Re: Do you believe in Prohibition?
I'm really torn on this issue. I really am.
On the one hand:
I work in a hospital and I am a big health advocate. One potential problem is that marijuana does have a high tar content and has other carcinogens. Most people are going to use the smoking route of administration, so the end of 'dope prohibition' would lead to an increase in cancer. We already have thousands of people landing in the hospital ON PURPOSE. There are the obesity, diabetes, and sexually transmitted infection epidemics. All three are on the rise. You think Diablo, Meph, and Baal are bad? Well, believe me, sugar is killing more people than you would believe.
And they don't just die; no, they take a long time to die and they put a huge strain on the health care system.
So the issue is why add to the problem? Why make it easier for more people to land in the hospital? There are innocent children with cancer who are not getting good enough/fast enough health care because the health professionals and resources are stretched thin treating heart disease and smoking related illnesses. These are preventable and are wasting billions if not trillions over the decades. There are also innocent people in genuine accidents who have to wait in the ER because someone wants to chain smoke and then be waited on hand and foot by the hospital staff.
So adding another smoking product to the mix would just make things worse. More money would be going into more cancer treatment for cool dudes when it could be used to help innocent people who, IMO, deserve better care and research looking into their health problems. But how much of an impact would marijuana really have? This brings us to...
On the other hand:
Tobacco products are far more harmful than marijuana products. Plus, people in general can't smoke an ounce of high-efficacy weed every day. But they can easily smoke an ounce of tobacco each day, even double this. People have jobs to do, and their employers aren't going to let them get high all day. Their employers will, howver, let them smoke tobacco on all their breaks. So for these reasons, marijuana consumption is going to be much less than tobacco consumption. Tabacco is a pretty lame product with a short lasting effect, so people need to smoke the stuff all day. So marijuana would do tiny damage the the public's health compared to tobacco products.
Alcohol has a HUGE cost on society. Later on, in a future post, I will post some numbers I have from my Drugs and Behavior course I took. But to sumarize, many many murders, rapes, spousal abuse, child abuse, motor vehicle accidents, workplace injuries, and other serous and costly problems are alcohol related. The harm and cost to society caused by marijuana is likely to be trivial compared to alcohol and tobacco.
So I am still undecided. I think my ultiamte view as of now is sure, remove marijuana prohibition, but only if you make a nation wide ban on tobacco products. Take something harmful away before you add something else that is harmful.
You can't just add whatever you like to the mix. Why not make heroin legal? Afterall, the number of people getting killed from ice cream is far higher than the number of deaths caused by heroin. If you don't believe me, go visit a nursing home. The residents will all be thin or average wieght with maybe 1-2 obese residents who are confined to wheelchairs and are living a very poor quality of life. All the serious ice cream users die prior to 60. Or, they have strokes and live the rest of their lives institutionalized.
You have to ask yourself, "can society afford more sick people?" This is a tough question, because most of us are not exposed to sick people in our day to day lives. We walk down the street to work and we only see other people also walking to work. We don't see all the sick people because they are in the hospital hooked up to machines with nurses keeping them alive. We tend to walk around oblivious to the helath care problems because we only see people when they are up and functioning.
All I can add is people really don't like having catheters in their urethas because they can't make it to the washroom anymore. Although it is too late for them, if you ask them whether they would like smoking to be increased in society, they would likely say no. This is getting a bit OT, but patients complain about not being able to go home, even though they own a house, and they have 3 cars, and they have this and they have that. Well none of that matters when you need a hospital staff to keep you breathing. Nothing matters anymore when your oxygen saturation is too low and you require a long (maybe permanent) stay at a hospital. You can own all the houses you like, but it is all untouchable if you don't have working lungs.
It's a tough call. I think many people would love for marijuana to be legal, but those same people would eat their words when it cripples them 20 short years later. Bill Mahr once said, "can you really legistlate taste?" reffering to some drugs (nicotine) being legal and marijuana not. Well it's more complicated than that. Like I said, preventable illnesses are hogging up the resources. Maybe they could legalize it, but I think doctors and hosptials should be allowed to prioritize their patients with dark bias. Doctors should be able to say, "no, we can't treat your self inflicted lung disease...not until we treat all these kids with cancer first. Get in line please." Right now, it's pretty much the other way around.
Note: I live in Canada and hospital care and hospital drugs are free. But this is giving people a system to fall back on so they feel they can just abuse themselves all they want and the health care system will take care of them. Well, it does, but they are not miracle workers and it's mostly providing comfort, not cures.
