Posted on 05/12/2024 6:29:15 AM PDT by karpov
Young people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s were seen as part of the counterculture. Now the cannabis culture is mainstream. A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes.
While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last week media outlets reported that the Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug—on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine—which would provide tax benefits and a financial boon to the pot industry.
Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.
Ms. Madras has spent 60 years studying drugs, starting with LSD when she was a graduate student at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, an affiliate of Montreal’s McGill University, in the 1960s. “I was interested in psychoactive drugs because I thought they could not only give us some insight into how the brain works, but also on how the brain undergoes dysfunction and disease states,” she says.
In 2015 the World Health Organization asked her to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
would be better off with cigarettes
Yes they have.
government prefers to record otherwise.
Lets go back to throwing people in government cages for using pot!
I’m here just to see the freepers freak out.
Irrelevant to my point, but OK.
I felt your loss. Your kid shouldn’t have had to live the life you describe.
I feel it even more because it’s Mother’s Day and I know a dozen mothers who have suffered the same loss.
Young people often don’t see the friends that they once knew that are now in the treatment system. Mothers and Fathers do.
Teachers see the lost potential, but can’t speak up because their friends and bosses use recreationally.
I’m going out and pick some flowers and try for happier thoughts.
They say that because of THC content.
My opinion - THC - when smoked - has a medically ignored saturation issue.
Once THC reaches a certain level in your blood stream, you do not get higher.
However, I have read that you can OD if you eat marijuana, which seems logical.
I grew up in south Florida in the 1960s and had access to the best weed in the world.
We had one hit weed in the 1960s - just like they have one hit weed in 2024.
My opinion - if marijuana is outlawed, alcohol should be outlawed, too.
Full Disclosure - I never enjoyed alcohol, drank only because my friends drank, quit in 1985.
If all the alcohol in the world disappeared tomorrow, I would not notice unless someone told me.
I am not sure what irrelevant means in that sentence.
Are you saying you have never consumed alcohol?
If you have consumed alcohol, how old were you when you had your first drink?
I am so sorry to hear that. Blessings for you as you deal with that trauma.
MJ is absolutely, without question a gateway drug. While it is supposedly not addictive, what it does to the brain causes addiction. That feeling, that need that users get.
Only by the grace of God did my son make it out of the hell of drug abuse. He went from MJ, to other drugs to meth. Stealing, breaking into things; it was horrible. And yes, he says it was the gateway into using other drugs as well.
He is now a proud member on the US Army doing well for himself. Prayers for you all.
Nonsense! I have it on good authority Joe Biden smokes it and it doesn't bother him a bit. He's perfectly lucid.
You are missing what a gateway drug means.
I worked for 20 years with veterans suffering from PTSD. A majority of them used marijuana regularly, even daily. After years of use in some cases they still ended up needing intensive hospital treatment. If marijuana was useful for PTSD I would have needed a different job. The trap of using marijuana, alcohol or other addictive behaviors is, the very thing destroying you is what you have come to rely on to get through the day. A solution, it ain’t.
I know retired vets who use it daily. They have a medical card for it. They function fine. They have an RV and vacation places. That’s their story. I’m not a stoner. Don’t care for it but my libertarian tendencies says let each person decide for themselves.
You falsely attributed the quote in your post to me.
The quote is from someone else’s post.
“You can’t carry on a conversation with someone who smokes pot all the time…“
SO true!
Drives me nuts when I run across old ‘friends’ who’ve been smoking it since the 70’s.. They’re incoherent; they repeat themselves like dementia patients; they constantly re-assure me - “look,, hasn’t changed me at all! I’m fine!..”
When all I see is a shell of the person I used to know who used to be so full of life.
Someone better explain that to Google and Bing.
Almost every Page One link for "Gateway Drug" includes the word alcohol.
I bring up the issue because Free Republic has many passionate supporters who think marijuana should be banned, but no one who thinks alcohol should be banned.
However, most people who move on to hard drugs used alcohol before they used marijuana.
Instead of bankrolling ballot initiatives to legalize pot, she says, George Soros and other wealthy donors who “catalyzed this whole movement” should be funding rigorous research: “If these folks, these billionaires, had just taken that money and put it into clinical trials, I would have been at peace.” It’s a travesty, Ms. Madras adds, that the “FDA has decided that they’re going to listen to that movement rather than to what the science says.”
The same is true of all pain meds if you do them recreationally.
—Paracelsus, 1538
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