Actually, Nancy, there is no War on Drugs. There is a War on Some Drugs.

I would not put it past a Tim Russert or a Wolf Blitzer to raise the issue in a debate, should Obama win the Democratic nom. These are the same people who asked Kucinich about Shirley McLaine’s story that they had witnessed a UFO. There’s a war going on, people are without jobs and health care and losing their homes, our government tortures and spies on people, but let’s ask a presidential candidate about UFOs.

Well of course. What would you expect? How is a reporter to meet his or her objectives if they just stick to asking substantive questions about important issues?

Ah - oh, wait. Are you operating under the illusion that the objective of the media is to inform the public? No, sorry. The objective of the media is to sell advertising space and thereby make money. It’s also to elevate themselves from beat reporter to such rarified (and much better paying) states such as columnist, pundit, anchor, author, etc. After all, Americans don’t actually pay attention to something that takes longer than reading a cartoon (no slight intended, BTW, I like cartoons) (even yours). And how are people to recognize your name as readily as Wolf Blitzer’s or Dan Rather’s if you only ask questions that take more than 10 seconds to ask or answer and that don’t immediately raise controversy?

I was all in favor of Watergate at the time it happened, and I’m still in favor of it. But the Law of Unintended Consequences certainly has had it’s way with the media and it’s audience subsequently.

Personally, I don’t care what people imbibe, as long as they know the risks and don’t use in a situation that would put others at risk. So no using on the job, while driving, or while caring for small children, but on your own time in a safe situation with risks that you know and accept, whose business but yours should it be?

So the USA’s puritan roots dominate political discourse once again.

I was mostly pulling my information from these pages: one, two, three. I have actually read about the studies you’re describing, and I would be totally interested in learning more about that, because yeah, we should know the consequences. I just know that they’re not nearly as bad as with legal drugs :P

(Sorry if this was a duplicate, my computer’s been psycho for the last couple weeks.)

I’m not familiar with the study you say has been debunked. The studies I have seen have not been related to pictures-on-an-MRI kind of thing, they have been epidemiological work that has shown a markedly increased incidence of schizophrenia (on the order of two-fold) among the population of pot smokers. Dianne’s point that it may well simply be that schizophrenics smoke pot because they’re self-medicating for their mental problems rings true to me, but I’m not quite ready to throw away the association as valueless yet. We need to figure it out, because there are a lot of us smoking the doob (cough, but not me of course, because that would be wrong, cough) and we should know the consequences.

There is no such thing as a fatal dose of marijuana; it does not contribute to any health problems and is even an anti-cancer agent. Regular smokers of marijuana are at a decreased risk of both lung cancer and brain cancer than the average non-weed smoker. It does not create dependency and does not cause amotivational syndrome; that is a myth. Sure, if you’re kind of despondent and unambitious it’s not gonna HELP you in any way at all, but it is rarely if ever the CAUSE of such people’s problems. And the Lancet recently published a study saying that drivers high on marijuana were actually LESS likely to get in an accident than sober drivers (probably because they were paranoid).

Compare this to alcohol. My boyfriend’s family was torn apart by alcoholism; my best friend’s life until high school graduation was constant hell because of her alcoholic mother. My boyfriend’s best friend was abused for a very large & formative part of his childhood by–you guessed it–his alcoholic parents. Alcohol is the CAUSE of some 85,000 deaths PER YEAR here in the USA; tobacco is responsible for 440,000 deaths per year. Weed? Has not killed a soul worldwide, and actually has health benefits.

So I guess all this means that yeah, I’m leaning towards voting for Obama on Tuesday rather than standing by Edwards…

So the argument against legalizing marijuana is that if it is legalized more people might use it and end up like Robert?

Conservatives are stuck with/taken advantage of by the Republican party in a relationship similar to that between liberals and the Democratic party.”

True… I was using the colloquial definition of conservative, which has come to mean a large umbrella under which there are “social conservatives” (who often endorse expanding government or maintaining the status quo to achieve their aims) and “fiscal conservatives” (who are usually for low levels of government interference in both public and private life). Ever since the “umbrella” was created, a growing number of people choose to identify as a conflation of the two seemingly directly competing brands of conservatism and the terms conservative and republican have become interchangeable, which further confuses both “things” in general and “me” in particular.

What does?

As far as “why don’t politicians vote for this if 80% to 90% of the American population favor it” - the 80%+ won’t vote against a candidate if he or she condemns marijuana legalization, but the 10% to 20% are likely to vote against the candidate if they favor it.

Last I heard that connection was pretty flaky and it wasn’t at all clear which way the causation went (that is, whether marijuana promoted schizophrenia or if people developing schizophrenia were more likely to use marijuana, possibly to self-medicate). Alcohol is definitively connected to a number of nasty diseases, as is tobacco, but few people advocate banning either of those.

The most common reason I’ve heard for not wanting to decriminalize marijuana is something on the lines of “my kid/parent/spouse used it and went crazy/became disinterested in life/etc.” Hard to argue with people whose lives are messed up by a drug, but the same argument could be made for alcohol.

I remember when they showed Reefer Madness in the Sala de Puerto Rico in the Student Center at MIT. I made the mistake of sitting in the back. Let’s just say that it was hard to see the screen through the … haze.

No, because the best legal status for “things that cause schizophrenia” may be “banned”. I don’t advocate this position - hell, I’d theoretically allow heroin vending machines in the elementary schools - but it’s not intrinsically stupid, the way most other anti-cannabis justifications are. “This might make people seriously and permanently mentally ill” and “this makes white girls dance with negroes!” are not equivalent arguments.