Posted on 01/15/2003 7:24:33 AM PST by MrLeRoy
If most parents knew there was a federally funded organization lying to their children about the effects of drug use, they would likely be appalled and seek to have the organization's funding removed. Yet the frightening truth is that such a group exists, operating under the family-friendly monicker, Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA). In its newest line of Public Service Announcements (PSAs), the group equates marijuana use with wrongful death, rape and even murder...crimes that sensible people realize marijuana usage alone would never lead to. Last year, the American public was misled into thinking that every joint they smoked contributed to international terrorism, and recently that using marijuana will almost certainly result in acts of domestic violence.
Lies. The "anti-drug."
PDFA's well-intentioned but inaccurate PSAs feature a variety of scenarios, each ending with someone dying, being raped or going to jail. In reality, only the latter is a likely consequence of using marijuana.
In one of the ads, two male teenagers smoke pot in what appears to be the home office of one of their fathers, and, as the two adolescents continue to smoke, they stumble across a handgun. To see if it's loaded, one of the teens promptly picks up the gun and shoots directly at his friend. The gun is, of course, loaded, and the guilty teen, totally under the "control" of the marijuana, never thought to check for bullets or point the gun anywhere except directly at his friend. The entire grisly scene is followed by the words "Marijuana: Harmless?"
If this television spot sounds totally implausible, even ridiculous, that's because it is, and the others are just like it. The ad would be better-aimed at parents who fail to lock up their handguns. The fact remains that people don't test to see if a gun is loaded by blindly pointing it at their best friend and squeezing the trigger, stoned or not. The ad's message is not simply that marijuana distorts perception and judgement, it is that if you smoke weed, you will be shot or perhaps shoot someone else. This is false.
All of these ads play on what I call a "worst case scenario" fear. The most horrible thing that can happen in any one of the given commercials always does, and, without fail, marijuana is to blame.
Another of the PSAs features a car full of young people at a fast food window smoking marijuana. The teens get their food, and as they are pulling out, a child on a bicycle pulls out in front of them from behind a corner, totally getting run over by the "negligent" driver in the process. If only the teens hadn't been smoking marijuana, the commercial implies, perhaps the little girl on the bicycle would have lived.
The fact that this child appears to be younger than 5 years old and riding a bike without parental supervision along a busy commercial fairway is never addressed. Again, the ad would better serve parents who let their children play in the street unattended. Anyone, regardless of age, who darts in front of a moving car is likely to get run over. Marijuana has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps most intriguing is the spot in which two teens, a male and a female, smoke marijuana at a party. After smoking a few bowls of weed from a pipe, the female begins to look comatose, and her male companion proceeds to rape her in front of all the people at the party. Not surprisingly, no one comes to her aid, and viewers are again asked "Marijuana: Harmless?"
Here, marijuana use leads to an impromptu rape at this poor woman's expense. Mark Tutssel, vice-chairman of Leo Burnett USA, PDFA's ad agency, said in a press release that the company's PSAs dealt with "everyday occurences." I would venture to say that none of the aforementioned scenarios occurs every day, if at all, and PDFA, which prides itself on truth, is willfully misleading the American public about the "dangers" of marijuana.
Here are the facts. The Marijuana Policy Project's Web site, www.mpp.org, lists that 11 of our 50 states consider marijuana to be a medicine and have decriminalized it. Of these states, California alone saves $100 million each year in reduced arrests, according to the group's Web site. Imagine what the extra money could do for California and how much might be saved if marijuana was legalized outright.
In fact, the Web site states that the government has been supplying American citizens with medicinal marijuana for more than 20 years. There is even a pill form of the drug, called Marinol, available only by prescription. So is marijuana the scourge of society and the corruptor of youth? The U.S. government doesn't seem to think so.
When dealing with tough issues such as drug use, one must take the good with the bad. Marijuana can arguably be said to cure more than it causes, and its medicinal qualities cannot be ignored. Could there be negative effects of using marijuana? Sure, but to think that smoking pot will almost certainly lead to accidental death, rape, or murder, you would have to be, well, high.
I don't care "how successful" you think they would be. In the scenario shown in the completely idiotic commercial, the girl was at fault, plain and simple.
It amazes me this mentality that alcohol or pot removes any and all ability to avoid a wreck, and if one occurs while the driver was "high" or had been drinking, then the smoke or drink was automatically at fault. It totally ignores the thousands of wrecks that are caused by completely sober people, and the thousands of times an "intoxicated" person drives fine.
