco is a misnomer.

 

The problem is it's an inherently endogenous result. There's no way to tell whether people more likely to drop out for whatever reason are correlatively more likely to smoke pot, or whether people who smoke pot are thus causatively more likely to drop out.

I don't doubt it has potentially significant (in the statistical sense) effects on the brain, especially the developing brain, and especially with regular use, but the thing is we've found evidence of similar neurological effects for everything from beer to chocolate and masturbation. We just don't have the technological or medical knowledge to measure and fully understand what's going on here. The least-bad course of action is legalization and regulation, we know enough to know it's far less dangerous than alcohol at least and so far evidence points to that significantly hampering drug and gang crime.

 

Treat pot like alcohol: Fiure out a way to tax it, legalize it, and establish age restrictions. Just don't screw-up someones life legally speaking because they're underage and get caught with pot. The guidelines we have for alcohol purchases and consumption aren't perfect, but it seems to me they can be applied to pot.

This.

 

I'm 45,smoked pot on a nearly daily basis since I was 13.......I've graduated,been employed since I was 16.......own acreage with my woman of 26 years,both children graduated with top honours,the eldest just bought his own house with his lovely new wife.

financially stable,always busy,and i work too hard but,it's all for what we want outta life.

and I still smoke pot every day............it's like a tool,you just need to learn how to utilize that tool.

*rant over*

 

For me, the most harmful thing about marijuana is the fact that I can't use it without risking arrest.

But sure, high school kids should probably minimize their use.

 

This is what I mean by denial. The long term use of mind altering drugs can produce bad side effects. It doesn't always happen, and may not happen often. Some people have experienced psychosis. Not everyone does. You can, and if you continue using, you might, or it may never happen.

Whether or not you take the risk is up to you, as long as you don't do something stupid that puts others in danger (like driving while intoxicated). But young people take their parents attitude. If mom & dad say it's no big deal....

Your choice to use may have unintended consequences....

Make it an intelligent choice. That's all I'm advocating.

 

No drug of any kind is completely harmless in every way-- not even completely accepted and "benign" drugs like caffeine or aspirin. Take too much of them, mix them with other drugs irresponsibly, use them too much and too hard over a long time, they'll damage you in some way. In that sense, pot is no different. If you're smoking it the old-fashioned way (as in, not with a vaporizer, and as opposed to consuming it in edibles), then if you smoke a lot of it, every day, it will almost certainly increase your risk for lung, throat, or mouth cancers. And if you are spending most of every day blasted wasted from smoking a large amount of pot, then yes, probably your productivity will go down, and you will have financial and social troubles. Also, while not physically addictive, pot can be dependency-forming in psyches particularly prone to addictions. So, sure, it can be harmful.

However, I have yet to see any compelling evidence that pot is worse than alcohol, tobacco, many prescription drugs, or even some over-the-counter medications, if it is used in moderation, on its own, by stable individuals without predisposition to addition, in comparatively safe circumstances (i.e., when not smoked in dangerous areas, or side by side with people doing other more volatile drugs, etc.).

I smoked a lot of weed in high school and college, and in the years afterward. Since the age of 25 or 30, I have been only an occasional or very moderate pot smoker. I managed to graduate high school with decent grades (and the only reasons they weren't better had nothing to do with pot, and everything to do with teenage rebellion and not having my priorities straight, which I grew out of) and without undue social or financial complications, and to graduate college, and to find jobs and hold them down. I had long-term relationships, I produced art of various kinds, I did an enormous amount of reading and studying. I smoked moderately all through rabbinical school, getting advanced degrees and ordination toward the top of my class. I have smoked occasionally or moderately while teaching very successfully at the high school and middle school levels as well as teaching adult education, and while serving in a congregational capacity as I now do (also quite successfully).

And I am hardly unique. I have known people who smoked much more than I ever have, and still managed to do top notch work in school, in advanced academics, in teaching, in art, journalism, scientific research, and business. Frankly, I have known more people who did well while getting high on a regular basis than I have known who did well while getting drunk on a regular basis.

Having done due diligence investigating the arguments originally used in the banning of marijuana back in the early 20th century (and who used those arguments, and why), I see no reason to presume that marijuana is inherently more apt to misuse or more physically dangerous to self and others than other common legal drugs, and most illegal drugs also.

