The Washington Postreports on a recent study that unexpectedly failed to find a link between smoking marijuana and lung cancer. Dan Filler wonders how federal agencies will respond.
Unless they find that smoking pot makes you Republican, I daresay nothing is going to change our government's "reefer madness" approach.
(FTR, I don't smoke anything, tobacco or cannabis; I've seen friends abuse cannabis; but there's nothing plausible I've ever seen to make me think it's as bad as alcohol can be.)
The first surgeon general's report on smoking failed to find a link between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer. Subsequent surgeons general solved this awkwardness by never breaking them out separately again.
Dan Filler wonders how federal agencies will respond.
That's easy.
Donald Pashkin's UCLA research group won't get any more NIDA grants until he repents and agrees to come back "on message". NIH will deep-six the research report as soon as nobody's looking. Not to be outdone, CDC will issue an advisory that even thinking about changing drug laws causes cancer. Karen Tandy will declare Pashkin an enemy combatant and recommend shipping him to Git'mo. John "P4Me" Walters will spend a few million bucks flying around the country denouncing "pot-head pseudoscientists in California" to any civic groups that promise not to laugh.
What bugs me is that politicians and regulators are so focused on marijuanna use that they are really neglecting methamphetamine use.
Now THAT stuff is just plain evil!
County and local law enforcement agencies have been calling for anti-meth funding for years, and gotten little real interest from those in Washington who are more interested in making political points against those "damn hippies" on the left.
Yes, I'm sure that unadulterated tobacco is quite healthy, along with other naturally occurring substances like lead, mercury, cyanide and arsenic. Not that I'd suggesting two obviously deadly poisons and some heavy metals are the equivalent of tobacco. I'm just amazed that the phrase "all natural" still has any traction at all.
That's damn, dirty hippies, BTW, and there is a lot of money being spent on methamphetamine enforcement and interdiction across the country, along with ineffective measures like restricting access to cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine (a precursor). Of course, my solution is to legalize cocaine and make meth unattractive by comparison, so I might be the wrong one to talk about it. I fail to see how imprisoning a drug addict (which is what "enforcement" is a euphamism for, after all) does anything for society, who must now pay for the addict's upkeep, or for the addict, who will either (i) have access to drugs in prison anyway, oe (ii) be forced to participate in an ineffective drug treatment program, or both.
My primary point was not "all natural" but went to the quantity and frequency of ingestion.
You'd not have any increased of cancer from smoking 4 cigarettes a day, from home dried tobacco or the commercial kind. Just as you have no increased chance of contracting cancer from 2nd hand smoke.
Irensaga I agree that the meth problem is much larger than most people realize. Highest/fastest spike to the pleasure receptors and it's insanely addictive. Nasty business which is a rot to low/middle class. Gotta love the petty crime that goes with it too.
John Jenkins,
"and there is a lot of money being spent on methamphetamine enforcement and interdiction across the country, along with ineffective measures like restricting access to cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine (a precursor)."
My understanding though is that source is unique enough (less than a dozen plants in the world make the key ingredient) that meth could be controlled by restricting the source. Granted limiting people to 3 Sudafed boxes per store is not a successful restriction campaign. Going back further to the source would be. But of course that would mess with drug company’s profit margins on cold medicine. I guess it will be a while before the meth epidemic is a big enough problem that it overrides drug company profits?
That's true, most pipe and cigar smokers don't inhale. However, many people don't know that. Plus they are both notorious for producing large amounts of secondhand smoke which the pipe and cigar smokers do inhale in large quantities. Later surgeon general reports claimed cigars and pipes were equivalent to cigarettes as justification for lumping them all together into one statistical category, and criticized them just as heavily as cigarettes for causing lung cancer.
SenatorX, pseudoephedrine is in the public domain. You can buy it cheaply in generic brands, so your argument about drug company profits doesn't really give the reason. Then there's the fact that you're interfering with millions of people who want to self-medicate for a cold or sinus problem. An obvious counterargument is that there are other drugs that do that, which is true, and they are generally more expensive, leading to greater drug company profits. I guess you're just screwed on that one.
As to the meth epidimic, (1) it's overplayed and (2) if you ban pseudoephedrine, people will use other precursors. As it is now, here in Oklahoma, meth cooks import pesudoephedrine from other places (notably mexico, where it is easily purchased in large lots). It's simply not possible for the U.S. government to choke off all of the supplies. Even if they did, the demand would simply shift to something else (sort of like how we got to meth in the first place).
The only way to stop it is to dry up demand. The only ways to dry up demand are to imprison the drug users, which is unjust, expensive and ineffective (because drugs are available in prison), to somehow convince them all to stop doing drugs (which seems unlikely), or allow people to use other things in its place (which also seems unlikely).
All of that begs the question, however, because it assumes that we *ought* to do something about it in the first place. While regulating meth cooks on the basis of hazard makes sense, regulating meth use really doesn't because the secondary effects of heavy handed enforcement are worse than the secondary effects of meth use. There's also the fact that enforcement doesn't work.
How do they breathe, then? True, they mostly don't draw the smoke in the way cigarette smokers do, but they surely inhale a lot of tobacco smoke.
My impression, as a former heavy cigarette smoker and former sometime pipe-smoker, was that one doesn't intentionally inhale the smoke with each drag with a pipe or cigar. One surely inhales plenty of second-hand (I suppose "ambient" smoke might be a better term, as it come from the smoker himself in the first place) smoke but that it's nowhere near the amount that cigarette smokers do. The nicotine is delivered primarily through absorbtion into the bloodstream through the mouth. It sure never gave me the buzz/fix that cigarettes did. Anyway, all bad for you and I'm thrilled I finally managed to quit. My point was simply that I wasn't surprised there wasn't a direct link with lung cancer found in these cases.
As someone who has worked directly with meth addicts, I cannot tell you just how you devestating this addiction is both to the addicts and their families. It is not overplayed at all. I think prevention and treatment are more effective than law enforcement though.
John,
None of what you say is really true and you certainly don't seem very solution oriented. The most important error is point our your "other precursors" theory. What exactly are those again? The precursors to meth are very difficult to make and there are only some 9 labs in the world that make them. Control of distribution from there and over the counter to consumers would successfully put an end to the meth market. Meth is very different from most drugs in that the "precursors" are not taken from an easy to grow plant. Why do you think again this has not been addressed? I am interested in your theory.
Oh and the hazard of cooking meth? Comes from cooking the PILL COATS off and other binders...Before they had to get it across the counter they didn’t have that hazard.
Go tell a room full of mothers trying to kick meth that their "epidemic" is overplayed. They only have a twenty something percent chance of success. See the drug actually changes parts of the brain permanently. I suppose it's hard to enjoy anything after being a meth addict. That bar gets raised so high nothing else can ever touch it. That’s not something that is overplayed. That is something where all the money spent on the prohibition of marijuana should go instead.
Pipe and cigar smokers fail to inhale the primary smoke in much the same way as they fail to inhale soda when they drink through a straw. As stated above, the primary nicotine absorption occurs though the lining of the mouth.
Additionally, many of the tobacco varieties common in pipe and cigars have significantly lower nicotine content than that used for cigarettes, and some of the curing processes for pipe tobacco tend to reduce the nicotine content as well. It's easier to get a buzz from cigars than pipes -- in addition to holding less tobacco, it's very hard to smoke a pipe fast enough to get a buzz without burning your hand or your tongue.
The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes....While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
The article does not seem to say how long the "heavy" marijuana smokers smoked, but let's run some numbers.
Two packs a day of cigarettes per year:
2 x 20 x 365 = 14,600 cigarettes per year.
One pack a day per year:
20 x 365 = 7,300
Heavy marijuana use over an undetermined time: 14,000 -22,000 total.
So a one pack a day habit smokes as many cigarettes in three years as the "study" "heavy marijuana smokers" did in their entire lives.
Excuse me if I am not impressed by the alleged conclusion.
