"if something IS bad for you, it should be banned... does that mean they'll be coming for my chocolate soon?!?!" That's sort of my point. Conservatives or libertarians don't try to argue, for example, that "the statisics showing that people who eat too much choclate get fat and have zits are LIES LIES." They argue that, despite certain conceded potentially unhealthy aspects of chocolate that it shouldn't be banned because people have the FREEDOM to use it.
When its marijuana, however, they don't allow themselves to make the concession. They cling stubbornly to the concept that marijuana is the greatest thing on god's green leafy earth.
Once the "freedom" theory is abandoned for pot in favor of the "aint bad for ya" theory it opens to the door to the logical and rhetorical position that we should abandon the "freedom" theory in other areas and look solely at whether or not its bad for you.
And that opens the door to the exact place the socialists, liberal, etc., want us to go.
In other words I think we may have found FR's own "useful idiots." ;-)
An exhaustive search of the literature finds no deaths induced by marijuana. The US Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) records instances of drug mentions in medical examiners' reports, and though marijuana is mentioned, it is usually in combination with alcohol or other drugs. Marijuana alone has not been shown to cause an overdose death.
Source: Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), available on the web at
http://www.samhsa.gov/; also see Janet E. Joy, Stanley J. Watson, Jr., and John A. Benson, Jr., "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base," Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Research, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), available on the web at
http://www.nap.edu/html/marimed/; and US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition" (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 57.
There are not a lot of substances that you can say that about.
The DEA's Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young concluded: "In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.
What are these terrible dangers you allude to?