Not to mention a very good post to go along with it. Thanks!
AB: Discusses how the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), interferes with short-term memory in both delayed match and delayed nonmatch to sample tasks (DNMS). Animal studies have shown that other cannabinoids, such as the potent cannabinoid receptor (CB1) agonist, WIN 55,212-2 produces a delay-dependent deficit in the DNMS task at a dose range well below that of Delta-sup-9-THC, which was blocked by the CB1 receptor antagonist SR141716A. The effects of WIN 55,212-2 at low doses were similar to those of isolated lesions of the hippocampus, whereas high doses (0.50 mg/kg) produced effects similar to lesions of both hippocampus and surrounding retrohippocampal areas. The low dose effect was delay-dependent while the high dose introduced an additional deficit at short delays that was sensitive to SR141716A and phaclofen. Comparison of lesion vs cannabinoid effects on DNMS performance suggests that CB1 receptors on hippocampal neurons interfere with the processing of DNMS task-specific information within a trial. CB1 receptors on hippocampal gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)ergic interneurons and in retrohippocampal areas appear to influence the ability to maintain segregation of information between trials in the task.
(PsycINFO Database
Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved)
AU: Hampson,-Robert-E; Deadwyler,-Sam-A
AF: Wake Forest U, School of Medicine, Dept of Physiology and Pharmacology, Winston-Salem, NC, US
SO: Life-Sciences. 1999 Jul; Vol 65(6-7): 715-723.
JN: Life-Sciences;
PB: US: Elsevier Science, Inc.
IS: 0024-3205
PY: 1999
URLP: www.elsevier.com
LA: English
KP: role of delta-9-THC and cannabinoid receptors in hippocampus in short-term memory interference MJ: *Cannabinoids-; *Hippocampus-; *Neural-Receptors; *Short-Term-Memory; * Tetrahydrocannabinol- MN: Cognitive-Ability; Neurobiology- CC: 2580-Psychopharmacology; 2580; 25 SF: References UD: 19991101
You should write a paper on "The role of anti-drug mania in short-term memory interference"---the subject we were talking about was depression and schizophrenia.
They apparently got weed confused with alchohol...the original date-rape drug.
George Patton: Yes, well thats the other question that we looked at, and we looked at the extent to which teenage depression predicted frequent cannabis use later on, and what we found is that there was really no relationship there. So cannabis use predicted depression, but depression did not predict frequent daily or even weekly cannabis use.
Norman Swan: Whats the message for young boys in this?
George Patton: It wasnt that young boys escaped without other problems, and here the link with other mental disorders, particularly psychotic disorders, that link is one that appears to not be gender specific, its true for males as well as females.
Norman Swan: So this is the debate which we covered on The Health Report about whether cannabis either brings on a psychotic attack, or in fact causes it in the first place.
George Patton: Well I think thats right, and all the evidence appears to be pointing in one direction, that cannabis use does cause not only a worse course of schizophrenia but also it does cause higher rates of schizophrenia and the two other papers that appeared in the BMJ were very different studies, both suggesting the same thing. So I think there is the question that the risks are schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. I think theres also an important message about the risks for dependence, and in our group we found very high rates of symptoms of dependence, cannabis use, these are symptoms such as withdrawal symptoms, craving for the drug, increased tolerance to cannabis, seeking the drug out, in preference to other social activities, these symptoms were very, very common in daily users, and I think thats a real problem because I think dependence, whatever the drug, is likely to predict continued use and continued heavy use.
"So cannabis use predicted depression, but depression did not predict frequent daily or even weekly cannabis use."
I didn't mention depression specifically as a predictor; I said, "[The results] can equally well be explained by the theory that the later psychiatric problems are already manifesting themselves in these teens and increasing their propensity to seek out marijuana," i.e., later depression may manifest itself as an earlier psychological condition other than depression. To Patton's credit, he's done some thinking about the causality issue---but he hasn't nearly put it to rest.
Published in the British Medical Journal...
Not all opinions are equal! :)
"...later psychiatric problems are already manifesting themselves ..."
Depressison is a psychiatric problem.
I might add, it's also a societal problem (e.g., effexor and other anti-depressant prescription medications).
But not the only one, so it remains possible that some earlier condition leads to both later depression and later marijuana use.
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