Dr Andrew Weil

Dr Andrew Weil, director of the University of Arizona's program of integrative medicine and a renowned authority on psychoactive drugs, allows that some clinical trials should be repeated but stresses that "on the basis of what we know at the moment, marijuana could be authorized for uses in medicine."

  Non-toxic drug

Perhaps the most significant advantage weed offers, Weil says, is the fact that its use entails no side effects. The effects of other, conventional treatments are sometimes so serious that patients have to stop taking them despite their suffering.

"It is so non-toxic -- relative to the pharmaceutical drugs that are used routinely -- that you may as well look for ways to use it, because we don't have anything else in medicine that is so non-toxic."

 Dr. Mel Pohl

"I want to sort of dispel the myth that alcohol causes alcoholism, because it doesn't," says Mel Pohl, service director for Charter Hospital's addictive disease program. "Long before they ever take their first 'drink', there is a difference in somebody who's got alcoholism or drug addictions from somebody  who doesn't."

No one was robbing, whoring and murdering over drugs when addicts could buy all of the heroin, cocaine, morphine, opium and any other drug cheaply and legally at the corner drug store. When addicts had access to pure pharmaceutical drugs, overdoses were virtually unheard of. In short, our so-called "drug problems" are almost entirely generated by irresponsible drug prohibition laws. 

We can extricate ourselves from the monstrous disaster drug prohibitionists have led us into by repealing drug prohibition and installing a regulated market for adult drug use that can handle the real problems caused by drugs which are insignificant compared to the costs of drug prohibition.

Robert MacCoun, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, wrote in a recent report: "In the absence of causal evidence, a strong allegiance to any particular gateway theory would seem to reflect ideology or politics, rather than science."  

Drug War Heresies- Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places (Cambridge, 2001)

 

 Dr. Lynn Zimmer, PhD

Dr. Lynn Zimmer, PhD, sociology professor at the University of New York and co-author of the book Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, says  "the gateway theory is as likely to be true as the idea that early bicycle riding 'causes' motorcycling."

"Marijuana use may give you a hint that your kid might be interested in other drugs," she said.  

 

Despite 80 years of drug prohibition, at the cost of billions upon billions of dollars, and at a great loss of our precious civil liberties, anybody of any age that has a couple of bucks can buy illegal drugs.

They're cheaper, more pure, more diverse and more widely available than ever before. The illicit drug market is an unregulated, free-market with no age limit and no ID required.


"Everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bed room windows.

Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."