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onewheelwizzard:
OK, a few things.  (Do not bother reading this post if you're not interested in drugs.  I go to school to study this kind of stuff and I do a lot of extracurricular research so I have a lot to say about the subject, so this will be tl;dr for a lot of people here.)

First of all, on the "addictive" power of marijuana.  From a medical standpoint, one of the most important measures of the damage done by an addiction is the intensity of withdrawl symptoms.  Basically, something is addictive if the user experiences negative symptoms like pain or health problems if they are denied the drug.  Cigarettes are extremely addictive because nicotine binds to receptor sites all over the body, and therefore the entire body's nervous system is calling out for it every time a hardcore smoker goes too long without it (I've heard that it's absolutely terrible).  Opiates (OxyContin, morphine, heroin, Percocet, etc.) are extremely addictive because of the neural pathways they affect, and the resultant fact that withdrawing from painkiller addiction feels a bit like having third-degree burns all over your body for days.  Alcohol is actually the worst when it comes to addictions because it's the only widely abused drug that can and will actually flat-out kill you if you try going cold turkey after delving too deep into addiction.  A hardcore heroin junkie will probably want to die for an entire month after going cold turkey on heroin (and as such will probably relapse) but a hardcore alcoholic (we're talking lifetime) who tries to go cold turkey will just die, their heart will give out and they will drop like a rock.  A slightly less harder-core alcoholic will suffer delerium tremens.  Alcohol is really, really destructive from the standpoint of addiction.

A hardcore stoner, the hardest-core stoner, someone who smokes superstrong crazy weed 10-15 times a day despite having zero medical reason to do so (of which there are several, by the way, including glaucoma, arthritis, and appetite stimulation during chemotherapy) will probably suffer some pretty serious irritability problems for about a month or two if they stop smoking pot.  They won't be happy about it, but they won't suffer anything even remotely close to the magnitude of seriousness that is heroin, nicotine, or alcohol withdrawl.  Even withdrawing from caffeine is more difficult than withdrawing from weed, at least on a purely biochemical level.  It's quite true that lazy losers have a tendency to be severely enabled by smoking weed and as such you see a lot of very unwise use of it, but this is a problem with the attitude people take towards using it, not a property of the drug itself that causes this phenomenon.  Basically the risk of serious cannabis addiction is virtually zero, if addiction is defined according to medical symptoms associated with use and withdrawl.  "Addiction" to cannabis is a bit like being "addicted" to coming in to work late (which, I'm sure someone will argue here, can be a serious problem for some people).

Oh, and the last study done on the link between weed and cancer found literally zero indication that weed increases cancer risk.  That's not as huge and amazing as it sounds, because they had to control for cigarette smoking among their subjects and so there was a pretty serious confound, but if you trust statistics as a discipline, the fact that they found a 2000% (20X) increased risk for cancer due to cigarette smoking compared to a 0% or even negative risk associated with weed, it starts to make you think.
(Source)
Oh, and the second-largest organization of medical professionals in the nation just endorsed medical marijuana and called for research!

It's not physiologically addictive (unlike caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and a great many pharmaceuticals), it's not neurotoxic, it's not associated with cancer risk, lots of doctors are ready and willing to accept it as legitimate medicine ... the evidence pretty strongly suggests that marijuana usage is effectively harmless if treated with a modicum of sense, and minimally problematic even for people who don't give enough of a shit to treat themselves with respect as they use drugs.

On the subject of psychedelics ...

I am certain that psychedelics hold a universal potential for personal development (which I define as self-directed improvement in quality of life).  What little research that has been done on them has shown that they are surprisingly effective at a wide range of psychologically therapeutic tasks if used correctly, including treatment for alcoholism and opiate addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, cluster headaches, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and maybe even anxiety and depression (It's important to point out that different psychedelics are useful for different things.  I'd need to go into specifics if I were to explain each of the treatment possibilities I mentioned but you can rest assured that I'm not making any of it up.)  So from a medical standpoint, they at least have potential as treatments for certain disorders.

However, they also have the unique capacity (among drugs) to make a person who is physically and mentally healthy somehow even more well.  This was actually researched recently ... Johns Hopkins published a study in which researchers gave psilocybin (the stuff in "magic mushrooms" that makes a person trip, more or less similar to LSD in effect and duration) to healthy, normal, middle-aged volunteers who had never taken psychedelic drugs before (but DID engage in spiritual practice or activity such as church worship, meditation, prayer, yoga, etc.)  The results were actually pretty incredible.  A full third of the people who participated in the study said that it was the most important thing that had ever happened to them.  Another third ranked it in the top 5 (alongside landmarks like the death of a parent or the birth of a firstborn child).  Here's the kicker ... at 2 months, 6 months, and 12 months after the study, exactly zero of the participants reported any sort of lasting negative effect (only 30% reported negative effects of any sort even during the experimental sessions), and they all performed equally well on any test given before and after the experiment.  If nothing else, the study proved that it was safe for healthy people to take psilocybin in correctly controlled environments, which is a huge step towards further understanding exactly what it actually does.  The last and most powerful result of the study, though, was that more than 80% of the people who participated said, a year later, that they were better off for having done so.  More than 80%!  That is HUGE.  (If you want to follow up on this study, it was conducted by Roland Griffiths and published in the journal Psychopharmacology.  I forget the date.)

Obviously, as with any other drug, positive results rely upon well-reasoned and responsible use, preferably with the help of a professional.  Unfortunately there is a serious shortage of professionals who are trained in psychedelic administration (they just don't make shamans like they used to these days) and even the medical establishment knows next to nothing about how they could be reasonably used.  So recommending psychedelics to anyone would be jumping the gun in a serious way.

