http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109.abstract Now that's more like it, a proper peer-reviewed article that's recent. The abstract says enough: Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents. tl;dr Cannabis makes you stupid
pnas is my favourite journal. Granted, that's because you can get away with saying penis. /useful contribution to thread.
not quite - tl;dr Cannabis makes you stupid if you smoke too much of it when your brain is still developing. Likewise, drinking alcohol, probably doesnt do wonders to a developing brain (I have no studies for that to hand to link to). That study, in my eyes, doesn't really say alot. It just says that cannabis can have a detrimental effect on a developing brain. But its a developing brain - go figure....
Yet cannabis is commonly smoked by adolescents, in other words, those with "developing brains". The study fairly conclusively, with a decent number of participants, shows that there is a higher risk of what is essentially brain damage if you start smoking cannabis as an adolescent, and that damage can never be repaired. The other point is, there are people in this thread arguing that cannabis is fine, it doesn't really hurt people, and in fact, is basically medicinal. Nuh uh. Equally, I wish people would stop bringing up the fact that we drink alcohol. Yes we do, and we shouldn't. However it is a logical fallacy to say that just because one is legal the other should be. Two wrongs don't make a right.
But if drugs were legalised then the age of use could be monitored and restricted more effectively. That's not to mention the benefit of all of the taxes we could get nor the fact that it would help enable a better provision for people seeking help if they have problem habits.
...because we do so well at stopping teenagers drinking, which is exactly the same model you're proposing. No. People will always find a way around any controls placed on a substance.
I disagree with an argument that posits the view that without controls less underaged people would drink. I believe the converse would be true.
Err, when was that argument even made, except by yourself? The point is, even with controls, underaged people get their hands on rather a lot of alcohol. You can't say that controls on drugs would achieve anything different.
From what I recall, usage goes down when certain substances are legalized. Let's do a quick sample. Would you try heroin if it were made legal? Probably not. I've always found that logic to be silly. I doubt there's a large group of people just waiting to try drugs, but won't purely out of legality. Not like it matters since the ones who really want to try them, find a way to do them anyways. Legalization with proper education is the way to go. I think that argument largely backs cannabis in the sense that if Alcohol, a drug that can kill, and kills thousands every year is legal, then why not cannabis? As far as we know it's a considerably safer drug so it feels rather silly to keep the safer one illegal. Well it is medicinal in ways that we know, and probably in ways that we don't. I get pretty nasty migraines on occasion. There is no legal drug that I can take that would get rid of them, except for cannabis. It literally takes the pain away the second I smoke it. Purely anecdotal but it still counts. Cannabis is no more of a gateway drug than caffeine. You know it really is a shame to see drugs ruin the lives of otherwise stable people, but remember that when it has happened, it happened whilst drugs were illegal. I would be willing to bet that those affected by such things have had poor drug education as it is.
I would think that the fallacy is not holding each drug up to the same scrutiny regardless of the outcome in terms of legalisation, regulation etc. Legalisation and classification seem less to do with measured and reasoned scientific understanding of physiological and sociological effects than tradition and cultural bias. If alcohol and tobacco are to be legal then at least cannabis should be legal too. If you want to ban cannabis and others then at the very least alcohol should also be banned. I see it, in a similar light to American drinking laws. If you're considered an adult at 18 then you should be allowed drink at 18. If you want the legal drinking age to be 21 then the age of being an adult should be moved to 21. This is not an argument for or against the legalisation of any drug but that the rules should be thought out properly and applied evenly across the board.
Indeed they will. So we are looking at a "lesser evil" solution. History of the Prohibitian in the USA has shown what happened when alcohol was outlawed. It did not stop people drinking; instead its production and sale shifted to the criminal sphere. Quality control was absent as methanol-contaminated drink hit the market and organised crime made a mint, while law enforcement spent money as lives on a futile battle. We see the same in the "War on drugs". In the Netherlands coffee shops have recently been prohibited from selling cannabis. Its sale has now shifted to local hard drug dealers, who not only have found a new source of income but conveniently can introduce their customers to some harder wares while they're at it. Not to mention that people who were previously enjoying a joint in the peaceful and safe social surroundings of a coffee shop are now on street corners in contact with unsavoury elements. You cannot control human nature; you have to manage it. The fact is that most people, including politicians, don't understand human nature and still like to think you can control people. You can't. Drug use and addiction (not the same thing) are even worse understood. I would say that anyone who develops an addiction is per definition not functional. It's not the drug; it's the person.
