A Marijuana Masquerade Ball

Marijuana

The following blog post is by Family Council staff member Deborah Deuerman.

The effort to make “medical” marijuana legal in Arkansas is a ploy, a ruse, a scam.  It’s a masquerade, a facade, camouflage.  The goal is not to make marijuana available to a few sick people for medical use.  It’s to make marijuana legal for everyone—they want recreational marijuana.

Marijuana is now fully legal in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia.  Oregon, Alaska and Washington legalized “medical” marijuana in 1998; Colorado in 2000 and D.C. in 2010.  Marijuana was decriminalized (lessens the criminal penalties or makes it a misdemeanor instead of a felony) years before in all these places.

So-called “medical” marijuana is legal now in 21 other states.  Voters in 5 of them will determine in November this year whether marijuana will be fully legal, that is, approved for recreational use.

Campaigns to legalize marijuana at any level are funded by national groups such as the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) and National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).  They have contributed millions of dollars to these efforts.

These legalization “pushers” don’t hide their plans:

“The key to it is medical access, because once you have hundreds of thousands of people using marijuana under medical supervision the whole scam is going to be bought. Once there’s medical access…then we will get full legalization.”

-Richard Cowan, former director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Note he says “scam.”  We can stop this masquerade ball in Arkansas.  We don’t want to dance.  We don’t want recreational marijuana.  Let’s not take the first step toward it.  We must VOTE AGAINST MARIJUANA on November 8.

Photo Credit: “Cannabis Plant” by Cannabis Training University – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Marijuana: Smoking a Plant

Marijuana

The following blog post is by Family Council staff member Deborah Beuerman.

There’s no special “medical marijuana” plant.  The marijuana plant people smoke to get high is the same one some people claim is medicine.  Looks like you’d better be prepared for side effects when smoking that medicine.

Smoking?  Is there any other medicine people have to smoke?  Smoking itself is harmful.  And research continues to show marijuana contains more tar and toxins compounds than tobacco.

Marijuana smoke deposits in the lungs four times the tar of tobacco smoke.  While there is not conclusive evidence that marijuana causes as much cancer as tobacco, smokers suffer from the same chronic lung illnesses and infections and respiratory problems like bronchitis and COPD.

Marijuana does cause one special infection.  Aspergillus is a mold or fungus that grows on the plants.  When taken into the lungs, one type of Aspergillus causes an allergic reaction and coughing and wheezing.  Another type of Aspergillus can spread throughout the body and damage any of the organs, of course starting with the lungs.  This infection, invasive aspergillosis can be fatal in 90% of cases.

Smoking marijuana is not good for anyone’s health.

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Is Marijuana Safer Than Alcohol?

Marijuana

Purple_KushThe following blog post is by Family Council staff member Deborah Beuerman.

People who smoke marijuana frequently claim it’s safer than alcohol.  But why should that make a difference?  Both are harmful.  People get addicted to both.  People’s bodies are damaged and made sick by both.  Drunk drivers cause fatal accidents.  The number of fatalities with marijuana involved has more than doubled in states where marijuana is legal.

It’s a little easier to deal with drunks than with stoned people.  Proof is needed to arrest someone for impaired driving. It’s pretty easy to tell someone is drunk, and there are field sobriety tests and a breathalyzer to determine how much alcohol is in the system.  There are no field tests for marijuana levels, although some new marijuana breathalyzers are being tested.

How is “impaired” defined anyway?  With alcohol, it is a number to indicate the blood alcohol concentration, and the more alcohol that’s in the blood, the more drunk a person is.  Marijuana impairment can’t be defined that way—no numbers have been determined, neither has it been determined how to figure out what the numbers should be.

The body handles alcohol and marijuana differently.  Alcohol is water soluble, moves into the bloodstream, breaks down, and eventually is excreted out of the body. A person who quits drinking after reaching the “legal limit” of 0.08 blood alcohol will be sober in about 5 hours.

Marijuana is fat soluble and is stored in the fatty tissue in organs like the lungs, heart, brain, and liver.  Depending on how much is smoked, how often, and how potent it is, marijuana could be in a body 60 days later.

Marijuana is harmful.  Alcohol is harmful.  Why should we try to figure out which one is safer?

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