I used to agree with you 100% about this.
However, after “research”, I have to disagree with you. Here’s why:
Pot exists in hundreds, if not thousands, of differant strains. Back when I used to smoke regularly in my youth, I had a really bad injury, and I thought I’d try to smoke to see if it would help the pain diminish. It had the exact *opposite* effect - it seems like I was very much in touch with my body, and the pain was actually amplified!
At that point right there, I said “ok, this whole thing about medicenal pot is bullcrap”, and thought that it was all just a bunch of crap to try to get pot legalized from people who want to party it up (and I still think that’s a driving force for legalization, btw.)
However! Not so long ago, I had been complaining to a friend of mine about how sore I get after working out at the gym... I’ve been lifting kind of heavy and when the day ends, I’m so sore that I literally have trouble getting up a flight of stairs. My buddy said, “here, try *this*, this is what they use for pain control in Europe.”
I was very skepticial from my previous experiance, but I said, Ok, sure, I’ll try it.
I’ll be damned if the pain wasn’t totally gone in about ten minutes. So I told my buddy about this and he was the one that told me that differant strains of the plant have differant properties. Some of the strains are great for pain management, he tells me, and some of them are great for other things. There is one strain that supposedly gives people with MS a great degree of relief. Some strains make you insanely hungry... and some strains actually dull your appitite.
Bottom line is, I used to agree with you and think that “pot” is more or less all the same, and that this whole “medical pot” thing is bullcrap to try to get people to legalize a narcotic. But I honestly really feel that there is something to pot having certain medicinal effects depending on the strain.
The problem, the way that I see it, is that suddenly you will see a HUGE influx of kids in thier late teens and early 20s suddenly running to the doctor with “sudden depression” or whatever ailment that they can fake to get a script for the government dope. I honestly can’t think of a way to get around that, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m still on the fence about whether legalization is good or not.
There are certain forms of ailments that are TREMENDOUSLY benefited from pot! MS, epilepsy, and there is argueably no better treatment for nausea. It is, in my eyes, no differant then smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol. Legalizing it, however, might pave the way for the legalization of harder drugs, and I feel that legalizing things like cocaine or heroin is just about the stupidest thing that a society can do to itself.
Cocaine is already legal - my otolaryngologist swabbed it up my nose a few years back, out of a little brown bottle labelled “COCAINE HYDROCHLORIDE 10% USP SOLUTION.”
Do we have a “huge influx” of kids running to ear, nose, and throat doctors trying to get a prescription for cocaine?
The problems with drugs arise when you use the criminal justice system and the brute force of armed police officers to deal with a public health issue.