Pubdate: Mon, 20 Aug 2012
Source: Daily Californian, The (UC Berkeley, CA Edu)
Copyright: 2012 The Daily Californian
Contact:  http://www.dailycal.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/597
Author: Roger Morgan

MARIJUANA BAN WOULD PROTECT YOUTH, FAMILIES

Schizophrenia, psychosis are among associated ailments

It is not surprising that Dan Rush would write an article favorable to
pot ("Bill's passage would protect patient welfare," Aug. 13), but
hopefully, the majority of students will see through the smoke and
realize that the "medical marijuana" is a hoax to begin with and
doomed to fail. To call it medicine, or the customers patients, is an
affront to our collective intellect. To suggest that shuttering pot
shops is depriving a 5-year-old child of medicine is
blasphemous.

Marijuana is not medicine, and 98 percent of the patients aren't
suffering from serious illness. They just want to get high or are in
it for the money. Since students' generation will soon inherit the
empire, you had best take an honest assessment of the true social and
economic impacts of marijuana and other drugs.

America has declined in the world academically, with 1.2 million high
school drop outs, more than 6.1 million kids being raised by
grandparents or in foster homes and an annual cost to the nation for
substance abuse of more than $1 trillion.

While isolated components of the marijuana may have medicinal value,
the entire plant does not. Real medicines have known ingredients,
dosage and potency and must be reproducible in consistent form, like
pills. They must pass scrutiny of the Food and Drug Administration,
and they are never dispensed by 21-year-old kids in retail pot shops
whose only training comes from smoking pot. And smoking is never an
acceptable delivery system.

Marijuana causes brain damage, particularly during adolescence, and is
harmful until the brain is fully developed at age 25 or later. It can
also lead to psychosis, including schizophrenia and paranoia, and
suicidal depression, and 17 percent of those who start smoking before
age 18 will become addicted to it. Used alone, it doesn't kill by
overdose, but almost all of the 3,400 Americans who die monthly of
overdose started their drug journey with marijuana. And overdose isn't
the only cause of death or only adverse outcome. Addiction alone will
ruin one's life and family.

Scientific research has shown that because of the potency of today's
pot, a fetus can incur brain damage and physical harm only two weeks
after conception, before many women even realize they are pregnant.
Even if the pregnant mother stops, it's too late for the baby.

You have a choice of what to believe regarding Rep. Barbara Lee's H.R.
6335. Either she is unenlightened on the true harms of marijuana or
her philosophies are shaped by campaign contributions or both. In
either case, she has violated the public trust to safeguard people and
our tax dollars.

If you are part of the 81 percent to 85 percent of young people who
don't smoke pot, keep in mind that shortly your hard work will have to
pay for the burden of those who work less or not at all. Think hard
about whether you want to do that.

Help stop the hoax!

Roger Morgan is the founder and director of Take Back America.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt