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Posted on Jan 13, 2017
Landmark marijuana study links drug to schizophrenia and heart attacks
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Amazing super dru or super scam? States spent billions fighting smoking because it led to cancer and other diseases. Now they want tax revenue so are open to legalized Marijuana.
Landmark marijuana study links drug to schizophrenia and heart attacks
Posted from dailymail.co.uk
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Posted 8 y ago
Responses: 5
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I want to know if smoking is still bad for us or not. Hollywood is reducing smoking in movies so as not to influence kids but new actors push to smoke pot...
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Legalize it, collect the money from taxes and stop sending people to jail for a drug that causes less harm that alcohol.
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Sgt Bob Leonard
LTC Trent Klug - You said, "Nobody is going to jail for marijuana possession."
That depends on a lot of variables. The first one is, who made the arrest? If you're arrested by State or Local Authorities in a State with relaxed laws on possession, you might receive only a fine. If you're arrested by Federal Authorities, mj is still (erroneously) classified a Category 1 drug, and you can do hard time in a Federal facility.
You said, "This is the number (one) crop of the cartels and they are killing people over it and for it every day."
Only in those locales where it's still illegal. When you or someone you know can grow your own, there's no more market for the 'cartels'. Much of the money that is spent to keep mj illegal is from the cartels. Once legalized, they lose their market.
You said one State is considering repealing mj laws because of increased traffic accidents and fatalties.
Can you be more specific? There was talk of that in Washington State not long ago, but it was pointed out that the data used was incomplete and improperly applied.
For example, there is no blood or urine test that can be used to correlate mj use with impairment. A person can test "positive" for mj for weeks after using it, even though there is absolutely no impairment. With alcohol, a .08 or higher blood alcohol concentration is usually the the legal threshold for impairment. That can be measured with a breathalyzer at the scene.
That depends on a lot of variables. The first one is, who made the arrest? If you're arrested by State or Local Authorities in a State with relaxed laws on possession, you might receive only a fine. If you're arrested by Federal Authorities, mj is still (erroneously) classified a Category 1 drug, and you can do hard time in a Federal facility.
You said, "This is the number (one) crop of the cartels and they are killing people over it and for it every day."
Only in those locales where it's still illegal. When you or someone you know can grow your own, there's no more market for the 'cartels'. Much of the money that is spent to keep mj illegal is from the cartels. Once legalized, they lose their market.
You said one State is considering repealing mj laws because of increased traffic accidents and fatalties.
Can you be more specific? There was talk of that in Washington State not long ago, but it was pointed out that the data used was incomplete and improperly applied.
For example, there is no blood or urine test that can be used to correlate mj use with impairment. A person can test "positive" for mj for weeks after using it, even though there is absolutely no impairment. With alcohol, a .08 or higher blood alcohol concentration is usually the the legal threshold for impairment. That can be measured with a breathalyzer at the scene.
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LTC Trent Klug
Sgt Bob Leonard - First, I am retired federal law enforcement and have many friends in law enforcement at all levels: federal, state, county, and municipal.
It took exactly .59 seconds on Google to come up with the following stories under the search term 'marijuana grows by cartels :
Marijuana grow connected to Mexican cartel dismantled south of Pueblo (Colorado)
Mexican Cartel Uses California National Park To Grow Pot, Kills ... (California)
: 10 marijuana grow houses linked to Mexican cartel – East ... (California)
Nearly 12000 marijuana plants found at suspected cartel grow si - KPTV (Oregon)
Mexican drug cartels are taking full advantage of Colorado's ... - 7News (Colorado)
All of these stories are from April 2016 coming forward. And yes, law enforcement focuses on heroin and meth more than marijuana-political pressure due to highly publicized deaths and an occasional explosion of a cooking factory make for bad publicity.
Washington had a fatal vehicle/pedestrian accident the very day pot became legal in the state. The driver admitted to smoking dope prior to getting behind the wheel. At the time he wasn't arrested because your state had no testing to see if the driver was incapacitated. He has yet to be prosecuted and more than likely will never be prosecuted.
And, of course, there's strong support for it. Its been sold as being less harmful than alcohol by its supporters and the public has bought into it.
It took exactly .59 seconds on Google to come up with the following stories under the search term 'marijuana grows by cartels :
Marijuana grow connected to Mexican cartel dismantled south of Pueblo (Colorado)
Mexican Cartel Uses California National Park To Grow Pot, Kills ... (California)
: 10 marijuana grow houses linked to Mexican cartel – East ... (California)
Nearly 12000 marijuana plants found at suspected cartel grow si - KPTV (Oregon)
Mexican drug cartels are taking full advantage of Colorado's ... - 7News (Colorado)
All of these stories are from April 2016 coming forward. And yes, law enforcement focuses on heroin and meth more than marijuana-political pressure due to highly publicized deaths and an occasional explosion of a cooking factory make for bad publicity.
Washington had a fatal vehicle/pedestrian accident the very day pot became legal in the state. The driver admitted to smoking dope prior to getting behind the wheel. At the time he wasn't arrested because your state had no testing to see if the driver was incapacitated. He has yet to be prosecuted and more than likely will never be prosecuted.
And, of course, there's strong support for it. Its been sold as being less harmful than alcohol by its supporters and the public has bought into it.
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LTC Trent Klug
A1C Doug Towsley - See my reply to Sgt Leonard. I misposted to his instead of yours.
Colorado lawmakers at the behest of law enforcement officials there are looking at rescinding the law. That is from my LE contacts in Oregon who have friends in LE in Colorado.
Colorado lawmakers at the behest of law enforcement officials there are looking at rescinding the law. That is from my LE contacts in Oregon who have friends in LE in Colorado.
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Sgt Bob Leonard
LTC Trent Klug - I don't have, nor do I pretend to have, the background in LE that you do. (Kudos and thanks to you for your life in service to the Country in LE and the Army.) I do have a couple of good friends who are former cops, both of them favor a more tempered and reasonable approach to mj than is in place now.
One of them told me, when he was a Patrol Officer, the kind of call they were most concerned and 'on alert' about was a "domestic dispute involving alcohol" because they didn't know from incident to incident what to expect other than the situation would likely be volatile and could go from bad to worse in a nanosecond.
The kind of call that aroused the least concern (though they were ALWAYS alert, that's why they are old enough to be retired)) was a call to a residence where there was suspected pot use. They expected to find one or more people relaxed on the couch, eating cheetos, and greating them with, "Wow, the Man's here. Bummer... Want some cheetos, dude?"
It should go without saying (but I'll say it anyway), with regard to "victimless crimes", it's the Law which creates the problem, not the substance. We learned that with Prohibition, but we're not applying it with pot.
Every one of those articles you linked pointed to a circumstance where the activity (cultivation of pot) lead to a chain of violent and potentially violent criminal activity. Cultivation (and use) of pot is not inherently evil or violent or antisocial. But...
When there's a real and lucrative market for the substance, and the only way to obtain it is from 'bad guys' (and I mean that literally; drug cartels and such are run by truly evil people), guess where the consumers go for the substance? Prohibition didn't stop the problems inherent with alcohol abuse, but it sure provided the opportunity for organized crime to flourish. We finally decided that the problems with alcohol abuse combined with the problems that came with organized crime were worse, far worse, than the problems that came with alcohol abuse alone.
Don't misunderstand where I'm coming from. I'm not a user, and at sixty-something years old, I don't plan to become one. However, I personally know several people who use it on a regular basis, and they are intelligent, creative contributing members of society. One, a distant relative, suffered from debilitating migraine headaches until his early twenties. No drug or combination of drugs helped. When Medical Marijuana came available to him he tried it. It was like a new life for him. It doesn't eliminate the headaches entirely, but it makes it possible for him to function during an attack when before the best he could do was curl up on a bed in a dark room and hope for the end of the pain, or death, it was that bad.
Regarding your next to last paragraph:
You said, "he wasn't arrested because they had no test for mj impairment". That seems a little sketchy. True enough, there was, at that time, no objective test for mj impairment (i.e. like a breathalyzer or BAC test). But there is always a field sobriety test, which tests for impairment, no matter what the cause. Impairment is impairment.
Without specifics to that one incident, I can't comment any more on it. Other than to say, if there was a fatality, I'm sure the DA considered all factors before deciding to prosecute or not.
Whether pot is more or less harmful than alcohol is a red herring of a question. It misses the point. The real question is, does it aid or hinder society to continue to classify mj as a Schedule 1 Narcotic and prosecute and punish offenders as if it were when it's not? The argument that it's a money maker for drug cartels is really an argument for legalizing it and getting it out of their hands.
"Mexican drug cartels are taking full advantage of Colorado's marijuana laws"
"If you combine the legalization of marijuana and you combine that there are no regulations for the legalization of marijuana outside Colorado, it becomes an attractive criminal enterprises," said Jorge Duque with the Colorado Department of Law."
This line from one of the articles you linked addresses the issue of why it's becoming a problem in CO. Because it's legal in CO but illegal everywhere else, the criminals go to CO to grow with impunity, then transport to States where it's not legal and make a bunch of money.
One of them told me, when he was a Patrol Officer, the kind of call they were most concerned and 'on alert' about was a "domestic dispute involving alcohol" because they didn't know from incident to incident what to expect other than the situation would likely be volatile and could go from bad to worse in a nanosecond.
The kind of call that aroused the least concern (though they were ALWAYS alert, that's why they are old enough to be retired)) was a call to a residence where there was suspected pot use. They expected to find one or more people relaxed on the couch, eating cheetos, and greating them with, "Wow, the Man's here. Bummer... Want some cheetos, dude?"
It should go without saying (but I'll say it anyway), with regard to "victimless crimes", it's the Law which creates the problem, not the substance. We learned that with Prohibition, but we're not applying it with pot.
Every one of those articles you linked pointed to a circumstance where the activity (cultivation of pot) lead to a chain of violent and potentially violent criminal activity. Cultivation (and use) of pot is not inherently evil or violent or antisocial. But...
When there's a real and lucrative market for the substance, and the only way to obtain it is from 'bad guys' (and I mean that literally; drug cartels and such are run by truly evil people), guess where the consumers go for the substance? Prohibition didn't stop the problems inherent with alcohol abuse, but it sure provided the opportunity for organized crime to flourish. We finally decided that the problems with alcohol abuse combined with the problems that came with organized crime were worse, far worse, than the problems that came with alcohol abuse alone.
Don't misunderstand where I'm coming from. I'm not a user, and at sixty-something years old, I don't plan to become one. However, I personally know several people who use it on a regular basis, and they are intelligent, creative contributing members of society. One, a distant relative, suffered from debilitating migraine headaches until his early twenties. No drug or combination of drugs helped. When Medical Marijuana came available to him he tried it. It was like a new life for him. It doesn't eliminate the headaches entirely, but it makes it possible for him to function during an attack when before the best he could do was curl up on a bed in a dark room and hope for the end of the pain, or death, it was that bad.
Regarding your next to last paragraph:
You said, "he wasn't arrested because they had no test for mj impairment". That seems a little sketchy. True enough, there was, at that time, no objective test for mj impairment (i.e. like a breathalyzer or BAC test). But there is always a field sobriety test, which tests for impairment, no matter what the cause. Impairment is impairment.
Without specifics to that one incident, I can't comment any more on it. Other than to say, if there was a fatality, I'm sure the DA considered all factors before deciding to prosecute or not.
Whether pot is more or less harmful than alcohol is a red herring of a question. It misses the point. The real question is, does it aid or hinder society to continue to classify mj as a Schedule 1 Narcotic and prosecute and punish offenders as if it were when it's not? The argument that it's a money maker for drug cartels is really an argument for legalizing it and getting it out of their hands.
"Mexican drug cartels are taking full advantage of Colorado's marijuana laws"
"If you combine the legalization of marijuana and you combine that there are no regulations for the legalization of marijuana outside Colorado, it becomes an attractive criminal enterprises," said Jorge Duque with the Colorado Department of Law."
This line from one of the articles you linked addresses the issue of why it's becoming a problem in CO. Because it's legal in CO but illegal everywhere else, the criminals go to CO to grow with impunity, then transport to States where it's not legal and make a bunch of money.
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Isn't that the same answer we get when people discuss these e-vapor things? Now the medical side is starting to push back on that too and I think it's just flavored water vapor with nicotine...
I'm not sure if you think I'm immature or just need age to be wise like you but I'll remind you that poison Ivey is all natural too and there is no hyperbole in my argument or position.
That's part of my curiosity with the pro MJ crowd with is largely the 420 crowd. The vast majority of them light it on fire and inhale (except for one very famous exception).
I will admit that I'm not smart enough to weigh in on the medical MJ use but I'm libertarian enough to say why not as long as it don't cost me nuthin'.