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firstly, i remember in school we were taught sex education and yes we appear to have probs with this underager sex & pregnancy in this country, however no where near as bad as the problem with alcohol and class a drugs,
secondly, the most important thing to do is EDUCATE people, when i was 14 i was a registered alcoholic, why? because i didnt know about the harms it would do to me. after 13 months rehab i became educated about alcohol and for the last 6 years been tee-total.
IF WE EDUCATE PEOPLE AT AN AGE BEFORE THEY START EXPERIMENTING WITH SUBSTANCES PEER PRESSURE WILL PLAY NO PART UNLIKE @ THE MOMENT.
thirdly, ive not seen anyone say about both alcohol and such like being man made substances however even though cannabis is prepared by the hand of man it is a natural occuring plant and has been used for centuries if not more. we all need to be educated about what we are doing to our bodies, even then it should be the users right to be able to make a choice of whether or not to use.........
(Not having read the entire thread) Sadly I'm not that sure education would help things. Even an 11 year old knows why smoking is bad for health AND that it's addictive, and still many teenagers start.
Do u have any idea of what this costs? And how many times do u do this a year? Harmless indeed sir.
the biggest threat is people being aware and this most amazing of plants being once more in the hands of the people ...big business stands to loose billions world wide.
if people like GWB can see things in the context of good and evil then let me have a go ...the hemp plant is so incredible in what it can do for the benefit of mankind medicaly ...spritiualy ...recreationaly ...economicly ...environmentaly socialy ...that it is a gift from god ...and satan has demonised it and using evil powerful men to erradicate the one plant that can save the world!
Just goes to show how little you know about it then.
Problem is, most psychiatric doctors know fuck all about drugs. What's needed is more dual diagnosis workers, but there's a massive shortage.
but would you not agree that the positives outweigh the negatives.
But psychiatrists are qualified to diagnose mental illness, and offer suggestions on predisposing or precipitating factors which may have contributed to that illness.
should we make them illegal ...along with motorbikes?
Then again, peanuts (including peanut butter) were banned at my brother's primary school because they had 1 kid with an allergy, and we have speed limits and licencing of motorbikes, so civil liberties aren't absolute.
And 'legalising' and 'reinstating' is just semantics - the fact is cannabis is currently illegal.
it is as addictive as sugar and caffiene.
it is no more jharmful than a million things we do in this life.
And we are trying to reduce obesity levels because it is a recognised health threat, just like we would be trying to reduce cannabis consumption in a few years time if we were to legalise it.
One of your arguments is that we should legalise drugs to tax sales and take money out of the hands of drug dealers, but then most people argue for spending that tax revenue on treatment centres for drug users. It doesn't make any sense, except on the grounds of civil liberties, which I just said cannot be absolute.
After 15 days of taking testimony and more than a year's legal deliberation, DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young formally urged the DEA to allow doctors to prescribe marijuana. In a September 1988 judgement, he ruled: "The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision . . . It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record. In strict medical terms, marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."
Yet former DEA Administrator John Lawn, his successor, Robert Bonner, and current DEA Administrator John Constantine - non-doctors all! - have refused to comply and have continued to deprive persons of medical cannabis, according to their own personal discretion.
Wasting Time, Wasting Lives
More than 100 years have passed since the 1894 British Raj commission study of hashish smokers in India reported cannabis use was harmless and even helpful. Numerous studies since have all agreed: The most prominent being Siler, LaGuardia, Nixon's Shafer Commission, Canada's LeDain Commission, and the California Research Advisory Commission.
Concurrently, American presidents have praised hemp, the USDA amassed volumes of data showing its value as a natural resource, and in 1942 the Roosevelt administration even made Hemp for Victory, a film glorifying our patriotic hemp farmers. That same year, Germany produced The Humorous Hemp Primer, a comic book, written in rhyme, extolling hemp's virtues. (See appendix I of the paper version of this book.)
Yet even the humane use of hemp for medicine is now denied. Asked in late 1989 about the DEA's failure to implement his decision quoted above, Judge Young responded that administrator John Lawn was being given time to comply.
More than a year after that ruling, Lawn officially refused to reschedule cannabis, again classing it as a Schedule I "dangerous" drug that is not even allowed to be used as medicine.
Decrying this needless suffering of helpless Americans, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Family Council on Drug Awareness quickly demanded Lawn's resignation. His successors, Bonner, and now Constantine, retain the same policy.
What hypocrisy allows public officials to scoff at the facts and deny the truth? How do they rationalize their atrocities? How? They invent their own experts.
The most exhaustive study of hemp smoking in its natural setting is probably Ganja in Jamaica A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marijuana Use by Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas (1975; Mouton & Co., The Hague, Paris/Anchor Books, NY).
The Jamaican study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Center for Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse, was the first project in medical anthropology to be undertaken and is the first intensive, multi-disciplinary study of marijuana use and users to be published.
From the Jamaican Study introduction: "Despite its illegality, ganja use is pervasive, and duration and frequency are very high; it is smoked over a longer period in heavier quantities with greater THC potency than in the U.S. without deleterious social or psychological consequences. The major difference is that both use and expected behaviours are culturally conditioned and controlled by well established tradition." "No impairment of physiological, sensory and perceptual-motor performance, tests of concept formation, abstracting ability, and cognitive style and test of memory."
The study outlines the positive reinforcement given socially to ganja smokers in Jamaica, the universal praise for the practice among users, who smoke it as a work motivator.
Subjects described the effects of smoking making them "brainier", lively, merry, more responsible and conscious. They reported it was good for meditation and concentration, and created an general sense of well-being and self-assertiveness.
The Hype:
More Harmful Than Tobacco
According to the American Lung Association, cigarettes and tobacco smoking related diseases kill more than 430,000 Americans every year. Fifty million Americans smoke, and 3,000 teens start each day. The Berkeley carcinogenic tar studies of the late 1970s concluded that "marijuana is one-and-a-half times more carcinogenic than tobacco."
The Fact:
Not One Documented Case of Cancer
There are lung irritants involved in any smoke. Cannabis smoke causes mild irritation to the large airways of the lungs. Symptoms disappear when smoking is discontinued.
However, unlike tobacco smoke, cannabis smoke does not cause any changes in the small airways, the area where tobacco smoke causes long term and permanent damage. Additionally, a tobacco smoker will smoke 20 to 60 cigarettes a day, while a heavy marijuana smoker may smoke five to seven joints a day, even less when potent high-quality flower tops are available.
While tens of millions of Americans smoke pot regularly, cannabis has never caused a known case of lung cancer as of December 1997, according to America's foremost lung expert, Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA. He considers the biggest health risk to the lungs would be a person smoking 16 or more "large" spliffs a day of leaf/bud because of the hypoxia of too much smoke and not enough oxygen.
Tashkin feels there is no danger for anyone to worry about potentiating emphysema "in any way" by the use of marijuana totally the opposite of tobacco.
Cannabis is a complex, highly evolved plant. There are some 400 compounds in its smoke. Of these, 60 are presently known to have therapeutic value.
Cannabis may also be eaten, entirely avoiding the irritating effects of smoke. However, four times more of the active ingredients of smoked cannabis are absorbed by the human body than when the same amount is eaten. And the prohibition inflated price of black market cannabis, combined with harsh penalties for cultivation, prevent most persons from being able to afford the luxury of a less efficient, though healthier, means of ingestion.