Legalization of marijuana

[TxCat]

I would need to do a LOT more research and read the links before I could intelligently weigh in on the discussion. For now, I will give my views and experiences.

Marijuana is, for me, one of the few substances which relieves pain and increases appetite but does not produce untoward side effects. Had I the choice of doing so legally, I would prefer a medicinal marijuana prescription. The few times I have tried it, it had been mixed with a food to make it more palatable (I cannot smoke it because I have COPD and severe asthma, two things which it certainly does not help!) For now, I have to take no less than three pain medications, which I still use sparingly for fear of dependence or addiction, and each of them has their own array of side effects ranging from nausea to dizziness to interference with clotting factors. Without pain relief, I am truly non-functional.

For me, however, marijuana does not appear to have any of the recreational side effects for which people seek it out. I don't get high. I don't see visions. I don't get the munchies. I don't desire more and stronger drugs. It simply relieves pain without the side effects and it kills the nausea somehow, allowing me to at least drink fluids.

That said, I no longer live in a state which allows marijuana to be prescribed and so I cannot and will not use it. Back in Colorado, I noted that various pain clinics have sprung up and many of them do, in fact, have a marijuana pharmacy. I also noted that these are in neighborhoods which used to be bad ones. For whatever reason, their presence seems to have cleaned those places up rather than creating a center for crime as opponents have so often predicted.

I am NOT in favor of making it legal for recreational use in public places but, being a libertarian, I maintain that what people do within their own homes on private property is no one's business. As long as they're not driving while impaired, giving it to minors or others incapable of using with informed consent, and they're not smoking it in my air space I wouldn't worry about it.

Addictions are just that --- a predilection for whatever reason toward the misuse of a substance or thing. In my experience, addicts will just as soon use one thing as another precisely because they have that predilection. There are 'net addicts, gaming addicts, shopping addicts, clothing addicts...and by that, I mean people whose interest in these things becomes so strong it overrides all other activities and they cannot function unless their lives are focused on that thing. For that reason, I don't particularly believe that marijuana is a 'gateway' drug which leads to harder drug use for everyone. For those with addictive tendencies, that's quite likely the case.

I'm also against outright banning something which still has useful medical applications simply because of a tendency toward misuse. The medical benefits of marijuana are well documented and it is currently the only known substance capable of reversing and curing glaucoma.

... If they legalize marijuana, that means that kids will be able to get hold of it and smoke it... It isn't a smart idea, especially since so many kids are vulnerable to the effects of peer pressure.

That, to me, is a weak argument against legalization. Kids get hold of many substances and abuse them whether they are legalized or not. It is not, for instance, legal for anyone under the age of eighteen to drink and yet kids that age can still obtain alcohol. It's illegal for them to have tobacco products too and they still manage to get hold of them. There are a whole plethora of potentially damaging and addicting activities and substances --- video gaming, television shows, movies, books, anime --- which are perfectly legal and obtainable by children and yet we don't make those illegal. Legalities should be based on an evaluation of harm to the general public, not on making a child-safe world. That's a parent's job, not mine and not society's.

[LittleFireCat]

In the end, most of what you posted comes down to 'all the effects exists, but some studies say they are negligible'. The question is on which studies to believe, and whether one should take the risk to unban a mind-altering substance that can lead to addiction. There's also the question on where to draw the line. Once marijuana will be unbanned, people will soon ask to unban more illegal substances. You'll have a precedent that will make it more difficult to keep other drugs banned.

Thalidomide, Morphine, Codeine, Diazepam are all legal, most pose risks of addiction, but would you say that they are easily obtained by children? No, I don't think they are. The only children that would have those medications are the ones who were prescribed them.
As to the risks of addiction, this graph made using the information found here (inverting the value of less serious and more serious, so that in the graph seriousness is show in increasing from 1-6, where as in the study showed it increasing from 6-1), shows that marijuana has on average lower values for the properties of addiction than Nicotine, Heroin, Cocaine, and Alcohol. And the graph also suggests that Marijuana is, on average, no more addictive (albeit in different ways) than Caffeine. And Caffeine by the way, is well known to be very harmful( and unlike marijuana, poses a risk of heart attack in even healthy people), and yet is often directly marketed 'to' children in the way of colourfully packaged, performance inhancing energy drinks. And Caffeine does in fact have deaths caused by it's use. Here and here.
Marijuana on the other has no deaths directly related to it's use. Here

4. Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality.
5. This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world. Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death.

