Scary Marijuana Bedtime Stories

Pete at DrugWar Rant listed many of the horror stories we have heard all our lives:

it’ll turn you into a bat/ax murderer/assassin, it’ll make black men look at a white woman twice, it’ll kill your brain cells, grow man-boobs, make you unmotivated, destroy your memory, cause cancer, make you get pregnant or shoot your best friend, fund terrorists, destroy your sperm, and a whole lot of other things.

How many times have you heard all the horror stories about weed’s affect on people? We’ve had almost a century of brainwashing, so I am not surprised that many people believe the bullshit told them by “those that know”: people like our Drug War Heroes and Czars, policemen who’s job depends upon it, and a whole host of prisons chock full of those evil doers who snuck a hit (Obama, you lucky bastard).

I wonder of all the horror stories you hear, how many of those people actually have tried the shit. I mean really!

I grew up in a home that railed against weed, while those railing were holding a scotch and water in their hand, 15 minutes after swallowing a Valium. Neither of my parents ever took a hit, or if so, never admitted it. My Dad died in ‘82, so we have not been able to discuss this while I was an adult, but my mom is still kickin’.

She can blather all the cliche sayings and fear tactics about it, she can browbeat a person virtually to death over the horrors of weed and its lead to failure and mental illness (which is hypocritically hilarious coming from a total fruitcake, herself), but she cannot give a single example of having tried or experienced it herself.

This is nothing new for these people and if I truly believed as they do, I wouldn’t touch it, either. But that fear is unfounded. Dangerously so, for it is keeping us from using a miracle drug that no Drug Company will ever be able to replace (Marinol is 100% synthetic THC, so for those of you who are worried about the Killer Bud killing you, it is far less potent than the drug maker’s stuff: so much so that medicinal users say it makes them sick and doesn’t work as well as regular consumption).

Look, I don’t use simple because I am broke and I get demotivated under heavy usage. It does affect my ability to interact with people while selling high tech equipment. I soundly and thoughtfully do not use the stuff with any regularity (unless around someone that has it socially) and when I do, I prefer to vaporize it, rather than smoke it (doesn’t harm the lungs at all).

But beyond me, I have a person in my household that HAS experimented with it in the past for her illness and we know for a fact that it is a far superior medication for her condition than any pharmaceutical made. Period. Hand’s down. Her meds average (without Insurance, which we are a breath away from losing) $1,000/month (our health insurance premium is $1,173/month, as a reference). And her meds have added almost 75 pounds to her small frame, she stays in a stupor, and cannot work and function like normal people. She has been moved from med to med to med and nothing really works.

Yet, here we have a natural substance that helps her far more than anything man made and she is so afraid to use it because of prison that she refuses. They are forcing her into this situation of helplessness when there is a freaking weed that I could grow that would help her more than anything else known to man.

Now, here is where this all congeals into a post: her condition is similar to one that the fear mongers have been saying will get cause her to get worse if using. And I have heard similar things my entire life about it. My point is that we have been fed a century’s worth of lies and innuendo about this plant and it is obvious that many believe it hands down due to that fear, without ever having any formal training or experience with it.

I wonder how well one would do learning to drive with a driving instructor that never drove before? Or only had information that was drummed up from 50 years ago?

Doesn’t it seem imperative to you that the people who have used this for medicinal purposes will know how it affects them, moreso than someone who has never even tried it or that has never conducted experimentation on the substance?

But it doesn’t stop there, we actually have to fight junk science that is purposefully formed to misinform us, in face of evidential personal experience that differs totally from their storyline, Pete continues:

Marijuana and Mental Illness? Not so fast.

Junk science exposed again.

It doesn’t matter how good the scientific research is… it is still junk science if it results in implied conclusions, particularly when they are publicized based on political opportunism rather than waiting to follow through to real proof.

The whole connection of marijuana to schizophrenia and psychosis that has been touted worldwide was clearly in that category – no proof of causality, evidence of self-medication, and lack of certainty regarding diagnosing the onset of the conditions. Yet, all sorts of “serious” people have accepted as certain that marijuana causes schizophrenia and psychosis.

Paul Armentano analyzes the situation:

Most notably perhaps, a team of researchers writing in the July 28, 2007 edition of the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet, boldly proclaimed that smoking cannabis could boost one’s risk of a psychotic episode by 40 percent or more. [...]Of course, there was a fatal flaw with The Lancet’s argument — one that, oddly enough, every single MSM outlet failed to mention. Empirical data did not support the investigators’ hypothesis that smoking marijuana was associated with increased rates of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses among the general public — a fact that even the authors begrudgingly admitted when they declared, “Projected trends for schizophrenia incidence have not paralleled trends in cannabis use over time.” [...]

Two years after The Lancet’s dire predictions, a team of researchers at the Keele University Medical School have once and for all put the ‘pot-and-mental illness’ claims to the test. [...]

“[T]he expected rise in diagnoses of schizophrenia and psychoses did not occur over a 10 year period. This study does not therefore support the specific causal link between cannabis use and incidence of psychotic disorders. … This concurs with other reports indicating that increases in population cannabis use have not been followed by increases in psychotic incidence.” [Abstract]