OH REALLY! It's nasty to smoke a regular cigarette, but Lord Have Mercy, don't let nothing happen to the WEED!
Not that I'm advocating anything relating to pot smoking, but it humorous that not a single shred of evidence is presented in this story - not even a hint at fact - to back the assertions of the headline or of the story itself.
So we have a bunch of pols, a physician, a reporter, and the BBC itself fabricating a story on the basis of precisely nothing.
"Health officials in Geneva have suppressed the publication of a politically sensitive analysis that confirms what ageing hippies have known for decades: cannabis is safer than alcohol or tobacco."
"According to a document leaked to New Scientist, the analysis concludes not only that the amount of dope smoked worldwide does less harm to public health than drink and cigarettes, but that the same is likely to hold true even if people consumed dope on the same scale as these legal substances. "
Typically, the report is exactly backwards. If the modern drug is more potent, one needs to smoke less to obtain the same effect. The health hazards arise from the smoke, not the active ingredient, so the more potent it is, the less has to be smoked, with less health risk.
Furthermore, cannabis doesn't need to be smoked at all to obtain the effect - it can be baked into brownies and eaten, with nuch less deleterious health effects than smoking it - or smoking tobacco.
Great - the more potent it becomes the less one needs to smoke to get a buzz.
You are much too believing. You've got to be more skeptical. Who, who believe smoking was a good thing 50 years ago? A couple of cigarette companies promoting the smoother taste with less coughing. 100 years ago and more, people called cigarettes 'coffin nails'. "People" knew smoking wasn't healthy, they may not have known exactly, but they knew.
Second, you're taking the word of one politician on what marijuana does to the lungs. This politician is NOT unbiased, he's NOT a scientist, doctor or epidemiologist and certainly hasn't read the literature on the health effects of pot.
You have to realize that drug prohibition is a leftwing program, that has gone on so long, that it's been adopted by conservatives as their own. The Left lies. When in doubt, remember that the Left lies. Polititicians lie. Do your own homework.
In over 30 centuries of known human consumption of pot, there are zero known deaths. If smoking pot is bad, then people can eat or drink it.
Condensed version: it is almost humanly impossible to smoke the amount of weed you'd need to achieve the levels of toxins they want you to be concerned about. The research was conducted on rats who were exposed to MJ smoke until they died. The equivalent level of smoke for humans is something obscene---on the order of several scores of joints per day . . .
Well, then, don't smoke it. Try Alice B. Toklas' brownie recipe instead. ;-)
Why do I get the impression that she thinks that young people making their own decisions is a bad thing?
Pot burns hotter than tobacco, but you smoke much, much less of it. But it's still smoking. Based on - ahem - extensive personal research I'd guess it's less carcinogenic than tobacco due primarily to dosage, but that its health risks are not zero, and not just cancer-related, smoking anything tends to increase blood pressure and put exotic organic compounds onto skin whose reactions vary from individual to individual but which are occasionally detrimental.
Is it as "harmful" as tobacco? Well, tobacco isn't necessarily "harmful" to everyone, so blanket statements such as this are not necessarily that helpful to debate. Is it risk-free to everyone? I doubt that seriously. Will there be social costs associated with legalization? I think that is inevitable. Will these be worse than the social costs we're paying to support the WOD? My personal belief is that they will not be, but they won't be zero.
And no, I don't smoke the stuff any more.
No one smokes 10-20 marijuana cigarettes a day like the 1-2 pack a day cigarette smokers who damage their lungs and get cancer.
Marijuana ought to be legalized and sold in a controlled fashion like alchohol. It is, on the whole, probably less dangerous than alchohol. I've never heard of a person DYING from using marijuana; it must be pretty rare (more than 100,000 people a year die from alchohol related diseases and accidents). It doesn't even increase their auto accident rate (they just slow down).
I don't use marijuana. But I don't like the enormous criminality and corruption that follows from its being illegal. It's just like what happened during Prohibition. The corruption and crime are worse than anything the drug does.
Campfires, grills, tobacco, even if you were to simply smoke newspaper....
But that's not a reason to make it illegal.