Myths and Urban Legends

What has been spread around by anti-drug organizations about dear sweet mary jane? I have a list with some common ones:

MARIJUANA IMPAIRS IMMUNE SYSTEM FUNCTIONING
False no proven reports! Most likely caused by more mouth to mouth contact through smoking utensils.

MARIJUANA HARMS SEXUAL MATURATION AND REPRODUCTION
False! Severe adverse consequences have also been produced in male laboratory animals, although only with extremely high daily THC doses.
More importantly, in both the human and animal laboratory studies, all observed changes were reversed once THC administration was halted.

MARIJUANA CAUSES BRAIN DAMAGE
The original basis of this claim was a report that, upon postmortem examinations, structural changes in several brain regions were found in two rhesus monkeys exposed to THC. Because these changes primarily involved the hippocampus, a cortical brain region known to play an important role in learning and memory, this finding suggested possible negative consequences for human marijuana users.
The damage was caused by lack of oxygen caused by the researchers suffocating them with more smoke than a heavy user would smoke in their lifetime.

MARIJUANA IS AN ADDICTIVE DRUG
People who continue using marijuana for several years or more are not necessarily "addicted" to it. Many regular users - including many daily users - consume marijuana in a way that does not interfere with other life activities, and may in some cases enhance them. No physical withdrawl.
Pyschological withdrawl is almost complete bullshit, its saying that doing something pleasurable more than once is an addiction, if this is true the whole world are slaves to psychological addiction.

MARIJUANA PRODUCES AN AMOTIVATIONAL SYNDROME
Large-scale studies of high school students have generally found no difference in grade-point averages between marijuana users and non-users. "Amotivational syndrome" is caused by being a fucking teenager, i have friends who are not users and the symptoms of this pot exclusive syndrome.

MARIJUANA IS A "GATEWAY" TO THE USE OF OTHER DRUGS
Over time, there has been no consistent relationship between the use patterns of various drugs.
As marijuana use increased in the 1960s and 1970s, heroin use declined. And, when marijuana use declined in the 1980s, heroin use remained fairly stable.
For the past 20 years, as marijuana use-rates fluctuated, the use of LSD hardly changed at all.
Cocaine use increased in the early 1980s as marijuana use was declining. During the late 1980s, both marijuana and cocaine declined. During the last few years, cocaine use has continued to decline as marijuana use has increased slightly.

DUTCH MARIJUANA POLICY HAS BEEN A FAILURE
Since liberalization, marijuana use has increased in the Netherlands, although rates remain similar to those in neighboring European countries, and are generally lower than those in the United States.
Marijuana lingers in the body like DDT
his is also true but misleading. Cannabinoids are fat
soluble as are innumerable nutrients and, yes, some poisons like
DDT. For example, the essential nutrient, Vitamin A, is fat
soluble but one never hears people who favor marijuana prohibition
making this comparison.

There are over a thousand chemicals in marijuana smoke
Again, true but misleading. The 31 August 1990 issue of the
magazine Science notes that of the over 800 volatile chemicals
present in roasted COFFEE, only 21 have actually been tested on
animals and 16 of these cause cancer in rodents. Yet, coffee
remains legal and is generally considered fairly safe.

You can easily die of a marijuana overdose
Animal tests have revealed that extremely high doses of
cannabinoids are needed to have lethal effect. This has led
scientists to conclude that the ratio of the amount of cannabinoids
necessary to get a person intoxicated (i.e., stoned) relative to
the amount necessary to kill them is 1 to 40,000. In other words,
to overdose, you would have to consume 40,000 times as much
marijuana as you needed to get stoned. In contrast, the ratio for
alcohol varies between 1 to 4 and 1 to 10. It is easy to see how
upwards of 5000 people die from alcohol overdoses every year and no
one EVER dies of marijuana overdoses.

Marijuana is a relatively new drug.
Marijuana has been used since ancient times . While field hands
and working people have often smoked the raw plant, aristocrats
historically prefer hashish made from the cured flowers of the
plant. It was not seen as a problem until a calculated disinformation
campaign was launched in the 1930s , and the first American
laws against using it were passed.

Marijuana Leads to Crime and/or Hard Drugs
The only crime most marijuana users commit is that they use
marijuana. And, while many people who abuse dangerous drugs also smoke
marijuana, the old "stepping stone" theory is now discredited, since
virtually all of them started out "using" legal drugs like sugar,
coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.

Marijuana Makes People Violent
In fact, Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry Anslinger once
told Congress just the opposite - that it leads to non-violence and
pacifism.

Marijuana is a serious crime and deserves more jail time
No independent government panel that has studied marijuana has ever
recommended jail for users

All quoted from erowid which has bibliographical evidence.
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis.shtml

Oh by the way take a look at a report on the effects on CANCER THC has
including LUNG CANCER!
http://www.ardpark.org/research/shrinktumors.htm
By the way im planning on doing this as a project in one of my classes...
in something...

 

i did something like that in health class last year about psychedelic drugs. Bad idea man, i got a zero for "promoting drug use" and i had to bitch to principal to pass health. Just start a school newsletter and put that shit in there, i did that to and it works alot better. Just make tons of copies and put them all around your school.

 

yeah... i go a 0/72 for a math project and we had to make graphs and whatnot on a documented subject. so i chose rates of marijuana usage gr6-12, and i got screwed even with the vice principal telling me it was an acceptable and interesting subject!

 

You could add that one of the reasons that MJ sometimes seems to be a "gateway drug" is that its prohibition forces users to find a dealer in order to get it. If they ever get curious about harder drugs, they have an easy time finding them, since they already have some knowledge of the drug market. If pot were legal, smokers would be able to get it from stores and wouldn't interact as much with dealers who can get them harder drugs. For example, the biggest connection that an underage drinker has to get is someone over 21 to buy them alcohol. Odds are that person can't them coke.

Also, on the subject of Dutch legalization: use of harder drugs has gone down since pot was decriminalized. See the above paragraph for a potential reason why. Also, legalization hasn't been a failure because marijuana use is up. No one legalizes a substance in the hope that its use will go down (in my opinion), they legalize it because the have found that the effects of its use are not severe enough to warrant criminalization and the resources that go into enforcing prohibition laws.

Nice list, it's always good to have responses to the (bad) arguments that DARE and the gov use.

 

Hardvard did a study in the last few years of people who smoke weed.
Some had been smoking daiily for over 20 years, some never did.
There was zero difference in memory retention between the 2 groups.

 

Thats great I always wonder if my memory would be sharper if I didn't smoke