PEACE - POT FOR PEACE, PEACE FOR POT

The Actual Risks involved in Smoking Cannabis?

1. Current research on brain development suggests that the amygdala, or emotional response centre, kicks in at puberty, while the frontal cortex, where adult decisions are made, is not fully developed until the mid twenties. Within days of this study being released, an anti-cannabis researcher announced that cannabis affects brain development. The timing makes me suspicious, but until there is some believable research, it is not unreasonable to assume there could be some truth in this. It is therefore my advice not to experiment with intoxicants until you are at least over eighteen, because they all have this potential to limit personal and/or physical growth.

2. Being arrested, carried away as a criminal, spending the night or weekend in a watch-house or police cells, coming into contact with dangerous people with poor social skills, coming up before a magistrate in the morning, and either getting bail or being remanded in custody until the case is heard, and having a criminal conviction recorded against your name for the rest of your life, limiting your employment opportunities. As you pass through the justice system you will feel as though you have been transported back a hundred years to a system where time stands still. If you enter the prisons system, you may realise that this is the hub of criminal enterprise, and a great opportunity for networking, recruiting, and planning by those present. Some enterprises are managed from prison. The prison system has become an integral part of the criminal system.

3. Any smoke inhaled into the lungs causes some damage. Some people’s lungs are more prone to this damage than others. The fine mucous sweeping hairs get stunted with smoke damage, and the ability to remove excess mucous is reduced, resulting in the body resorting to coughing to make up for this. This is a signal to stop or cut down on the smoking to let the lungs recover, or at least keep up. Smoking cannabis with tobacco might also increase your chances of getting lung cancer. Cannabis on its own appears to reduce the risk of lung cancer.

4. If you have a latent mental disorder (and how would you know?) cannabis can expose that, but it does not cause madness in itself. There are also some mental conditions where pot is not a good thing, and some where it is. If you know you have a specific disorder ask a trusted psychiatrist whether cannabis is appropriate for your condition or not, and, if you mistrust the answer, do a Google search on the web for your condition and cannabis together, to get a second opinion or more. If you are a seriously disordered person you will probably ignore any sort of advice, on any topic.

5. You may meet serious criminals. While this might sound cool to someone without the experience, it is not. Situations can easily develop where you have little control of the outcomes. You can be beaten, stood over, knifed, shot, robbed, or invaded, and you have little standing as a witness if you are a drug user. Furthermore, if you do give the police information serious enough to warrant protection, that protection usually evaporates after the case is heard, or if you are declared an unreliable witness. You are then an endangered species, fair game to any mate of the man you helped prosecute. Serious criminals can be very charismatic and charming, but they can also do things that would never occur to you. In you own infatuation or quest for excitement you may do things you would never otherwise consider, and possibly live to regret. If you have no regard for personal safety, you will ignore this warning.

6. People who know nothing about the differences between drugs will discriminate against you on the simple basis that you “use a drug”.

7. Your family and/or existing friends, depending on their beliefs, may or may not become alienated from you, or you from them.

8. You may come into contact with other less benign drugs, and experiment with them in the false belief that all official drug information is now suspect. This is collateral damage from the hysterically false anti cannabis propaganda machine. The free market does not distinguish between safe and unsafe products. Be warned that the powdered drugs are dangerous, and there is nothing so special about you that will overcome “the desire that consumes”.

9. You may become addicted to tobacco if you are not a cigarette smoker yet mix tobacco with pot or hash to smoke. People often conveniently “forget” this, and say they have a pot addiction. Pot can be just another convenient scapegoat for personal failings.

10. If you discover that cannabis provides remission, amelioration or distraction from an intractable malady you may be prosecuted and fined or jailed for growing or using it. Self medication has been officially frowned upon for seventy years now.

11. Any of the above may make you disillusioned with society for hysterically stonewalling cannabis on principle without any honest desire to examine the evidence, little of which is left standing after genuine evaluation.

12. You may be verbally abused. Cannabis is an emotional issue, and the emotions aroused make rational debate all but impossible. Humanity may never recover from all the lurid scare stories put about by Anslinger in the thirties to scare the individual American states into passing the uniform drug laws he wanted, but were slow to be adopted. It worked spectacularly. The anti cannabis position masquerades as holy writ, and will brook no debate. This now means you will be at risk of being engaged in pointless argument with closed minds that see laws or health outcomes as absolutes, while the media will constantly dredge up old rubbish and trot it out as something new to increase sales or ratings and feed hysteria in the process.

13. You may also have the misfortune to be beaten, robbed, mugged, injured, wounded, or ripped off buying pot from strangers or chance acquaintances.

14. One study, which rings true, says normal driving ability is not impaired, but the ability to negotiate a slalom course of orange witch’s hats is impaired. Most people drive more carefully when stoned, and may get abused and tooted at by other motorists for being too timid at intersections, etc.

15. You may or may not become obsessed with something obscure or religious or both e.g. Buddhism, pacifism, Christianity, model building, bug collecting, growing the best marijuana, or any of the other singular obsessive compulsive activities humans are prone to. This aspect can also be characterised as one smoke changing one's life direction or focus to something akin to a holy mission.