XPost: alt.politics.democrats, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns
XPost: sac.politics
From: drooler@gmail.com

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research contains
some inconvenient news for the rosy worldview of those who claim that
marijuana is a completely harmless drug.

The paper reviews data on opioid and marijuana use and makes two key
findings — first, that “medical marijuana, particularly when available
through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality.”
The second finding is that data “for recreational marijuana, while less
reliable, also suggest that retail sales through dispensaries are
associated with greater death rates relative to the counterfactual of no
legal cannabis.”

The increase in opioid deaths associated with marijuana use is greater for
men, nonwhites, and young people.

That may be somewhat disturbing, but the details appear even more
devilish. The study importantly addresses earlier results, based on data
from 1999 to 2010, that had seemed to suggest a more beneficial effect. It
turns out, though, that the results abruptly changed. If you include data
from 2010 to 2017, the period when medical and/or recreational marijuana
legalization began in earnest in the states, the results swing from a 21%
reduction in opioid deaths to a 23% increase.

The results are complex, but the study undercuts a key claim of marijuana
legalization proponents who argue that marijuana is a harmless substance
that causes a cheap, temporary high and nothing more.

Here, the relationship between cannabis and opioid deaths is interesting
in that it reinforces a much-mocked description of marijuana as a “gateway
drug.” Different drug habits might well be related in ways we do not yet
understand.

And of course, this is not the only pitfall associated with marijuana use
that marijuana campaigners work hard to minimize. For example, habitual
marijuana use as late as one’s mid-20s can cause permanent brain damage.
That’s because it prevents proper development of the frontal cortex, which
the American Psychological Association describes as one of the last
regions of the brain to develop fully. This brain structure is “critical
to planning, judgment, decision-making, and personality.”

This means that use among teenagers, which is a lot more common than
people would like to admit, and even use among young adults has
deleterious and permanent health effects.

This is something to remember when these campaigners come to your state
and try to sell you on the idea of cannabis as something completely
harmless. One need not exaggerate the dangers of marijuana to acknowledge
that they at least exist.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/marijuana-
legalization-is-not-
harmless?utm_campaign=article_rail&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=article_
rail

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 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)