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Lothar121

Warning Marijuana Is 'Not A Soft Drug'
The Age | 08/01/2006

Marijuana is not a soft drug and Australians should be aware of how dangerous it can be, an anti-drug campaigner says.

Drug Free Australia chairman Craig Thompson is urging the community, young people in particular, to change their thinking about cannabis because of its serious effects on health.

"The road fatalities caused by cannabis-intoxicated drivers, links to cannabis and psychosis, birth defects and greater potency of the drug are just a few issues of enormous concern," Mr Thompson said.

He says cannabis continues to be accepted as a low-risk, non-addictive drug, but this is not the case.

"There's recognition among experts that marijuana is an addictive drug now, but that's not widely known," Mr Thompson says.

"People think it's kind of a soft drug that you can have a bit of a nibble at without too many consequences, but treatment agencies and even addicts that I've spoken to say that it's cannabis that's hardest to get off."

He said both national and international studies have found that drivers intoxicated with cannabis pose a high risk of road accidents, while medical practitioners have confirmed the drug's use is linked to psychosis.

"The link between cannabis use and birth defects is one of the most horrendous issues of all," Mr Thompson said.

"Medical practitioners (are warned) about health risks such as impairment of foetal brain development, relative prematurity, smaller length and head circumference, malformations, higher rate of miscarriage and peri-natal death."

Mr Thompson also said marijuana had been gaining in potency over the past 20 years.

"There is definite evidence of stronger plants in more recent times," he said.

 

Bl4ck3n3D

Stronger bud means you don't have to inhale as much... so in reality it's healthier? It looks like the only argument this guy has is intoxicated driving, everything else is bullshit.

Hansje

Ditto on Bl4ck3n3d's sentiments. The only thing this guy's got is the statistics on people who've had accidents while under the influence of weed. There was a study done in Jamaica on how cannabis use affects pregnant women and the babies, and no alarms arose out of it, as this guy would have you believe. I guess Jamaica must be an island full of mentally handicapped people by his reckoning. If you were just walking under the influence of weed, there would be nothing left to his argument about accidents. The studies on psychosis have been disputed. If not, then aren't the 20 some million people or more in the U.S. who have used weed or still use weed psychotics? I guess they all work for the U.S. Postal Service, huh? I guess this guy and his cronies consider alcohol to be a soft drug if they say marijuana is not a soft drug. This guy would have you believe that the potency of marijuana is continually rising. No so, it has it's limits, which are around 20% THC at the high end of connoisseur growing conditions, and most strains are not that high. One would just need less to achieve the same high, and thus reduce the tar inhaled if smoked and not vaporized. I suppose reduced inhalation of tar is a bad thing in his book. Hey buddy, you can't have it all; everything has its drawbacks, so you have to do a positive-negative analysis and decide on the trade-offs.

No intelligent person who takes the time to look into the Aussie's arguments will be convinced by them. Enough Scare Tactics! What we need are Fair Tactics! Thompson seems to have spent too much time lost in the Australian bush, and has seen things that aren't really there. Mr. Thompson, it's your Fata Morgana, so please keep it to yourself and don't expect anyone else to believe it.

You know, I love the series on illegal drugs that the History Channel shows. I would also like to see a series that debunks the pseudo-scientific studies that have been done on marijuana, like the one where the monkeys wearing gasmasks died from smoking marijuana, basically because they were asphyxiated and not from the effects of marijuana itself. Show the positive results that can be concluded from the Jamaican study. Expose all the pseudo-science. Expose the DEA, NIDA, NIH, WHO, and any other organisation or person for defrauding taxpayers with disinformation on this issue on a worldwide scale. Essentially go through Jack Herer's book The Emperor Has No Clothes, plus all the other pseudo-scientific studies that need to be debunked. Great Deceivers and Liars of Biblical Magnitude Need to Be Taken Down!