I blame todays poor teaching of High School Chemistry,
Back in the 70's, the easily available recipes for cooking up Meth involved much harder syntheses. Today's high school drop outs have to rely on the much easier conversion from pseudo-ephedrine
As a drug policy acquaintance once pointed out, the unfortunate thing about US policy vis-a-vis marijuana is that the government drew a very deep line in the sand back in the 1930s regarding the "evil weed". Changing policy on this substance would be a tacit admission that the US's entire drug policy is an absurd and extraordinarily costly failure. Ultimately it would be necessary to rethink and rebuild the nation's drug policies from the ground up. No bureaucrat -- Democran or Republicat -- wants to deal with that. In light of the current brouhaha over Mexican migration into the US, it is also amusing to remember that the origins of US policy with regard to marijuana were primarily in laws that southwestern, "anglo" politicians developed as part of a broader effort to isolate Mexican-Americans socially and politicaly and to minimize the perceived dangers this population posed to the "anglo" power structure.
PPA &ephedrine are both alternate precursors. Ephedrine *is* easily available from plants. Your "9 labs" theory is incorrect. There are nine "major" labs producing pseudoephedrine. You don't think someone will take up the slack if those sources are cut off (and how would you expect to do that outside the U.S.)? You said yourself how addictive meth is. That creates a market. Someone will find a way to serve it. The idea that the Congress can stop meth manufacture by forcing the nine major labs to report to the DEA how much pseudoephedrine they produce is laughable on its face.
You say I'm not solution oriented. You're still begging the question. If someone wants to abuse meth, why should I stop them? What right or obligation do you or I have to stop someone else from destroying himself? You say that we should stop marijuana enforcement. I agree. But why should we stop with marijuana? Why not legalize all drugs? If your belief is the great harm that meth causes justifies intervention (and it is harmful to those who use it, my statement was intended to convey the idea that the meth "epedimic" is overstated, not the effects on an indivudual user), then shouldn't alcohol be first on the list? If not, why not? Because you approve of one and not the other?
AppSocRes, don't worry. Mexico is getting it's drug revenge. Most of the meth used in the U.S. today isn't even manufactured here because there are large labs in Mexico that can do so more cheaply and easily and then import the drug to the U.S.
I never heard that the war on drugs had anything to do with cancer.
It has to do, today, with funding and huge enforcement bureaucracies that don't want to die.
WF Buckley and Milton Friedman were early on against the war on drugs, as exactly counterproductive, by making it profitable. The chief supporters of a vigorous war on drugs, from the point of view of profits, are drug trafficers. The more enforcement, the more profit.
That's reenforced by the self-preservation of bureaucrats, making it all pretty hopeless.
Another reason that cigar and pipe smokers don't show the same overall bad health effects is that they tend to be richer and get better health care. Of course this can be controled for but it is a confounding effect.
I think one reason that the government should focus on meth and crack more than pot is because it has more externalities and crime. I know some quite function (if low motivated) people who smoke pot. The only people I know second hand who have a meth problem have totally spiraled to nothing.
Pure Heroin is perfectly safe if used correctly. Its simply a morphine molecule with 2 acetyl groups attached to speed its absorption into the brain. Street heroin is dangerous because of the materials used to dilute it and the resulting unpredictability of the dose you get.
The first surgeon general's report on smoking failed to find a link between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer.
Most people don't inhale cigar and pipe smoke, right?
There is a causal link between pipe/cigar smoking and cancer of the oral cavity and throat. Also with chewing tobacco. Sigmund Freud died of this disease. Having seen people with this and many other diseases, I can say that if there is one disease I would NOT want to have, this is it.
The real problem I had with your comment was that you said attacking demand was the only way to address the problem but then quickly acknowledge that enforcement won't work. For the most part I would agree that education and addressing the social question of why people use drugs in the first place is the way to deal with "the drug problem", and that is on the demand side.
The thing is that while I agree with this libertarian veiw I can't help but also think all drugs are not equal. Drugs that can kill or cause instant addiction when someone tries them just once (maybe as a teenager), seem in a separate class than those that don't. In meth's case the information SEEMS to suggest that there is a direct correlation with supply side hits and a reduction in addicts as well. A decrease in purity means an increased chance the addict can kick the habit if nothing else.
