Too bad Roker is gone, he would love these...

[palerider]

Study Says Pot Smoking Harms Lungs

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/249245/Study_Says_Pot_Smoking_Harms_Lungs

Impact On Lungs Of One Cannabis Joint Equal To Up To Five Cigarettes

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070731085550.htm

Emotional Intelligence And The Use Of Tobacco And Cannabis

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071102091207.htm

 

[bewitched]

is Roker an anti-smoker or something?
of course smoking is bad, pot, ciggies, cloves, cigars, banana peels...
and there's indoor pollution that is bad too. the fibers from carpet, new car smell, toxins from plastics cooked in the microwave... poor lungs hardly have a chance these days.

 

[9sublime]

What have those studies taught use? Excessive use of marijuana has potentially serious health effects. I know that, I don't challange that. If I want to smoke it why should the government stop me? I like the occassional smoke and if I have to go to the dealer to get I suppose thats the way it'll have to be until someone sees enough sense to legalise it.

If its drink - thats fine - "its a nice taxable drug" and the NHS can take in every alcoholic who needs therapy and a new liver or a binge drinker who needs their stomach pumped because thats a consequence the government seems willing to pay for. But new lungs? Oh no, theres obviously a world of difference between those two.

 

[heyjude]

If health were the only consideration, pot would be legal and alcohol illegal. Alcohol kills thousands, destroys the lives of families and friends, kills people who have the misfortune to share the road with drunks, and is a drug that causes people to become violent.

I don't believe that a ban on alcohol would work though. One of the earliest inventions of man was beer and wine. For all I know, after a hard day of hunting, cave men may have gotten tanked. But the government could mount a campaign to make alcohol an inappropiate substance. And leave the people who use relatively harmless substances alone. FYI, I indulge in neither.

 

[vyo476]

If health were the only consideration, pot would be legal and alcohol illegal. Alcohol kills thousands, destroys the lives of families and friends, kills people who have the misfortune to share the road with drunks, and is a drug that causes people to become violent.

I don't believe that a ban on alcohol would work though. One of the earliest inventions of man was beer and wine. For all I know, after a hard day of hunting, cave men may have gotten tanked. But the government could mount a campaign to make alcohol an inappropiate substance. And leave the people who use relatively harmless substances alone. FYI, I indulge in neither.

Government-enforced prohibition was one of the worst policies our country has ever attempted to maintain. Americans and beer have deep, old cultural ties - going back to the original settling of America, where hordes of German immigrants brought the relatively simple process of distilling beer with them. Our abundance of unexploited natural resources and status as the only hub of "civilization" in the New World early on helped create a huge alcohol trade without which the American economy might never have evolved into an industrial-trade system.

Marijuana doesn't have anywhere near the kinds of cultural roots alcohol does, and in typical fashion we treat with fear that which we don't know and embrace. Irrational fear has been attributed to plenty of substances and still is to this day - aside from marijuana, absynthe comes to mind.

Prohibition of alcohol worked poorly because so many people wanted it. Prohibition of marijuana works only tenuously (and then, not exactly "well") because, while the crowds are thinner than the alcohol-drinking bunch, there are still a lot of people out there who want it. The crowds that clamored for the end of Prohibition in the teens, 20s, and 30s didn't give a damn about health-related problems; why should the present-day cannabis crowd?