POT IS NEITHER ADDICTIVE NOR DANGEROUS

I wish to refute the belief that marijuana is dangerous (Letters, June 3).
Forty-seven percent of Americans have smoked marijuana. If there were a
direct causal effect between marijuana use and addiction, criminal behavior
and birth defects, would not 135 million people in the United States be
afflicted with some of these maladies?

One of my close friends, a case analyst for the U.S. Supreme Court, is fond
of saying that many government employees are incompetent. We were fed all
sorts of propaganda during the Cold War, and we are still looking for
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What incompetence! The same is true
about what the government tells us about marijuana. If I were dying of
cancer, going blind from glaucoma or wasting from AIDS, I would want to
smoke marijuana if it alleviated the symptoms.

Marijuana associates the user with the dealers who deal harder drugs. If
marijuana were legalized and put in the same category as alcohol, we might
solve part of the problem of harder drugs such as heroin, cocaine, crystal
methamphetamine, morphine, opium and others.

Phil Robertson