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Still amazed by the amount of people who site lung damage from using marijuana.
Lung damage can come from SMOKING marijuana (or anything since it's the smoke that irritates your lungs) but there 100 other ways to get high instead of smoking it.
Cigarettes cause cancer, blood clots, hesrt disease and other deadly health problems. No one has ever developed anything deadly from smoking MJ.
Cigarettes can also affect those around you through second and third hand smoke. I don't think I have ever heard of MJ causing issues through secondhand smoke.
Yeah but smoking is smoking. I don't think because we commonly associate lung cancer and other illnesses with smoking cigarettes that there's something uniquely harmful about tobacco that is sidestepped by using marijuana instead. I think it's probably just that one is legal and widely used and the other isn't. Plus, there are plenty of people who smoke 30+ years or better; I don't know that among pot users that people use heavily for the bulk of their lives. Unless of course they're addicts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by armory
How many old folks do you see carrying around green bottles because they have emphysema from doing bong hits?
Any chance that could be decades of cigarettes?
I don't have a link to one but studies have shown those who smoke pot and cigarettes have less chances of getting lung cancer.
Like I said, I think we know more about the effects of smoking cigarettes simply because it's legal. We have several generations of people who smoke cigarettes, so we have plenty of people to examine.
It is not "harmless", but neither is it as bad as what the anti-drug-types say.
1) You are filling your lungs with smoke (ash, various chemicals). This is never ever good in the long term.
2) While the psychoactive effects have proven to be mostly harmless to adults with moderate use, several studies have proven that it can be detrimental to brain development with extensive use. Especially in youth (pre age 25 or so) whose brains are still developing.
3) It is addictive, but only after regular use. It isn't as addictive as alcohol or nicotine, both of which are completely legal for adults. The psychoactive effects aren't as dangerous as alcohol; people who are stoned don't get violent in bars or kill people on the highway.
My goodness, you were doing ok until you said that last part I put in bold.
Stoners have caused many a fatal accident over the years.
Also not everyone reacts to dope in the same way, just like with alcohol. While the stereotypical image is of mellow people having the munchies, pot will make some become unpleasant/violent.
Many others are prone to reckless/irresponsible behavior which gets them into trouble. Heck one friend of mine was breaking into cars and eventually houses to afford his pot because he couldn't keep a job after becoming a stoner.
Another guy I knew was stoned and didn't recognize that this other guy wanted to be left alone, and was serious about it.
He kept trying to talk/reason with the guy until the guy lost it, flip him over his back and stomped on his face, breaking a bunch of facial bones.
All sorts of bad things can happen to people when they are in an altered state, regardless of the method they use to get that way.
When you get to be my age, you start to realize that people who used that substance became frozen in time. They stayed stuck in whatever era they were in, when they began smoking it. Same music. Same clothes. Same vocabulary. Apparently, a person's ability to learn and grow becomes stunted. After all, it IS described as being a STUPEFYING DRUG.
And I've seen occasional limited use turn wonderful people, over decades, into insufferable creeps. Marijuana Psychosis is creeping/insidious/subtle. Like sun damage, it is apparently cumulative, degenerative, and irreversible. Little bits, over time add up.
While under the influence, people think they're witty and brilliant and charming and "mellow". They are NOT. They're jerks. They're STUPID jerks.
These are things I've personally observed. But there is also a whole body of scientific research on the subject.
Personally, I don't think it's harmless. And this is coming from someone who used to smoke pot casually in undergrad, like it was nothing... most of my friends still smoke. And I can't help but roll my eyes when I hear some 14 year old say something like "It's just pot! Not a big deal". Yeah right.
For people who have underlying psychological issues (there are a lot of mentally disturbed people out there), pot can send someone over the deep end... this is not "reefer madness" hyperbole, but documented, scientific facts. It can increase anxiety, trigger schizophrenic or psychotic episodes in predisposed individuals, lower motivation, etc. I have a mild anxiety problem but whenever I smoked it was magnified x100 and for days after I would feel "off".
I also don't buy that it is safer to drive on it than alcohol. Many people find it difficult to stay in the present moment when they are high. I agree that you are unlikely to get violent or belligerent on it as with alcohol, but I think the issue lies more with your perception and relationship to reality. I definitely think it needs to be used with care.
It is not "harmless", but neither is it as bad as what the anti-drug-types say.
1) You are filling your lungs with smoke (ash, various chemicals). This is never ever good in the long term.
2) While the psychoactive effects have proven to be mostly harmless to adults with moderate use, several studies have proven that it can be detrimental to brain development with extensive use. Especially in youth (pre age 25 or so) whose brains are still developing.