I guess while I am never in favor of punishing a user I don't think this necessarily means the supply side should be ignored. A lot of current policy seems to do just that though. As others have pointed out already the money in enforcement is no small factor. I don't think that pointing out drug company profits in the meth case, as another factor, is that out of line.
It's true that there is a link between mouth and throat cancer and pipe and cigar smoking -- IIRC the first SG report discovered a roughly 7x increase for pipe smokers &2x for cigar smokers. However, mouth and throat cancer is extremely rare in the base population, much more rare than lung cancer is; as the 1st SGR documented that 7x increase merely takes the risk from extremely rare to very rare.
Something else that the SG report didn't mention, but that I have noticed among they guys at the pipe shop is that there is a very low rate of tobacco addiction, and even that seems to be mostly among the guys that started on cigarettes and switched to pipes to save money.
There will be approximately 30,000 cases of oral and pharyngeal cancer in the US in 2006 and another 10,000 of larynx cancer (I got this from the NIH web site, compared to about 186,000 cases of lung cancer. The vast majority of these is associated with tobacco and alcohol use.
I don't know if this counts as rare (not in my book). It is more common than ovarian or cervical cancer (of course both men and women get it). It is more common than leukemia or pancreatec cancer.
I would not dissuade you from enjoying your pipe, but it isn't safe.
Pipe and cigar smokers fail to inhale the primary smoke in much the same way as they fail to inhale soda when they drink through a straw.
You mean they suck it quickly into their stomach?
I assume what the commentor meant was that they don't inhale the smoke into their lungs when the pull on the pipe/cigar. They hold it their mouths and then blow it out. They don't breath in when the smoke is in their mouths. A better analogy would be tasting wine by swishing it in one's mouth and then spitting it out without swallowing it.
As of now there is no "BIG MARIJUANA" to sue. If pot gets fully leagalized and is then sold by huge and profitable companys, studies will appear linking it to everything from cancer of the urine to munchie-induced obesity.
Marijuana, on the very face of things, does not belong in Cat1 (no known medical use), though perhaps in another category rather than simply legalizing. The "active" ingredients in the weed are, in fact, the basis of more than one medicine.
But "no medical use" it is. And research in the US is best described as forbidden: higher quality plants than those grown by the government apparently grow in the wild, let be in greenhouses. --- it's ``not NIDA's mission to study the medicinal use of marijuana`` --- see link below...
The UK, and now Canada, have started what amounts to a large-scale testing: while restricted to MS patients, it is available by prescription - and no nonsense about growing the stuff in open fields, using the whole plant (stems, seeds, and all), or other asininity, the idea is to try to know (if with large uncertainties) quality/dosage/effect.
Lev: So a one pack a day habit smokes as many cigarettes in three years as the "study" "heavy marijuana smokers" did in their entire lives. Excuse me if I am not impressed by the alleged conclusion.
People do smoke comparable numbers of cigarettes and marijuana joints, just as people do not smoke comparable numbers of cigarettes and cigars, just as people do not use the same number of miligrams of ibuprophen and vicodin. There is no reason to think that "heavy" marijuana users would smoke the same volume of marijuana as "heavy" cigarette uses smoke of tobacco cigarettes.
Ah, great...so you die of emphysema instead of cancer...
NEJM Not to mention auto accidents...
Marijuana has a long half life, so if you are a regular user, it is similar to being constantly slightly drunk (or very drunk for heavy users).
Alcholol, on the other hand, is metabolized about one ounce per hour...legal drunkeness is one drink.
As a doc, I've seen so many abused/neglected children in marijuana users, not to mention positive THC in car wrecks and suicides that I wonder at the rich yuppies who claim it is "harmless"...maybe because those who misuse it tend to drop out of society and are no longer seen by their friends.But those of us working with social pathology have a different point of view...
Doc, that's powerful evidence about pot smoking. Thanks for contributing.
