I’m of very mixed opinion here.
On the one hand, I really don’t care what people do to themselves. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to be around those people or to deal with the consequences.
Looking through PubMed, I find 2293 articles when I search “medical marijuana.” It is very difficult to find articles which describe benefits of marijuana. It’s linked to psychosis, an intractable vomiting syndrome, a correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia is driving research to establish whether there is a causal relationship, and so on. Adding the word “benefits” to the search reduces the number of articles found to 52, which still contain little concrete data on actual benefits of use.
The passage of the medical marijuana proposition in California (which I voted for, btw) was clearly a way to give a cover of legitimacy to potheads. It had nothing to do with medicine.
The problem with legalization of marijuana is that we will have to deal with the very real public health consequences at a level far higher than we already do today. Anyone who thinks marijuana use wouldn’t increase if made legal is engaging in wishful thinking.
I would be all for the legalization of marijuana under two conditions. (1) All medical costs for any illness linked to or attributed to marijuana use are not covered by insurance or government programs. (You smoke it, you bear the costs). (2) Any crime committed while under the influence of marijuana incurs an immediate death sentence. (If you do the drug and commit a crime, then you will die)
Every pot smoker I've ever met has been or become a dope head. They've let the drug make them into losers. Every last one of them.
As far as the links to schitzophrenia... eh. Show me the schitzoids. I've known smokers who have smoked (probably daily) for at least 40 years and are hardly schitzophrenic. In fact I don't know 1 smoker who ever developed schitzophrenia. Yeah, that's not very scientific and I think maybe if someone has a propensity for schitzophrenia and then uses drugs that problem is going to be made worse, like it would for almost any drug. As far as I can tell though this is such a small, small minority but it serves to frighten. It does sadden me that legalization has used medical marijauna as a fig leaf. It's Orwellian word games. On the other hand those who take lots of perscription "medicines" are often fooling themselves too about why they need their "medicine".
“On the one hand, I really don’t care what people do to themselves. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to be around those people or to deal with the consequences.”
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I don’t really want to be around idiots who thought Obama was going to be a great improvement over George Bush and in my case that includes one immediate family member but I don’t want to have the idiots locked up.
Well, maybe on a bad day I want to see the idiots locked up.