But when 80% of healthy volunteers give resounding positive feedback and 0% give negative feedback, it's worth paying attention to.  That never happens in drug trials.  Those numbers would sound ridiculous to me if I didn't already know firsthand how much good mushrooms can do for a person.

Basically, the POTENTIAL for benefits granted by psychedelics is, I think, universal.  But there are a LOT of counterindications that would make me advise against recreational use, and until we have a lot of sound scientific research on it and a system set up to handle it therapeutically, recreational use is all we have.

I pay a lot of attention to the research that's been done on illegal drugs.  I think it's really important.  I hope nobody minds if I get long-winded about it.

dennis:

--- Quote from: Switchblade on 13 Mar 2008, 19:07 ---To date, everybody I've known who smoked weed wound up doing one of two things:

1: quitting before it became a problem.

2: getting hooked and dropping out.

There have been far more of the latter than of the former. I'm yet to encounter anybody who smoked it on a regular basis and wasn't affected by it in some fairly significant way.
--- End quote ---
Anecdotal evidence, confirmation bias, false dichotomy.


--- Quote ---while it may be to some extent true that quote: "medical organizations and care providers get BIG MONEY for pushing certain drugs" I think I should point out that I'm not aware of any medication designed for weaning people off cannabis. Heroin, yes, there are plenty of mild opiates designed to wean people off Heroin and suchlike, but there aren't such medicines around for Marijuana (to my knowledge). As such, it's difficult for pharmaceutical companies to make a profit off helping people quit cannabis addiction, because there's no product they can sell for that purpose.
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There's nothing like methadone for cannabis because cannabis isn't physiologically addictive. There's no withdrawal for cannabis like there is for heroin. Methadone (what I think you're referring to when you say "mild opiate") is used to treat opiate addiction because it doesn't produce a high, but alleviates withdrawal symptoms while blocking the opioid receptors so that using heroin won't produce a high.


--- Quote ---So, if there's no drug being sold to help people quit, and therefore no money being thrown at medical organizations to promote certain products, then ulterior motive goes out the window. With no incentive, those medical groups fall back on the old standby of actually recommending what's best for the patient's mental and physical health.
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This is incredibly cynical and insulting to the profession of medicine, in addition to being incorrect.


--- Quote ---I'm all for letting people fuck up their own brains and lives if they so want. It means that they aren't competing with people like me, which makes my life easier. I do, however, think that it's vitally important that people be presented with ALL the facts so that they can make their decision with all of the evidence in front of them. That way, we can reasonably blame their own stupidity rather than misinformation or lack of clear facts.
--- End quote ---
You're not helping.


--- Quote ---And let's just say that when it comes to trusting information that is given to me, I tend to feel more secure placing my faith in the say-so of a law-abiding, intellectual professional than in the say so of an addict or dealer, either one of which is willfully breaking the law. It's Occam's razor again. I can either make the far-fetched and paranoid assumption that every doctor and medical paper in the world is out to stop me from having fun for no good reason, or make the not-very-far-fetched-at-all and quite reasonable assumption that marijuana is actually bad for me, and that the people who are promoting it are doing so because they want to sell it and get rich.
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It's not Occam's Razor, it's a false dichotomy. Whether cannabis is bad for you has nothing to do with the law, or people who push drugs with a profit motive. You just got finished calling doctors drug pushers because they just want to sell drugs, but you trust them over dealers because they just want to sell you drugs?

Switchblade:
I'm just passing on what I've been told, by people and sources that I trust implicitly (and with good reason), and what I've experienced for myself. Although you can't cite anecdotal evidence in a research paper, it really ought not to be discounted in this kind of a discussion because it's being used to underpin valid points.

My own experience and research tells me that Marijuana is Bad, Alcohol is Not Bad (it's not necessarily Good, but few things are).  Clearly you have arrived at a different conclusion, and I suspect that there's little I can do to change your mind.

Nevertheless...


--- Quote from: dennis on 14 Mar 2008, 01:39 ---
--- Quote ---So, if there's no drug being sold to help people quit, and therefore no money being thrown at medical organizations to promote certain products, then ulterior motive goes out the window. With no incentive, those medical groups fall back on the old standby of actually recommending what's best for the patient's mental and physical health.
--- End quote ---
This is incredibly cynical and insulting to the profession of medicine, in addition to being incorrect.
--- End quote ---

You've misinterpreted me here, I'm afraid. I was actually refuting the argument that medical groups are biased by pharmaceutical corporations giving them money, not supporting it. My argument was "Even if that is the case, it cannot be the case in this situation because there is no drug for them to push that has any effect". Maybe the tone was cynical, but it certainly wasn't meant to be in support of the statement that


--- Quote from: SonofZ3 on 13 Mar 2008, 14:02 ---If you think doctors don't push drugs to get money from big pharmaceutical companies then you're living in imaginary land my friend. At least here in the U.S. medical organizations and care providers get BIG MONEY for pushing certain drugs.
--- End quote ---
.

I agree with you, dennis, that this statement is incredibly cynical and insulting to the profession of medicine.

Patrick:

--- Quote from: pilsner on 13 Mar 2008, 10:46 ---I can't wait for pipe smoking to come back.  Also:  capes.

--- End quote ---

I smoke a pipe on occasion. It's really nice! I'm getting better at doing smoke rings but I'm kindof out of practice because I only really smoke my pipe once every 5 weeks or so.

Barmymoo:
I have a cape.

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