Yesterday, our DCG wrote a post about John Morgan, an attorney stuck in the hippie-dippy 1960s, who’s sunken $4 million into a bus tour to convince college students to vote yes on Amendment 2, which would legalize medical marijuana in Florida.
The initiative in Florida is only the latest in a fast-paced movement across America to legalize pot.
But is marijuana really a harmless drug?
Wayne Hall, a professor and director of the Center for Youth Substance Abuse Research at the University of Queensland in Australia, had undertaken a study to answer that question.
As reported by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe for Live Science, Oct. 6, 2014, Professor Hall reviewed the many studies that had been done over the past two decades (1993-2013) on marijuana’s effects on human health. His findings were published in the October issue of the journal Addiction.
These are his findings:
1. Adolescents who regularly use cannabis are about twice as likely as their nonuser peers to drop out of school, and experience cognitive impairment and psychoses as adults.
2. Adolescent pot-users also tend to use other illicit drugs.
3. Although the risk of a person suffering a fatal overdose from marijuana is “extremely small,” there are case reports of deaths from heart problems in seemingly otherwise healthy young men after they smoked marijuana.
4. Middle-age people who regularly smoke marijuana are at an increased risk of a heart attack. However, there may be an interactive effect from tobacco smoking because most cannabis smokers were or are still cigarette smokers.
5. Marijuana use carries some of the same risks as alcohol use, such as an increased risk of accidents, dependence and psychosis.
6. Regular cannabis users also double their risk of experiencing psychotic symptoms, disordered thinking, hallucinations and delusions. Such symptoms and disorders are found in 7 of 1,000 nonusers, but in 14 of 1,000 regular marijuana users.
7. A study of more than 50,000 young men in Sweden found that those who had used marijuana 10 or more times by age 18 were about two times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia within the next 15 years than those who had not used the drug. Although critics argue that it may be that people with mental health problems are more likely to use marijuana to begin with, a 27-year follow-up of the 50,000 Swedish men found “a dose–response relationship between frequency of cannabis use at age 18 and risk of schizophrenia during the whole follow-up period.” The follow-up investigators estimated that 13% of schizophrenia cases diagnosed in the study “could be averted if all cannabis use had been prevented.”
8. Marijuana use by pregnant women may slightly reduce the birth weight of the baby.
9. The effects of euphoria that cannabis users seek from the drug come primarily from its psychoactive ingredient, called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC. During the past 30 years, the THC content of marijuana in the United States has jumped from less than 2% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2006. Like alcohol and other drugs such as opioids, the more potent form of marijuana likely increases users’ level of intoxication, as well as their risk of accidents and developing dependence.
Professor Hall concludes that although marijuana “is not as harmful as other illicit drugs such as amphetamine, cocaine and heroin, with which it is classified under the law in many countries, including the USA, the perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks.”
Translated into simple English: Marijuana is NOT a harmless drug, which should lead us to ask why there is such a push to make it legal.
Did you know that 84-year-old multibillionaire Warren Buffet has his fingers in this?
The Week reports that Cubic Designs Inc., a subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., sent hundreds of fliers to weed dispensaries in Colorado, Washington, and California. “Double your growing space,” one flier reads in capital letters, while another page adds, “Grow your profits.”
Cubic Designs builds additional platforms in warehouse spaces, allowing companies to expand usable areas of their holdings. A couple of marijuana growers independently contacted the company, inquiring about the “mezzanine systems.” So, “we sold a few mezzanines into that market and decided internally, ‘Why don’t we do some marketing?'” Shannon Salchert, marketing coordinator for Cubic Designs said.
See also “Warren Buffet gives $millions for abortions.”
~Eowyn