6. By contrast aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.

7. Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug induced toxicity. A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana's LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.

8. At present it is estimated that marijuana's LD-50 is around 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. In layman terms this means that in order to induce death a marijuana smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times as much marijuana as is contained in one marijuana cigarette. NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes weigh approximately .9 grams. A smoker would theoretically have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response.

9. In practical terms, marijuana cannot induce a lethal response as a result of drug-related toxicity.

It should be noted that my purpose for wanting marijuana legalized is purely to make it easier for those who are prescribed it to obtain their medication. Currently under most (but not all) laws even if someone has be prescribed marijuana, it is illegal for them to obtain their medication, and they could be imprisoned for doing so. As noted with the other medications earlier, making it legal for a person who is prescribed marijuana does not have to make it easier for a child to get a hold of it, unless they have a condition for which marijuana would relieve their suffering. Given the relative safety of marijuana a compared to other drugs used medically for the same purposes, I see no reason why marijuana is illegal, and yet the other drugs are. If the smoking of marijuana itself is a problem, then it can be provided to the patients for use in other ways.

[wolfeyedangel]

fredsmith: As someone who does research and as a scientist (Geologist to be specific). I would not trust Wikipedia for anything other than a spring board to other research or 'general overview' kinds of information. Because anyone can upload to it with very little in the way of peer review or other substantiation, it is not, in and of itself a reliable source. It is, at best, a distant source. If you actually want people to take you seriously. Go to the Wikipedia article... go to the sources the article cites and read those and trace your way back to the original sources, called PRIMARY sources. A secondary source (that is someone saying so and so said...) can be used if there IS no primary source (or the primary source is in a language not spoken by anyone involved so you have to use a translation), and so on. If you want to know what is said in Shakespeare's plays, reading the plays is going to give you more accurate information than the reviews of Shakespeare's plays... or commentaries on Shakespeare's plays (this is actually the most analogous to Wikipedia... and commentary is biased by the point of the view of the writer, especially since, unless it's a peer-reviewed paper or other similarly controlled document there is no inherent quality control system!).

In the same vein. Wikipedia is, indeed a good starting point, but saying it's more relevant than actual research articles on the topic published by credible institutions is, to be blunt, laughable. There are reasons schools do NOT accept it as a primary source... it's not and there are so many layers of distillation that inaccurate information creeps in all over the place. Some articles are more guilty of this than others... but unless you investigate the sources the article cites you cannot judge the veracity of a wikipedia article, yourself. Which, in turn, means you're far better off in any kind of serious discussion back tracking out of Wikipedia and looking up the articles they cite and citing them NOT wikipedia so you don't have to worry about what the person who wrote the Wikipedia article might have screwed up.

~Wolfeyedangel

[ryer]

I agree Wikipedia is definitely a great starting point, but you shouldn't base something entirely on what Wikipedia said (or any one site for that matter). Basically what others have said.

On topic, I definitely think marijuana should be legalized. Legalizing something opens the way to regulation as well as money from taxation which could be used for a variety of other things severely lacking, such as the public education system in the US (I believe personally that quality education is the key to long-term fight against poverty and crime)

[Kestrad]

I haven't done much research into the debate on marijuana, so I don't have much to contribute on this front. However, with US-Mexico tensions on the rise due to drug wars, perhaps legalization of marijuana (which is where drug cartels get a lot of their money) would be helpful towards improving relations between the two countries by reducing a source of money and therefore influence for the cartels.

