Please stop calling it "Medical Marijuana"

DoomyMcDoom

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I live in Victoria, BC, Canada, pot is almost as common here as tobacco depending what neighbourhoods you're in, hell most apartment buildings have a few hallways that smell faintly of marajuana, police have pretty much given up enforcement for posession, only really confiscate it if you got a bunch on you, they go after grow ops, because that's the business end and you can enforce that without putting thousands of people in prison.

About half my friends smoke it, and hell I do periodically, and lemme tell you, I've worked in environments in which i was surrounded by drug users of all sorts, and when I say pot should be legal medical or not, well it's because out of all the drug users I've come across, I've NEVER met a stoner who wasn't friendly or at least nonviolent in their attitude while in public, drunks crackheads and meth users... well not so much y'know... quite the opposite.

Just saying convenience stores would get hella rich, and you'd have less violent crime if weed was cheap and legal and readily available.

As far as medical use, it acts as a pain killer muscle relaxant appetite booster, and just generally helps people get their mind off their problems for awhile... I've known people with cancer that wouldn have died without pot, like starved and had no will to live and no energy to fight it.
People who struggle with chronic pain who have a resistance to all sorts of over the counter pain killers, have found it helps a lot.

I say just legalize the shit all out, medical or not, it's not nearly as destructive as booze when it comes to violent acts while under the influence, and it can help people who need a bit of relief. I mean sure you would hafta have warnings about some of the side effects of pot use like short term memory loss, and let people know that as a psychoactive drug, it can mess with your head, and affects different people differently... But I say why waste money enforcing all the drug prohibition laws on the most common and least harmful drug on the streets...Put the money saved from the enforcement costs, and the taxes on the stuff that would undoubtedly be huge proffit government-side, to work on healthcare and education that seems to be the first target for cuts in like every government.
 

iseko

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GrandmaFunk said:
iseko said:
Marijuana can induce psychosis. Several studies have been performed around this topic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22213786

The link goes to one of these studies.Alcohol can do the same in a sense but only if you abuse it a long time (alcoholic -> korsakov syndrome). Some people can get psychosis from 1 puff of marijuana. The percentage of people in the population is larger then you think. So no I don't think they should legalise it.
Apparently you totally misunderstood both the context and findings of that study. As well as what's meant by the use of the term "psychosis", which in this cases is used to mean an altered state of mind, which may include hallucinations.

this state of psychosis is temporary and is basically a scientific way of describing "getting high".
"Acute psychosis followed by increased risk of chronic schyzophrenia." The getting 'high' bit is just a part of it. But you are right that it is not the best example. Still I am 100% positive that you can become psychotic when doing marijuana.

1) My dad is a psychiatrist and works for a institution for the mentally ill. He works with people who became mentally ill from drugs.
2) My aunt is also a person who has this affliction thanks to marijuana.

But don't take my word for it. I'm too lazy to actually start looking up articles again (I did it once already for a paper) and research data for the sake of an internet discussion. I can only suggest that you look it up yourself and draw up your own conclusion :).
 

GrandmaFunk

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iseko said:
Still I am 100% positive that you can become psychotic when doing marijuana.

1) My dad is a psychiatrist and works for a institution for the mentally ill. He works with people who became mentally ill from drugs.
2) My aunt is also a person who has this affliction thanks to marijuana.
anecdotal evidence is awesome!

here's mine: I've met hundreds of pot smokers who were not mentally ill.

I've also met a few that were, but whose conditions not only predated their drug use, but were also mitigated by it.

Look, I'm not trying to say it doesn't happen, but it IS an extremely rare occurrence and is almost always due to a pre-existing predisposition.
 

evilneko

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Elmoth said:
evilneko said:
Well that fell apart fairly quickly, didn't it.

You should edit your OP to make your point without making incorrect claims about terminology.
Why don't you stop barging into threads and in no way help the discussion.

OT: I'd say the best way to handle marijuana is to make it legal with some restrictions, like we have here in the netherlands. Sometimes I even wonder how hard drugs like cocaine and herione and the like would be off if they'd be restricted in their usage as per their dangerousness, but still legal. I don't know much about that though. Also, I would discourage smoking it, that's still pretty unhealthy. It's too bad that other methods are less known and harder to come by.
I'm sorry you can't see the utility of editing the OP to make his point without going off on a flamebait-prone tangent.
 

iseko

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GrandmaFunk said:
iseko said:
Still I am 100% positive that you can become psychotic when doing marijuana.

1) My dad is a psychiatrist and works for a institution for the mentally ill. He works with people who became mentally ill from drugs.
2) My aunt is also a person who has this affliction thanks to marijuana.
anecdotal evidence is awesome!

here's mine: I've met hundreds of pot smokers who were not mentally ill.

I've also met a few that were, but whose conditions not only predated their drug use, but were also mitigated by it.