However, your experiences do not convince me that pot should be outlawed. Alcohol is involved in many car accidents, and certainly there are children neglected and abused by alcoholics. Then shouldn't they both be treated the same? Either all pot and alcohol should be prohibited, or both should be allowed, but controlled. What is the justification for treating one different from the other when the results of abuse are the same?
(FTR, I don't smoke anything, tobacco or cannabis; I've seen friends abuse cannabis; but there's nothing plausible I've ever seen to make me think it's as bad as alcohol can be.)
That's easy.
Donald Pashkin's UCLA research group won't get any more NIDA grants until he repents and agrees to come back "on message". NIH will deep-six the research report as soon as nobody's looking. Not to be outdone, CDC will issue an advisory that even thinking about changing drug laws causes cancer. Karen Tandy will declare Pashkin an enemy combatant and recommend shipping him to Git'mo. John "P4Me" Walters will spend a few million bucks flying around the country denouncing "pot-head pseudoscientists in California" to any civic groups that promise not to laugh.
Now THAT stuff is just plain evil!
County and local law enforcement agencies have been calling for anti-meth funding for years, and gotten little real interest from those in Washington who are more interested in making political points against those "damn hippies" on the left.
A heavy cigarette smoker smokes a couple of packs a day, day in day out for decades on end, then may or may not ultimately get cancer from it.
A heavy pot smoker would probably inhale, at most, 3-4 joints a day or less than 1/10 the amount and it's all natural vs. loaded with additives...
That's damn, dirty hippies, BTW, and there is a lot of money being spent on methamphetamine enforcement and interdiction across the country, along with ineffective measures like restricting access to cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine (a precursor). Of course, my solution is to legalize cocaine and make meth unattractive by comparison, so I might be the wrong one to talk about it. I fail to see how imprisoning a drug addict (which is what "enforcement" is a euphamism for, after all) does anything for society, who must now pay for the addict's upkeep, or for the addict, who will either (i) have access to drugs in prison anyway, oe (ii) be forced to participate in an ineffective drug treatment program, or both.
You'd not have any increased of cancer from smoking 4 cigarettes a day, from home dried tobacco or the commercial kind. Just as you have no increased chance of contracting cancer from 2nd hand smoke.
Most people don't inhale cigar and pipe smoke, right?
Irensaga I agree that the meth problem is much larger than most people realize. Highest/fastest spike to the pleasure receptors and it's insanely addictive. Nasty business which is a rot to low/middle class. Gotta love the petty crime that goes with it too.
John Jenkins,
"and there is a lot of money being spent on methamphetamine enforcement and interdiction across the country, along with ineffective measures like restricting access to cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine (a precursor)."
My understanding though is that source is unique enough (less than a dozen plants in the world make the key ingredient) that meth could be controlled by restricting the source. Granted limiting people to 3 Sudafed boxes per store is not a successful restriction campaign. Going back further to the source would be. But of course that would mess with drug company’s profit margins on cold medicine. I guess it will be a while before the meth epidemic is a big enough problem that it overrides drug company profits?
As to the meth epidimic, (1) it's overplayed and (2) if you ban pseudoephedrine, people will use other precursors. As it is now, here in Oklahoma, meth cooks import pesudoephedrine from other places (notably mexico, where it is easily purchased in large lots). It's simply not possible for the U.S. government to choke off all of the supplies. Even if they did, the demand would simply shift to something else (sort of like how we got to meth in the first place).
The only way to stop it is to dry up demand. The only ways to dry up demand are to imprison the drug users, which is unjust, expensive and ineffective (because drugs are available in prison), to somehow convince them all to stop doing drugs (which seems unlikely), or allow people to use other things in its place (which also seems unlikely).
All of that begs the question, however, because it assumes that we *ought* to do something about it in the first place. While regulating meth cooks on the basis of hazard makes sense, regulating meth use really doesn't because the secondary effects of heavy handed enforcement are worse than the secondary effects of meth use. There's also the fact that enforcement doesn't work.
How do they breathe, then? True, they mostly don't draw the smoke in the way cigarette smokers do, but they surely inhale a lot of tobacco smoke.
