POT DOES LITTLE TO HELP PEOPLE

Editor, Times-Dispatch: The irrelevant political push to legalize marijuana
use has recently ventured into a most inappropriate and absurd venue - that
medical doctors should be given the leeway to prescribe/administer it. I'm
actually quite surprised I haven't heard resounding laughter from the
current medical community. The standard opening lines by the proponents of
this are typically, "Marijuana is good for severe pain, it stimulates the
appetite in wasting patients, and it is a great anti-emetic." And this one
is even more comical: "Pot does not have the side-effects that the current
pharmaceuticals do - you gotta weigh pot's benefits vs. any adverse effects."

THC - pot's active chemical - possesses no appreciable analgesic effect on
any severe pain: bone fractures, post-surgical pain, nor chronic syndromes
involving muscular hyperspasticity. THC does trigger a schizotypal set of
psychiatric symptoms in roughly half of regular users - this is a
(somewhat) mild form of paranoid schizophrenia in which the affected is
highly uncomfortable, and occasionally dysfunctional, in even the most
typical of settings and environments. A smaller number even do lapse into
full-scale schizophrenia from which they will never emerge; numerous
examples of this are infinitely and aimlessly wandering city streets all
over America and Europe.

It has been long established, also, that smoking marijuana introduces the
user to (as much as) 20 times more tar and carcinogens than tobacco in just
one go of it. Smoking pot can also (initially) raise the toker's pulse up
to around 160 beats per minute - a dangerous tachycardia for many. Tobacco,
in itself, is devastating enough to the respiratory and cardiovascular
system. Pot smoking gives one even more harm per puff.

Lawrence D. Lanberg.

richmond.