Look, I'm not trying to say it doesn't happen, but it IS an extremely rare occurrence and is almost always due to a pre-existing predisposition.
As you wish. If that is your opinion then that is fine. However I do not appreciate the sarcasm. No need for it. And don't tell me anecdotal evidence is worth nothing when you yourself make a statement without any proof: "it IS an extremely rare occurrence and is almost always due to a pre-existing predisposition."

Your statement is somewhat true I suppose. If I remember correctly only 5% of the population would become psychotic. They need a genetic predisposition. But that doesn't translate to: they would have become psychotic anyway without the marijuana. That bit is not true.

Any ways. Believe me or don't believe me. It doesn't matter to me. And I genuinely hope neither you or anyone in your family will have this affliction (not meant sarcastically). But I won't reply anymore,

Cheers
 

isometry

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Cannabis has been used as medicine for 1000s of years, the OP is just blatantly ignorant, or trolling.

iseko said:
Marijuana can induce psychosis. Several studies have been performed around this topic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22213786

The link goes to one of these studies. Alcohol can do the same in a sense but only if you abuse it a long time (alcoholic -> korsakov syndrome). Some people can get psychosis from 1 puff of marijuana. The percentage of people in the population is larger then you think. So no I don't think they should legalise it.
You are exaggerating the danger, the article says "chronic use may increase the risk of schizophrenia", nowhere in the article does it say "some people can get psychosis from 1 puff." The only place that happens is in the 1930s propaganda film "Reefer Madness", which wasn't based on reality.

Also it's funny that you would compare a safe medicine like cannabis to a dangerous poison like alcohol. Alcohol can cause brain damage, liver damage, depression, anxiety, suicide, fetus damage, and overdose (the only drug with a higher ratio of threshold dose to over dose is heroin, meaning alcohol is next to heroin as the easiest drug to OD on). That's why alcohol is a poison and cannabis is a medicine.
 

IzisviAziria

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Are you sure it's just a catchphrase? How is medical Vicodin any different? They seem like pretty similar things to me.
 

him over there

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Essentially as you said it is a cure for nothing but has medical purposes in the way of a pain killer and it also can restore things like appetites in chemo-patients.

I whole heartedly agree with the notion that saying it has medical uses is why it should be legal though. It's seriously pathetic and ignorant that saying it has medicinal uses means it should be recreationally legal. Though it should be legal. Marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol strictly speaking.(well it is but not significantly) It won't kill you, but it will fuck your life up. You know how many people die of alcohol poisoning? not as many as you may think. Far more die of unforeseen circumstances because their judgement was impaired. It is very much the same for Weed.

Will it be straight up legalized whether people want it or it's medicinal or whatever? probably not. Mostly because the government has no form of tax or regulations in place to make any sort of tax revenue of the market. Do you really think smoking, which kills way more people than alcohol and pot would still be legal if the industry didn't make huge amounts of tax money for the government?
 

IzisviAziria

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I'm gonna eat some words here. I'm gonna drop part of the argument, for the sake of the rest of it. I'll stop fighting medicine vs drug vs painkiller. Will even go so far as to admit defeat and say I was wrong. I have a biased opinion on medicine because of how it is treated in the United States (an industry, rather than a method of healing).

I'm going to eat those words because I don't think they invalidate my point. I could have made the same point without making (rather vehemently) some of my rather less intelligent statements. So I'll do so.

Boiling it down, I want people to stop using medical marijuana as a loophole. Its negative effect is minimal, certainly less so than alcohol and poses little threat when used responsibly. The only rationale against legalization is, as previously stated, political. A terrible reason and sort of indicative of the American political system as a whole. It should be legal and available to adults who supposedly live in a free society and I don't think that finding loopholes to use it makes that problem better.
 

Chewster

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IzisviAziria said:
there are an insanely high number of people that have green cards that have no real need of it. getting one is as simple as telling the right doctor you have back pain, or that you can't sleep at night. What started out as an avenue for people that need to to get it has turned into a loophole the general populace uses to circumvent the law.
Even if there actually were an "insanely high" number of people getting green cards under false pretenses, so what? Are these innumerable people making you smoke it too? The fuck do you care?

This isn't an issue of the wrong drug, but the wrong people doling out said drug. Maybe you should consider that avenue of reasoning, instead of getting all worked up that people like to differentiate between street drugs, and ones prescribed for medical issues.

The issue should be separate. It's not. It has bled over and now medicinal use is skewed. If you read my post, I completely legitimized people that use it as part of a regimen for chemotherapy, or other REAL problems that require use of a painkiller. But for every one person that uses it medically in a legitimate way, there are 15 guys that lied to a doctor about back pain so that they could smoke or acquire weed without being afraid of the police.
Again, so what? Pot is a fairly benign drug overall and people who want to smoke it are likely going to, regardless of the law. At least this way they are not giving their cash to potential criminal organizations or clogging up the justice system on the off chance they get caught.

I'd be more worried about people getting hooked on prescription painkillers or other strong opiates.