My impression, as a former heavy cigarette smoker and former sometime pipe-smoker, was that one doesn't intentionally inhale the smoke with each drag with a pipe or cigar. One surely inhales plenty of second-hand (I suppose "ambient" smoke might be a better term, as it come from the smoker himself in the first place) smoke but that it's nowhere near the amount that cigarette smokers do. The nicotine is delivered primarily through absorbtion into the bloodstream through the mouth. It sure never gave me the buzz/fix that cigarettes did. Anyway, all bad for you and I'm thrilled I finally managed to quit. My point was simply that I wasn't surprised there wasn't a direct link with lung cancer found in these cases.
None of what you say is really true and you certainly don't seem very solution oriented. The most important error is point our your "other precursors" theory. What exactly are those again? The precursors to meth are very difficult to make and there are only some 9 labs in the world that make them. Control of distribution from there and over the counter to consumers would successfully put an end to the meth market. Meth is very different from most drugs in that the "precursors" are not taken from an easy to grow plant. Why do you think again this has not been addressed? I am interested in your theory.
Oh and the hazard of cooking meth? Comes from cooking the PILL COATS off and other binders...Before they had to get it across the counter they didn’t have that hazard.
Go tell a room full of mothers trying to kick meth that their "epidemic" is overplayed. They only have a twenty something percent chance of success. See the drug actually changes parts of the brain permanently. I suppose it's hard to enjoy anything after being a meth addict. That bar gets raised so high nothing else can ever touch it. That’s not something that is overplayed. That is something where all the money spent on the prohibition of marijuana should go instead.
Additionally, many of the tobacco varieties common in pipe and cigars have significantly lower nicotine content than that used for cigarettes, and some of the curing processes for pipe tobacco tend to reduce the nicotine content as well. It's easier to get a buzz from cigars than pipes -- in addition to holding less tobacco, it's very hard to smoke a pipe fast enough to get a buzz without burning your hand or your tongue.
The article does not seem to say how long the "heavy" marijuana smokers smoked, but let's run some numbers.
Two packs a day of cigarettes per year:
2 x 20 x 365 = 14,600 cigarettes per year.
One pack a day per year:
20 x 365 = 7,300
Heavy marijuana use over an undetermined time: 14,000 -22,000 total.
So a one pack a day habit smokes as many cigarettes in three years as the "study" "heavy marijuana smokers" did in their entire lives.
Excuse me if I am not impressed by the alleged conclusion.
Back in the 70's, the easily available recipes for cooking up Meth involved much harder syntheses. Today's high school drop outs have to rely on the much easier conversion from pseudo-ephedrine
PPA &ephedrine are both alternate precursors. Ephedrine *is* easily available from plants. Your "9 labs" theory is incorrect. There are nine "major" labs producing pseudoephedrine. You don't think someone will take up the slack if those sources are cut off (and how would you expect to do that outside the U.S.)? You said yourself how addictive meth is. That creates a market. Someone will find a way to serve it. The idea that the Congress can stop meth manufacture by forcing the nine major labs to report to the DEA how much pseudoephedrine they produce is laughable on its face.
You say I'm not solution oriented. You're still begging the question. If someone wants to abuse meth, why should I stop them? What right or obligation do you or I have to stop someone else from destroying himself? You say that we should stop marijuana enforcement. I agree. But why should we stop with marijuana? Why not legalize all drugs? If your belief is the great harm that meth causes justifies intervention (and it is harmful to those who use it, my statement was intended to convey the idea that the meth "epedimic" is overstated, not the effects on an indivudual user), then shouldn't alcohol be first on the list? If not, why not? Because you approve of one and not the other?
AppSocRes, don't worry. Mexico is getting it's drug revenge. Most of the meth used in the U.S. today isn't even manufactured here because there are large labs in Mexico that can do so more cheaply and easily and then import the drug to the U.S.
It has to do, today, with funding and huge enforcement bureaucracies that don't want to die.
WF Buckley and Milton Friedman were early on against the war on drugs, as exactly counterproductive, by making it profitable. The chief supporters of a vigorous war on drugs, from the point of view of profits, are drug trafficers. The more enforcement, the more profit.
