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Marijuana kills cancer?

After watching this video, I joined Legalize It! here at AN. I'd seen programs about medical research on marijuana, but this convinced me. However, I am not in favor of the recreational approach, just making it legal to smoke weed if you have cancer. If it's a legitimate drug, it should be purified and standardized. Let's take out the psychoactive properties so patients aren't forced to endure them. I don't like the idea of people using spurious diagnoses as an excuse to get stoned.

Tags: legalize marijuana

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on January 21, 2012 at 4:18pm

Ruth, step into other people's shoes for a few moments.

Give some thought to the reasons that Americans may be the world's heaviest users of marijuana and the other drugs the government has made illegal.

List some of those reasons here and I will tell you why getting stoned can have positive consequences.

(If it matters, I don't use the stuff.)

Permalink Reply by Julie Carter on January 22, 2012 at 1:54am

I'm basically for legalizing everything. I'm no fan of addictive street drugs like heroin or meth, but it always drives me batty to think about how everything from marijuana to regular cigarettes are vilified, people are judged for using them and made into criminals so that our criminal justice system is just a ridiculous mess, etc....but alcohol is A-OK. Go ahead and get hammered every night....as long as you don't smoke a cigarette or smoke pot! FSM forbid! It's just a ridiculous double standard that bothers me, especially considering the fact that marijuana is so much safer than other drugs, especially alcohol.

Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on January 22, 2012 at 1:28pm

I recently saw a program about marijuana that claimed every culture excepting the Innuit has some favored mind altering substance it considers desirable, while it condemns others. The only reason the Innuit don't is a lack of drug producing plants in their harsh environment. Basically they said the reason we need them is that those substances help us tolerate pain.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on January 22, 2012 at 2:59pm

"Basically they said the reason we need them is that those substances help us tolerate pain."

Ruth, thank you for responding. You and I agree that Americans who use recreational drugs do so to help them tolerate pain.

My next question in this Socratic chain: What in America causes so much pain to so many of us that we use recreational drugs so heavily?

I don't want to keep you in the dark so I will preview my direction. A colonized people (i.e., Americans in the 1770s or Asian Indians in the 1940s) can throw off their colonizer (i.e., England) by defeating them militarily, or by increasing the cost of colonization to a level at which it's no longer profitable.

Permalink Reply by Clarence Dember on January 22, 2012 at 5:06pm