Recently there has been a lot of discussion over the merits of medical marijuana, particularly because of the unnecessarily large numbers of dispensaries in the downtown Denver area.
After the Colorado Justice Department announced earlier this year that it would no longer be actively prosecuting medical marijuana growers, the “legal” growers began cropping up in staggering numbers—protected under the vaguely worded 20th Amendment to the Colorado state constitution.
Claims have been made about the positive health benefits such as marijuana’s natural ability to ease pain and increase appetite, but such assertions are usually presented without considering the far more detrimental aspects of the THC chemical and the general effect of legal marijuana products on the US economy and hard drug consumption. These claims must be corrected.
The first, and most common, argument for the legalization of medical marijuana centers around the health benefits.
These alleged benefits carried the majority vote to legalize medical marijuana dispensaries. While this vote was most likely an attempt to show mercy help those with chronic pain or terminal illnesses, the unintended repercussions of such an action have outweighed the benefits of the dispensaries.
Let’s look at the facts: according to an article written by Walt Crocker for Associated Content last August, during the month of July 2009 there were 2000 new registered medical marijuana users to add to a state-wide total of over 9000. These new patients were also overwhelmingly adolescents.
This fact is trivial until one considers the the maladies that medical marijuana is used to treat, such as glaucoma and arthritis.
Both of these conditions are overwhelmingly predominant in elderly people. Therefore, it does not make sense that the majority of licensed medical marijuana users are adolescents, unless there is another motivation for obtaining such a license.
Furthermore, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have advocated the use of the prescription drug Marinol for those patients actually needing the health benefits of cannabis.
It is a fact that smoking is an ineffective way of administering medications because it is difficult to achieve correct dosages and therefore there are no FDA approved medications that are smoked.
According to the DEA, smoked marijuana has over 400 different chemicals, including the carcinogens found in tobacco, as well as four times the tar found in a typical tobacco cigarette. These cancer-causing chemicals can lead to other and more serious health problems than those medical marijuana claims to aid.
Marijuana has also been proven as a “gateway” drug—meaning that marijuana can be linked to harder drugs in around 20 percent of users.
This fact was proven by the 1999 study of the ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring) subjects.
In this study, over 40,000 arrestees across America were tested for usage of marijuana and harder drugs such as cocaine. Marijuana was the highest detected drug in all categories of arrestees except for amongst older women, where cocaine was the most frequent.
Of those who tested positive for marijuana, 20 percent of these also tested positively for harder drugs. This study not only links marijuana to other drugs, but also to crime in general.
Possible health benefits aside, the pragmatism of legalized medical marijuana has been tested in California and Alaska, and in both of these places the loopholes in the system have become the very system itself.
In California, the difficulty of defining a legal medical marijuana grower and a recreational grower has become nearly impossible to the point where nearly anyone can grow, traffic and smoke marijuana.
The Alaskan Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that possession of marijuana in one’s home was not a violation of the Alaskan state constitution and therefore was legal. The Alaskan citizens then voted in 1990 to recriminalize the drug after a 1988 survey showed that Alaskan juveniles smoked twice the national average of marijuana for their age group.
These studies show that even if legalization of marijuana in any form may seem like a good idea, the reality of the issue is that kids want to get high and they will go through any available loop-holes to achieve this.
The only tried-and-true way of preventing illegal consumption across the board is the minimizing of all possibilities of loopholes, corruption and indiscretion.
Since this cannot be done realistically, medical marijuana is more of a menace than a miracle.