Keeping marijuana illegal is good business for law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies put massive numbers of marijuana users and sellers in jail, and when they do so, they are often able to confiscate vast amounts of the convicted individual's assets, which then are kept or sold off in order to fund the law enforcement agencies who took them. The governments-- both Federal and States-- spend billions every year trying to curb marijuana production, distribution, and consumption, most of it given to law enforcement agencies and prisons. If marijuana were legalized, all that money would disappear, and law enforcement agencies and prisons would both have to conract dramatically, letting personnel go or spending money to retrain them for other purposes, and would have to lose money repurposing or abandoning equipment or infrastructure dedicated to marijuana elimination. Plus, if marijuana were legalized in North America and Europe, the largest and easiest cash cow of the international drug cartels would vanish, crippling them financially-- and thus diminishing the need for a large, heavily-funded DEA: so law enforcement definitely doesn't want to see that.

Keeping marijuana illegal is also good business for the pharmaceutical companies, who definitely do not want people to be able to grow in their window boxes and closets a highly effective analgesic, anti-nausea agent, which is also effective in diminishing chronic tremors and spasms, and a whole host of other ills and maladies that now must be addressed with synthetic chemical medications produced and sold by the drug corporations for vast profits.

Keeping marijuana illegal is good business for alcohol and tobacco producers, who currently dominate the legal market for recreational substances, especially recreational substances used by the poor-- who, if they could easily grow their own recreational substance, would likely cause a sharp dip in the profits of the alcohol and tobacco producers.

And that's not even touching on the reasons that the logging and paper industries, cotton industry, oil industry, and others have for wanting hemp to remain illegal to grow-- despite the fact that industrial hemp doesn't actually produce any significant amount of THC. It looks like pot, could be used as cover to grow pot, so lobbyists from those industries have no trouble at all keeping it illegal by opposing the legalization of marijuana.

No, there are too many corporations and militaristic organizations intent on keeping pot legal for their own reasons, and far too little compelling evidence that there is actually any significant danger from more or less moderate and reasonably responsible pot use for me to think that this is anything to be concerned about. At best, the fear-mongering and propaganda put out by the government, law enforcement agencies, and other anti-drug interests are making mountains out of molehills. At worst, the whole notion of the rampant dangers of marijuana is just so much hot air, a fantasy spun from whole cloth.

 

As someone who smoked a lot of weed when I was a teenager who went on and did just fine in school and is still managing to hold down a job (and who knows a lot of people who did the same), I don't know that I see your point. My parents never smoked so they didn't really have anything to say on the matter. School-based authority figures painted a pretty bleak picture of the risks of smoking weed. The first time I got high I was 14ish, and despite the ridiculous claims made by DARE, the world didn't end. What did end was any notion that adults were credible assessors of risk.

I'm looking forward to expansive decriminalization. I will be one of the first to breeze through the new Weed section at Whole Foods. If my kids ask me about it, I will be honest with them. I will tell them that weed makes a lot of things better and some things worse and that it makes doing nothing seem okay. I will tell them that, like peanuts and honey and gluten, some people's bodies have a hard time dealing with exposure to marijuana and that when they are older, I will gladly get blasted with them and watch Totoro or play Titanfall or sit in a circle and crack jokes. I will use marijuana like I use alcohol, by which I mean recreationally, to feel intoxicated and in moderation.

 

You are too late to be the first. While regulations keep it out of Whole Foods, our Colorado weed is organic and tested.

No one thinks pot is harmless. In Colorado, voters chose to treat pot like alcohol. We decided that the consequences of prohibition weren't working and that regulation and taxation were preferable. For all of the news stories this generated, the real headline is that we made pot legal and nothing happened.

 

I can only speak for myself. I started smoking pot on occasion at age 22. I have a high school diploma, two bachelor's degrees, some graduate work. I worked at a profession for 23 years, was married, had two sons, now have two grandsons and am living in retirement overseas. I am respected and influential in certain fields online. I smoked regularly until my early fifties. Since then my use has been much less, but I still like the stuff.

The world and life are full of dangers. The question is, are we going to allow children to grow up and make their own adult decisions, or are we going to compromise their rights by supporting a Nanny-type government? A guardian can easily turn into a guard.

 

On the other hand, I had a work mate who was addicted to weed. He got to the stage where he needed a hit before going to work. He was a pretty bright bloke who ended up smoking too much. He ended up getting sacked over it and it was only after his dad and mum straightened him out that he was able to function properly again. This is a pretty extreme case, but does show the other side of this.

Still, all of this is just anecdotal evidence. I suspect for a lot of users that they aren't this buried by it and are able to function even while smoking.

 

Cannabis is not harmless but cannabis users are not criminals.
I am incredibly annoyed that cannabis is still illegal to some degree in the United States (Federal law outguns State). It the nanny-izing of adults that is maddening. Of course, just as in Prohibition we can get it if we "must,' but it is a heckuva lot of trouble.

Canada, of all places I found out this summer, does not care if weed is in your (odor-free) Express with tracking package.
Shipped within Canada, it is as easy as Internet and telephone access to buy BC Bud (of many varieties)--if you are a Canadian.