3) It is addictive, but only after regular use. It isn't as addictive as alcohol or nicotine, both of which are completely legal for adults. The psychoactive effects aren't as dangerous as alcohol; people who are stoned don't get violent in bars or kill people on the highway.
The stat's don't lie as marijuana death related car crashes have gone up over 100% since 2014 and that's from thdenverchannel.com
Let's face the reality that marijuana does impair oneself. It may be in a good way for one and totally different for another. Either way it impairs your brain.
I support marijuana as a drug to help people in pain and other conditions where it shows true benefit.
I also find it to be a drug that does less damage on your body than other legal things like alcohol and some
prescriptions..never mind the illegal like heroin, meth, cocaine and bath salts which r easily obtainable.
In the end it's not harmless as it's a gateway drug to harder ones and impairs or changes ur brain functions which can lead to more deaths on the road.
I'm all for the legalization at the state level but have a hard time with driving under the influence part. How can that be solved? If your sitting in your home at night and want to take a toke and chill..i see no harm in that. And let the states rake in the tax dollars as long as those dollars aren't for a new generation of pot addicts that need rehab on the states dime.
A true quagmire.
Time will tell how this one plays out but do believe Americans have the right to take a toke at night and chill..or help with a medical condition. Personally i wouldn't want to work with someone who is stoned during the day just for the fun of it.
I'm sure the attorneys will get it figured out in the next 5 years after some lawsuits are filed!
I hear all the time that its not bad for you and you cant get any diseases or anything. But i want to hear any negative input on the subject. Or positive
Positive: Compare pot with the "food" and "drugs" in U.S.A. "Food" has hormones and many other things. And "drugs" have MANY side effects. So compare and you will see that pot sounds very harm less.
Negative: Pot is usually smoked. It could be eaten, but I guess smoking it or inhaling it is much more effective. Too much smoke can be very bad. It can cause dam age to lungs and heart and brain. Even cancer.
But ... at the same time, there is a cancer risk for our "food" and "drugs" too.
I do not recommend driving while High any more than driving while Drunk. Both are dangerous to do. But perhaps soon there will be a complete over turn on the ban of pot. Decades and Decades ago they lifted the ban on alcohol. Many believe alcohol has benefits, but there is such a thing as too much.
I wonder if it could help tame violent criminals. People who go around robbing convenience stores with guns, raping women they never met before, attacking strangers violently enough to put them in the hospital just for the fun of it, starting violent fights over perceived minor insults, etc. What would happen if people like that had free and easy access to as much marijuana as they wanted? Maybe a community MJ center, where people could go to smoke it any time they wanted to, as much as they wanted? Could it reduce their violent crime significantly enough to make their communities better places to live?
OTOH, we could just build some huge, very spartan, very cheap prisons in the desert, and lock such people away for life. That might tame them even better. Why should their prisons have air conditioning, 3 square meals per day, and nothing for the prisoners to do but just relax? I never understood why prisons were so expensive. Why not use more iron bars on the cells and complexes, to not need so many guards? Is iron expensive? Why not put the prisoners in chain gangs that do useful work to make the prison pay for itself?
Comparing the above two solutions to violent crime, which would make you feel better? The marijuana would be perceived as a reward for being a violent criminal. It's only common sense to not reward such behavior. But maybe some kind of combination of extreme punishment and behavior modification with marijuana and/or other drugs. With the punishment being extreme enough to satisfy those who would not want to reward them, and the behavior modification being cost effective enough to be a real solution in combination with the extreme punishment.
But, instead, we get a borderline incompetent justice system, full of bureaucracy and waste, spending most of its time teaching prisoners to be even more violent than they were before, then turning them loose to practice their violence on people who don't have any training against it.
Not necessarily taming violent criminals, but the crime rate has dropped in Denver. Both violent and non-violent. The prevailing thought is that because the police are no longer tied up in various methods of marijuana prosecution, their resources have been able to be applied elsewhere thus leading to drop in crime.
Alcohol, by any objective standard, is much worse than THC. Each year, 88K deaths in the USA are directly traceable to alcohol (not just injury, but also cancer, cardiovascular diseases and liver cirrhosis).
Marijuana related deaths not tied to the legal status of the drug? Two.
Changing the law is opposed in part by the various businesses which stand to lose millions if MJ/THC is legalized, not the least of which are the alcoholic beverage industry and the illegal marijuana industry.
And what many people don't understand is that there is such a thing as marijuana that doesn't get you high. Most in the country have never heard of CBDs (the active ingredient when many medicinal benefits are discussed), nor do they realize that it's possible to cultivate a strain high in CBDs with no THC. They think, "Wow, that 8 year old kid with cancer is getting high?!?! What an outrage!"
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Quite harmful
Be Careful:
and "drugs" 
And "drugs" have MANY side effects. 
