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Propaganda of the Marijuana Lobby: A Con Job
We’re all being conned. As legalization of marijuana is being pushed forward in the US, we are discovering how little we really know about the drug, and the information we do have is not widely publicized:
Despite being a substance that targets the brain, if and how long-term cannabis use alters brain structure and function remain unknown. There are some known adverse effects. It acutely impairs mental functions and may exacerbate depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and use of other substances. Whether it is more harmful than substances such as alcohol or nicotine is still undetermined. On the plus side, there is conclusive evidence that cannabis provides relief from symptoms related to chemotherapy and multiple sclerosis. Other potential benefits remain unknown.
Ten states have already allowed the recreational use of cannabis. According to an op-ed piece by Alex Berenson, the pro-marijuana groups have changed the discussion by talking about medical marijuana and the relief it can provide, rather than focusing on its recreational use.
Studies that are not widely publicized explain that the effects on children and teenagers can be long-term:
When marijuana users begin using as teenagers, the drug may reduce attention, memory, and learning functions and affect how the brain builds connections between the areas necessary for these functions. Marijuana’s effects on these abilities may last a long time or even be permanent.
Developing brains, like those in babies, children, and teenagers are especially susceptible to the hurtful effects of marijuana. Although scientists are still learning about these effects of marijuana on the developing brain, studies show that marijuana use by mothers during pregnancy may be linked to problems with attention, memory, problem-solving skills, and behavior problems in their children.
Following the states that have legalized marijuana to date, casual use doesn’t seem to have increased substantially. But for people who are heavy users, the increase in use is alarming:
…the number of Americans who use cannabis heavily is soaring. In 2006, about 3 million Americans reported using the drug at least 300 times a year, the standard for daily use. By 2017, that number had increased to 8 million—approaching the 12 million Americans who drank every day. Put another way, only one in 15 drinkers consumed alcohol daily; about one in five marijuana users used cannabis that often.
The potency of the drug has also increased. Rather than the 2% THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) of the 1970s, marijuana is routinely 20-25%.
Even more alarming than this data is the lack of information on the link between mental illness, violence, and the use of marijuana:
In 2017, 7.5% of young adults met the criteria for serious mental illness, double the rate in 2008.
None of these studies prove that rising cannabis use has caused population-wide increases in psychosis or other mental illness, although they do offer suggestive evidence of a link. What is clear is that, in individual cases, marijuana can cause psychosis, and psychosis is a high risk factor for violence. What’s more, much of that violence occurs when psychotic people are using drugs. As long as people with schizophrenia are avoiding recreational drugs, they are only moderately more likely to become violent than healthy people. But when they use drugs, their risk of violence skyrockets. The drug they are most likely to use is cannabis.
According to the National Academies of Sciences, US scientists can only receive access to “research-graded” cannabis, so they don’t conduct studies on the marijuana that is actually being used recreationally by the public.
Needless to say, the marijuana lobby is not interested in funding or encouraging research on their product. Due to the lack of research, we have no credible assessment of the damage that is being done to our children. The relationships between mental illness, psychosis, and violence are still unclear. And no one really knows the effect on crime statistics.
If you think the opioid crisis was a tragedy, just wait and see the results of widespread marijuana legalization.
Are you as concerned as I am?
Published in Culture
My standards? You were responding to Manny. What is funny though, is that you spent so much energy trying to defend this argument which is total crap.
There is one dominate Western Culture in America, and it does not have a tradition of toking up.
Now you sound like a lefty. It has long been clear Fred, you labor under the delusion that we can both have an America as a country, but that we don’t need to have
No, I speak the truth. Pot is not part of Western Culture in the way Alcohol is. To say otherwise is to reveal you don’t care about the facts. Please find me the use of pot in literature of the west. Wine is mentioned throughout the Bible, dude. Never Pot.
I have not moved any goalposts. Wine, Beer and Spirits of today all have their roots in ones of the past. There has always been superstrong spirits. There has never been anything like today’s modern pot. That is why I used cocaine as the example. You are the one trying to move goalposts.
I think Manny has more than addressed you on that. You don’t like the answer. You want a formula. Life does not work that way.
But I’ll give you another answer you won’t like:
In a republic, when the People, through their elected officials decide a substance should be banned, then it should be banned. If they want it unbanned, then it should be unbanned.
You want to make as much as possible a “right” so that it is put beyond the scope of the political. Just like the left.
It does have a tradition of pluralism and individual liberty. Somehow the people who talk about “one dominate Western Culture” always seem to forget that part.