You're just proving my point, stating that if alcohol is legal than cannabis should be. Yes, alcohol causes car accidents, fights, and so on and so forth. You know what, it should be illegal, but in the case of alcohol you'd be fighting the inertia of thousands of years of alcohol consumption. You can't ban it simply due to the fact is is so entrenched. If alcohol was discovered today, I doubt it would be made for sale. Same goes for asprin - it wouldn't get its license as a painkiller, due to the fact that we now know it causes GI bleeding, and would be a more specialist drug, not one available at Tesco. It does have medicinal properties, but that's then ignoring the negative medical side of it - part of which is in the article I linked. Okay it stops your migrane, but do it long enough and you basically make yourself stupid. Great! Oh, and do you smoke it with tobacco, yet another of those substances that would be banned if found today due to the ridiculously harmful effect it has on your body? Medical drugs are all about the primary effect and then the side effects, and cannabis wouldn't exactly pass any rigorous trials. That said, drugs derived from cannabis are a possibility, but would then be regulated like any other medical drug. Blah blah gateway drug blah blah. Actually, where is your evidence for caffeine? I drink loads of tea and haven't smoked a joint in my entire life! Quick, lets trot out anecdotes and "I think" some more. I agree that the classification system is politics, and isn't equally applied - the changes around cannabis' classification over the years are ridiculous. There should be a fair and equal system, no dispute, and one based off the science. Problem is, this stuff has evolved over thousands of years, not all at once. Aaand then you fall over and make exactly the point I refuted, without any new ideas. Alcohol would be banned, except for the fact that we've seen exactly what happens when it is banned, and it wasn't good (as Nexxo points out with the US experiment with prohibition). I get your point, and agree, that if a "lesser evil" solution is the required one, then that is the way to go. However, my biggest issue remains the fact that most people in this thread seem to think cannabis is harmless and therefore this implementation of a lesser evil system should just happen overnight, damnit. It's not harmless, and if a government made it easily accessible, would that be a rather bad thing to be doing? (Would more people end up smoking cannabis as it became socially acceptable and you didn't have to go see Dodgy Dave for your supply?).
Save the drug use until your 40 Might help ease the pain, or remove the care of losing your youth ;-)
That does not appear to be the case in the Netherlands or Portugal. Of course accessibility is likely to make some impact on use, but people keep conflating use with addiction. They are not the same thing, and therefore not subject to the same influencing factors. The real question is: will making cannabis as accessible as alcohol lead to more addiction and more associated health problems? I would argue not, because those who are prone to addiction will find something else to get addicted to. We are quibbling over modulators, not moderators. Another example is sex: to those prone to addiction it can become one, too much of it (or rather, sharing too many genitals willy-nilly --pardon the pun) is bad for your health, and we wouldn't want people to indulge in it before they are adults. The US and the UK are extremely repressed about sex and have some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western world. Scandinavia and the Netherlands have some of the most open attitudes towards sex and the lowest teen pregnancy rates. It is never a good idea to try and protect people from harm by keeping them ignorant about it and by restricting their choices. People have to learn to choose wisely. Familiarity breeds contempt, whereas the forbidden fruit is always the tastiest.
One of the main things to understand, and the reason that so many people keep comparing to alcohol, is that when you look at it objectively, cannabis is less harmful than other legally available drugs (including alcohol). It's not entirely harm free, no, but there are worse things available. A quick trip round Cardiff city centre and the Heath Hospital A&E ward on a Friday/Saturday night will give you a good indication of just how much harm alcohol can cause. Count up how many people you see hospitalised, or passed out/falling over on the street, because they've drunk too much; then count the number of people you see in the same situation because of cannabis, ecstasy, magic mushrooms, etc. My main point, as well as my main source of frustration, is that the drug policy should be based on objective analysis and not purely political/cultural factors. Of course you have to look at the impact to society to fully understand this, but again this can be (and has been) done objectively. No, I won't pardon the pun because it made me giggle!