A note--I have read somewhere that eating marijuana is a way to get its medicinal effects without getting high. Eating as in actually ingesting the leaves--not the method that probably comes to mind which involves lacing baked goods with the drug.

[Morgaln]

In the end, most of what you posted comes down to 'all the effects exists, but some studies say they are negligible'. The question is on which studies to believe, and whether one should take the risk to unban a mind-altering substance that can lead to addiction. There's also the question on where to draw the line. Once marijuana will be unbanned, people will soon ask to unban more illegal substances. You'll have a precedent that will make it more difficult to keep other drugs banned.

Thalidomide, Morphine, Codeine, Diazepam are all legal, most pose risks of addiction, but would you say that they are easily obtained by children? No, I don't think they are. The only children that would have those medications are the ones who were prescribed them.

Then we probably talked about different things, because I have been arguing against making marijuana available publicly the way alcohol and cigarettes are, which I am strongly opposed to. I have no problems with marijuana as a prescribed medication, it's no more harmful (and a good deal less) than many others.

I haven't done much research into the debate on marijuana, so I don't have much to contribute on this front. However, with US-Mexico tensions on the rise due to drug wars, perhaps legalization of marijuana (which is where drug cartels get a lot of their money) would be helpful towards improving relations between the two countries by reducing a source of money and therefore influence for the cartels.

The problem with that argument I see is that those dealers won't just go and stop being dealers if you legalize marijuana. They'll just switch to another drug, that is likely to be even more harmful than cannabis, and probably causes physical addiction, whether that is ecstasy, cocain, heroin, or anything else. Or can you imagine all those dealers saying 'oh snap, no more money to be made with marijuana, let's go be bankers'?
One could argue that with marijuana illegal, if someone just wants to try something illegal once, at least he's likely to start on something comparably harmless, not any of the hard drugs. Drug dealers will be existing as long as there are drugs that aren't available freely, only what drugs those are changes.
If we're talking marijuana available only for medicinal purposes, there will still be a black market and there's not much gained on the criminal front.

Edit:

And yes, I suggest that we do ban things that are bad for pregnant women, if they can hurt them passively. That goes for smoking just as much as marijuana.

while noble, i don't think legally banning women from buying or using certain products or objects while pregnant is advisable, it'll trample numerous rights! the system is fine as it is, doctors advise and women decided wether or not to heed their advice.

However, in this case, it is not the woman who suffers the negative effects, but the baby. The government does have some responsibility to protect innocent third parties from harm, especially children, whether born or unborn, who need others to protect them, since they can't do it themselves. That's also one of the biggest problems with the 'they'll just smoke at home where no one is harmed' argument that is used for both cigarettes and marijuana. The children of those people are quite likely to be harmed, and there's no possible way currently to protect these children because it is completely legal to smoke in your own home.
And I've not been arguing for banning pregnant women from buying certain products, but for banning certain products completely because they can hurt unborn children passively. That is a difference.

[LittleFireCat]

In the end, most of what you posted comes down to 'all the effects exists, but some studies say they are negligible'. The question is on which studies to believe, and whether one should take the risk to unban a mind-altering substance that can lead to addiction. There's also the question on where to draw the line. Once marijuana will be unbanned, people will soon ask to unban more illegal substances. You'll have a precedent that will make it more difficult to keep other drugs banned.

Thalidomide, Morphine, Codeine, Diazepam are all legal, most pose risks of addiction, but would you say that they are easily obtained by children? No, I don't think they are. The only children that would have those medications are the ones who were prescribed them.

Then we probably talked about different things, because I have been arguing against making marijuana available publicly the way alcohol and cigarettes are, which I am strongly opposed to. I have no problems with marijuana as a prescribed medication, it's no more harmful (and a good deal less) than many others.

