OVERDOSING NOT AN ISSUE WITH MARIJUANA

The letter Wednesday by Michael Caron, "Harder to dose marijuana
correctly," misses the mark on cannabis as medicine. Sure, science has
done a swell job of meticulously gauging pharmaceutical doses in
medicines. That is why only some 100,000 deaths a year occur from
pharmaceuticals. If we went willy-nilly on dosage, think how many
fatalities would occur.

Fortunately, the manufacture of cannabis (by nature) has produced an
effective medicine of varying strength but without a fatal dosage. No
deaths occur each year from cannabis overdose. Zero.

The legality and illegality of cannabis has nothing to do with
toxicity. Rather it is about maintaining absolute control of a
nation's behavior. If it was about toxicity, we would have hemp farms
in our valley. We would be eating foods produced from hemp seeds grown
domestically. But even these beneficial aspects of one of nature's
most versatile plants are illegal.

When cannabis was prohibited it was done from a bigoted, racist
perspective, involved no science and instead gives us a prohibition
whose foundation is totally and preposterously based on perjured
congressional testimony.

Allan Erickson

Eugene