Shakespeare is also never mentioned in the Bible either. Does that mean it’s not part of Western Culture? Obviously not. Part of Western Culture is embracing new ideas, new products, new ways of living.
Let’s set aside that it explicitly says Genesis 1:12 that marijuana is good. (And that it comes long before any mention of wine in the Bible.)
If you want to talk about Western culture and the Bible, you keep mentioning wine, but you keep leaving out freedom. Over and over in the Bible, it’s clear that God wants people to be free.
Individual liberty is a cornerstone of Western Civilization. It’s more important and far more integral than wine.
The fact of the matter is the reason you two keep dodging the objective standards question is that there is no objective standard that you can put forward that allows alcohol, tobacco, and acetaminophen to be legal to purchase over the counter for adults that would exclude marijuana.
Marijuana is less addictive than alcohol or tobacco.
It’s less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.
Unlike alcohol and acetaminophen, you can’t hurt yourself by overdosing.
Unlike alcohol, you can’t die from overdosing.
Marijuana is banned because it’s been banned for the last 80 years. And it was banned 80 years ago because it was consumed by dirty Mexicans and scary Negroes. Go read the debates from the era, drug prohibition is always intertwined with racism.
It wasn’t until it large numbers of white people started smoking marijuana that the Overton Window started to move to the point where legalization became possible.
I’m not saying that either of you is racist. I’m saying that you don’t have a rational leg to stand on because there is no objective standard you can apply that would allow alcohol, tobacco, and acetaminophen and not marijuana.
In comment #120 I lay out a standard and a process of establishing a decision. The process of a “trade study” is what you don’t get. That’s the means of making a prudent decision not by formula as you would do but on prudence. You seem hung up on formulas. Human nature is such that it processes many bits of information and synthesizes it into a decision, in this case as I propose through a trade study.
Plus you didn’t answer my question in comment #120.
What would be the purpose of the product?
Oh, sure, that “Smoke marijuana, but what is this wine stuff?” verse.
“The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.”
I mean, I know we have seedless grapes now, but come on…
To the disinterested observer, it sounds like you’re using the wisdom/formula dichotomy as an escape hatch from any principle you might claim to hold. Or maybe it’s more like a magic wand, that justifies whatever you want it to.
Candy
I said if a substance has detrimental effects, then it needs to be evaluated. That’s not an escape hatch.
It sounds like the normal forces of product safety litigation would solve that problem.
So who are they going to sue when people realize pot has lasting effects? MJ companies or the state governments for legalizing? How is your answer any different for pot?
You really are moving far away from the point, which is that pot has been part of the culture for ages. As of yet, you have not only demonstrated pot is part of the culture, you have more or less ignored the evidence presented for alcohol. Instead of giving on this one point, you try to twist the idea of a culture of freedom to mean anything is part of the culture. The idea that freedom is “more important” than wine doesn’t mean anything about pot not being part of the culture.
That’s not what I was calling an escape hatch.
But if you’d like to talk about that, could you explain the
formulawisdom behind that? Are you saying that government should have authority to prohibit (pending its lengthy approval process) any substance a person might want to eat, drink, smoke, inject, etc?So what? The need for an objective standard is yours, not ours. Your need is clearly to place things outside the political process so you get your way. I Cannot help but every time I bring that up, you always ignore it.
Alcohol used in moderation might actually be helpful. Stealing a base here, if you are comparing responsible use of both.
Rare by can happen
Rare but can happen
Again, so what? That was a different drug then. Wanting to keep it banned now does not make one a racist. But, Fred, as is typical of you, the more agitated you get, the more you sound like a leftist. Now we are racist for not wanting more people to smoke pot.
Of course you are saying we are racist. That is why you brought it up. As far as not having a “rational leg” to stand on, of course we do. At least I know I do, because I start from different first principles than you do. The difference between you and me is I am able to see that and understand it. It does not make either of us a monster. You however, clearly feel that anyone who does not share your obejectivist thinking must be broken at best or evil at worst.
Just like a Marxist
I’ll say it can have that authority if given it by the People, follow a due political process. It is part of the political process. These are messy and always, there are people who don’t like the outcome. You take the outcomes you like with the outcomes you don’t.
I think the FDA system is broken and needs to be fixed. However, that is a political process issue, not a rights issue. The libertarian impulse is to find more and more negative rights, while the left looks to find positive ones. The goal, of course, is to place as much as possible outside the political sphere. There, either side gets to win, once and for all, forever, and the other side has to take a loss till the end of time. That does not work as a governing strategy.