Yes, I am purely talking about legal in the stand point of medical use. In Canada, despite the apparent legal-ness of marijuana for medical use, I personally know individuals who either cannot legally get sufficient marijuana from the government to maintain therapeutic effect, or have been barred from the program despite having conditions which should allow them entry and physician's aid in trying to obtain marijuana for medical use. These would be four individuals, two with MS, one with spinal cord injury which has caused debilitating pain, and one with severe epilepsy for which conventional treatments (including two surgeries spaced 7yrs apart) have failed in relieving the daily seizures. According to the site, all should be able to receive medical marijuana if their doctors feel it would help. Only one of the individuals with MS was granted medical marijuana, but the daily dose he was granted was not sufficient to create a therapeutic effect in him. The program has refused in changing his granted daily dose, despite that even his doctor felt he needed a larger dose in order to achieve a therapeutic effect. The other individuals were given no explanation in why they were not approved, even though the site states they should have. I feel that altering marijuana's legal status in Canada would make it easier for individuals to legally obtain the medications their doctors feel that they should have, in the doses that their doctors feel they need.

In the US the federal government regulates drugs through the Controlled Substances Act, which does not recognize the difference between medical and recreational use of marijuana. These laws are generally applied only against persons who possess, cultivate, or distribute large quantities of marijuana.The federal government places every controlled substance in a schedule, in principle according to its relative potential for abuse and medicinal value. Under the CSA, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, which means that the federal government views marijuana as highly addictive and having no medical value. The federal government claims that marijuana is not medicine and in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the United States Supreme Court held that the federal government has the constitutional authority to prohibit marijuana for all purposes. Thus, federal law enforcement officials may prosecute medical marijuana patients, even if they grow their own medicine and even if they reside in a state where medical marijuana use is protected under state law. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), charged with enforcing federal drug laws, has taken a substantial interest in medical marijuana patients and caregivers in general, and large cultivation and distribution operations more specifically. Over the past few years, dozens of people have been targets of federal enforcement actions. Many of them have either been arrested or had property seized. More than a hundred are currently in prison or are facing charges or ongoing criminal or civil investigations for their cultivation or distribution of medical marijuana. The DEA, like local enforcement agencies, can choose how to make the best use of its time. Ideally, the DEA will leave medical marijuana patients and their caregivers alone. But federal law does not yet recognize medical marijuana, and the DEA is currently allowed to use the Controlled Substances Act to arrest people for its use. In many pending and past cases, the DEA and U.S. Attorney's office have used exaggerated plant numbers and inflammatory rhetoric, as well as informants who trade jail time for testimony, to justify enforcing federal laws against medical marijuana patients and caregivers in California and other states. Link

[wolfeyedangel]

Fredsmith: I will be blunt. Wikipedia is NOT any of those sources. It is Wikipedia. I know their procedures, but they are NOT reliable primary sources. Any more than you want to cite your local librarian rather than the books she points you to on anything other than how she does HER job. I say again. If you want people to take your arguments seriously, go to Wikipedia's sources, see how reliable they are, and then quote those sources NOT Wikipedia. Not for anything more specific than general information. You used Wikipedia to counter the National Institute for Drug Abuse and a Medical journal (Biological Psychology to which Morgaln linked) with... Wikipedia. That's like walking up to a NASA engineer and claiming the average 3rd grader knows more about said engineer's job than the engineer does because they wrote a report on it.

~Wolfeyedangel

[wolfeyedangel]

I recommend you do the same. This is in no way a personal attack. This is a specification of what is, and is not, credible citation, and what can and cannot be used to refute which sources. You quoted that source as an answer to the statement that Marijuana also kills and asked to see something other than blogs, which had been provided in the post immediately before you cited Wikipedia. In your post you attempted to refute that Marijuana did not cause any such health hazard, yet your only backing was the Wikipedia article related to tobacco, which again, indicated you believed that sufficiently refuted the evidence presented in the post previous to yours. If you are going to refute a Primary source you cannot use a secondary source. If you are going to refute a Secondary source you cannot use a tertiary source. Wikipedia occasionally reaches the status of a secondary source, but more often it is a tertiary or lower source.

~Wolfeyedangel

[wolfeyedangel]

That still does not address the issue of using wikipedia to refute that particular post.

~Wolfeyedangel