MARIJUANA FOR LEGAL USAGE: POINT

"When pure and administered carefully it [cannabis] is one of the most
valuable medicines we possess," wrote J.R. Reynolds, Queen Victoria's
physician, in 1890 in an English medical journal, The Lancet.

In "Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine," author Dr. Lester Grinspoon,
associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, remarks
upon the "wonder drug of the 1940s:" penicillin.

"There were three major reasons for that reputation: it was remarkably
nontoxic, even at high doses; it could be produced inexpensively on a large
scale; and it was extremely versatile, acting against the microorganisms
that cause a great variety of diseases, from pneumonia to syphilis."

Grinspoon goes on to explain that cannabis has all of these qualities. On
the safety of it he said "As we have pointed out, despite its use by
millions of people over thousands of years, it has never caused an overdose
death.

"As we have also noted, the danger of lung damage can easily be addressed
by increasing the potency and by developing the technology to separate
particulate matter in the smoke from cannabinoids (a technology that
prohibition has retarded)."

Aside from the legalization of medical use however, which there shouldn't
even be a need for debate on, there's also question of whether or not the
drug should be legal for recreational use.

In the New York Times blog of Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics,
there's an entry "On the Legalization -- or Not -- of Marijuana."

Dubner writes that one of his favorite thought exercises is to "look at an
issue that's important, complex, and interesting -- something like
healthcare ... -- and pretend that you could rebuild the system from
scratch, without the convoluted histories and incentives that currently exist."

Dubner imagines what it would be like if "humankind made it all the way to
the 21st century without alcohol or marijuana" and then they were suddenly
and simultaneously discovered.

Thinking on what kinds of legislation might be passed to regulate the two
drugs he hypothesizes: "the alcohol laws might be tougher than they are now
and that the marijuana laws might be more lenient."

Dubner invited many academics on both sides of theargument to discuss the
question. He posted their mini-essays in his blog.

Richard Lawrence Miller, historian and author of "The Encyclopedia of
Addictive Drugs," puts it best: "In all of my studies, I concluded that the
'war on drugs' masked a war on democracy. ... There is no debate, merely
theater. Discussing drug policy is like discussing gun control or abortion:
facts are irrelevant."

For those who have difficulty swallowing the idea of legalizing the use of
marijuana -- what about decriminalizing its use?

Penn Jillette says it best in "Penn & Teller: Bullshit! War on Drugs."

"Over 700,000 people are arrested each year for drug charges and that's
just for marijuana. 75 percent of those arrests are for possession alone.
These aren't the Pablo Escobar's, a lot of them are the idiots you see
smoking the sticky icky in school parking lots and shopping malls.

"Yeah, they're stupid, but with the mandatory federal sentencing laws on
drug charges we're filling our prisons with these non-violent drug offenders."

Just think about that.