Libertarians of to day in 1787, if they are true to their much self-vaunted consistency and first principles, would have rejected the Constitution because it acknowledged slavery. And the nation would have died in its crib. So much for hard and fast, never wavering, can’t give an inch, thinking.
It has that power now. It’s called legislation and as long as it doesn’t violate the Bill of Rights, the legislative process can prohibit, has prohibited, and will continue to prohibit substances it deems harmful to society. Remember, this is the will of the people. If legislators abuse this power, they will be thrown out.
That’s true. I do want to place as possible outside the political sphere.
I don’t want or need my life to be controlled by other people. Nor do I desire to control other people.
Maybe you need someone else to tell you what you can and can’t do. And you think that someone should be the same entity that runs the DMV and the post office so effectively.
I’m not interested in being told what to do.
So, there’s another term for “hard and fast, never wavering, can’t give an inch, thinking” that you keep denigrating.
It’s called “having principles.” That used to be something that self-described conservatives believed in.
There’s another term for “plac[ing] things outside the political process.”
It’s called freedom. That also used to be something self-described conservatives believed in.
No. Actually the complete opposite of that. I literally said I wasn’t calling you racist. (But don’t let my actual words get in the way of you claiming to be a victim.)
What I’m saying is that you’re defending a law whose origins were in racism. It’s like people on the left who defend Davis-Bacon kicking and screaming and don’t realize the racist origins of the law.
And here we have it. Fred Cole wants to tell other people what they can, and cannot decide for themselves. You become the arbiter of rights, and you decide what is and is not political, and you impose that on everyone else, because you know better. As dictator, you would force everyone else to live as you see fit. You want to strip people from their freedom to fashion their own communities as they see fit.
The hidden tyrant living under the name of “freedom”.
Freedom to do as one wishes is not absolute, and it is more complex. I do believe in freedom. I think you do too. But we define the optimal parameters in different ways. You find what I am willing to tolerate unfathomable, and likewise, I find your toleration of things the same.
The whole point of a political process is it allows the marketplace of ideas to get settled. It allows the longest lasting consensus. Forcing people to change based on non-political processes is not sustainable in the long term. Thus, it gets back to first principles. You place freedom above all else. I place the ongoing continuation of the nation and its civilization as the most important task from the relationship between government and the people. Coming from these two starting points, there are going to be different ending points. Your implication that I don’t have principles is laughable. Of course I do. They just are not yours. I understand that Kant was wrong and that sometimes, even often, in human events, there is no one “right” way.
Your posts continue to imply anyone who does not agree with you is anti-freedom or not really conservative, or something. In short, if I don’t agree with you, it is clear you see me as less moral. I think it is this characteristic that makes you sound like a leftist. People apparently cannot disagree with you on this without being morally bankrupt.
This is a strange response. I wasn’t suggesting that we throw out the political process. Saying that people have rights to certain things, or that government shouldn’t be empowered to do certain things, doesn’t mean we up-end the process by fiat.
I thought it would be rather obvious that I was talking about what government should do. That’s why I used the word “should.” Of course I understand what we, the people, have authorized government to do. I am asking how far you think we should extend that power.
Just using your own rules against you. If a power can be abused it will. If we can place things outside the political process, more an more will be, and we end up with rule by fiat of robed judges.
Individual rights come into conflict with one another. There are not absolute rules for every human interaction. Life is not a formula no matter how much you or Fred want it to be. It is messy. People have the right to form the sorts of places they want to live in. Each individual has that right. You would give one person the power to veto all that. As long as crapping in public is not a health hazard, how dare the rest of us have a law against that! And so forth, and so on.
I want there to be an America for my kids. I will take a less than perfect America, than one destroyed by fool idealism, like open borders, destroyed marriages, and pot everywhere. And I will work towards my preferences at the ballot box, where you and Fred want to keep me out.
Not at the founding of the nation. If that were so, they would have had 25+ rights in the bill of rights instead of ten. they established only ten and the rest is up to the legislative process.
OK, they thought about the effects on society and many years ago they ruled pot dangerous enough to prohibit it. Now it seems that the cost of prohibition is outweighing the negative impact. So they are about to reverse it. This is what I call applying wisdom. It is not a defacto Libertarian right. I assume you would agree that heroin should not be legalized?
But Josh, nothing in the Bill of Rights automatically gives freedom to pot like it does to bear arms. So it has to go through the legislative process. They do not have a defacto right to pot.
To be fair, all rights are not listed, and that is explicit in the Bill of Rights.