I would think refuted is a loose term for your previous statement. What I added was the fact that the classification and legalities of drugs are not based around knowledge and fact. If it were then my statements would hold true. I'm also not using legal alcohol as an excuse to legalise cannabis, rather if they were both put to the same unbiased scrutiny they would either both be banned or both be legalised. I'm almost certain there is no argument for making cannabis illegal that can not also be applied to making alcohol illegal.
Yet if we take cigarettes as an example, they are legal, but socially frowned upon (and taxed very very highly). People still smoke, many just because their friends are, or social reasons. Surely this can happen with legalised cannabis? Sure, we may not see addicts, and the users can keep it under control...but medically, even that usage is still harmful. So to answer the question you put forward, would cannabis being as accessible as alcohol lead to more addiction, then the answer is "maybe". However, in answer to would it lead to more health problems, then the answer is surely yes. If that is the case, how can we morally justify it? I do agree that our drugs education is terrible however. Again, where is the scientific evidence for all these statements? You don't need to bang on about all the drunks in A&E, I have far more experience of that world than you (I'll take that back if you work there, otherwise no). Alcohol is a bad thing in excess, and as I keep saying, if we discovered it today it wouldn't be legal either. Drugs (some of them anyway) might not make you have a fight in the middle of Cardiff's Queen Street but it'll have an impact on your brain long term. It's a different effect, sure, and one far less obvious than a brawl in a pub, but a medical impact none the less. The fact that the drug classification is horribly skewed is a reflection upon life. We can't ban alcohol, no matter how much we may want to, due to the public reaction that would probably burn the world down. Just because alcohol has this special protected status doesn't mean that we then translate that to everything else that is bad for us. Well, I'm actually agreeing with you in that if everything was equal, both cannabis and alcohol would be banned. However we live in the real world, where alcohol won't be banned any time soon, and to make the point for the umpteenth time, just because we allow one thing doesn't automatically mean another should be.
Would you be in favour of banning alcohol as a recreational drug? You are right though alcohol is too engrained in our culture and has too large an industry surrounding it to put a ban on. Well if one substance is allowed then why should another equally or less damaging (to society, health etc.) not be. It is my preference not to use cannabis recreationally, my recreational drugs of choice are caffeine and alcohol. However, I would not force my preference on others who would feel differently especially when there are other legal drugs such as alcohol readily available.
I posted it a few pages ago: There was a paper published recently regarding the effects on IQ of consumption of cannabis by teenagers, but I haven't read that one properly yet. It might be a well-designed/executed study, but one thing to bear in mind is that IQ is not always an accurate or reliable measurement of "intelligence" (if it's even possible to quantify the concept of "intelligence" in the first place). In any case, the headlines from that study primarily concern the effect on under 18's, and I don't think that anyone in their right mind would advocate legally selling cannabis to under 18's - it should at the very least be the same age requirement as alcohol, preferably higher. I know that everyone keeps coming back to alcohol, but continued heavy consumption of alcohol will also have a serious medical effect on the body; so will smoking tobacco. If you take opinion and "public feeling" out of it and look at the situation objectively (which is the point that I'm trying to make), it makes utterly no sense that more harmful substances are legal whereas less harmful ones are illegal. I'm not advocating a ban on alcohol, nor am I saying that cannabis or some other drug should be legal just because alcohol is. What I am saying is that current illegal drugs policy is broken and should be re-evaluated from an objective and scientific point of view. It's not just in Britain either; the "War on drugs" has had massive negative effects for many countries around the world, both in terms of financial cost and human lives. It is a position that, when considered objectively, seems to be based on moral indignity rather than practicality & efficacy.