That's reenforced by the self-preservation of bureaucrats, making it all pretty hopeless.
Nothing to do with cancer.
I think one reason that the government should focus on meth and crack more than pot is because it has more externalities and crime. I know some quite function (if low motivated) people who smoke pot. The only people I know second hand who have a meth problem have totally spiraled to nothing.
Most people don't inhale cigar and pipe smoke, right?
There is a causal link between pipe/cigar smoking and cancer of the oral cavity and throat. Also with chewing tobacco. Sigmund Freud died of this disease. Having seen people with this and many other diseases, I can say that if there is one disease I would NOT want to have, this is it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/view/
The real problem I had with your comment was that you said attacking demand was the only way to address the problem but then quickly acknowledge that enforcement won't work. For the most part I would agree that education and addressing the social question of why people use drugs in the first place is the way to deal with "the drug problem", and that is on the demand side.
The thing is that while I agree with this libertarian veiw I can't help but also think all drugs are not equal. Drugs that can kill or cause instant addiction when someone tries them just once (maybe as a teenager), seem in a separate class than those that don't. In meth's case the information SEEMS to suggest that there is a direct correlation with supply side hits and a reduction in addicts as well. A decrease in purity means an increased chance the addict can kick the habit if nothing else.
I guess while I am never in favor of punishing a user I don't think this necessarily means the supply side should be ignored. A lot of current policy seems to do just that though. As others have pointed out already the money in enforcement is no small factor. I don't think that pointing out drug company profits in the meth case, as another factor, is that out of line.
Something else that the SG report didn't mention, but that I have noticed among they guys at the pipe shop is that there is a very low rate of tobacco addiction, and even that seems to be mostly among the guys that started on cigarettes and switched to pipes to save money.
I don't know if this counts as rare (not in my book). It is more common than ovarian or cervical cancer (of course both men and women get it). It is more common than leukemia or pancreatec cancer.
I would not dissuade you from enjoying your pipe, but it isn't safe.
You mean they suck it quickly into their stomach?
You mean they suck it quickly into their stomach?
I assume what the commentor meant was that they don't inhale the smoke into their lungs when the pull on the pipe/cigar. They hold it their mouths and then blow it out. They don't breath in when the smoke is in their mouths. A better analogy would be tasting wine by swishing it in one's mouth and then spitting it out without swallowing it.
But "no medical use" it is. And research in the US is best described as forbidden: higher quality plants than those grown by the government apparently grow in the wild, let be in greenhouses. --- it's ``not NIDA's mission to study the medicinal use of marijuana`` --- see link below...
The UK, and now Canada, have started what amounts to a large-scale testing: while restricted to MS patients, it is available by prescription - and no nonsense about growing the stuff in open fields, using the whole plant (stems, seeds, and all), or other asininity, the idea is to try to know (if with large uncertainties) quality/dosage/effect.
Weed control
People do smoke comparable numbers of cigarettes and marijuana joints, just as people do not smoke comparable numbers of cigarettes and cigars, just as people do not use the same number of miligrams of ibuprophen and vicodin. There is no reason to think that "heavy" marijuana users would smoke the same volume of marijuana as "heavy" cigarette uses smoke of tobacco cigarettes.
NEJM
Not to mention auto accidents...
Marijuana has a long half life, so if you are a regular user, it is similar to being constantly slightly drunk (or very drunk for heavy users).
Alcholol, on the other hand, is metabolized about one ounce per hour...legal drunkeness is one drink.
As a doc, I've seen so many abused/neglected children in marijuana users, not to mention positive THC in car wrecks and suicides that I wonder at the rich yuppies who claim it is "harmless"...maybe because those who misuse it tend to drop out of society and are no longer seen by their friends.But those of us working with social pathology have a different point of view...
However, your experiences do not convince me that pot should be outlawed. Alcohol is involved in many car accidents, and certainly there are children neglected and abused by alcoholics. Then shouldn't they both be treated the same? Either all pot and alcohol should be prohibited, or both should be allowed, but controlled. What is the justification for treating one different from the other when the results of abuse are the same?