LIES!

When I have debates about marijuana with anti-marijuana activists these are the main points I always have to fight.

1. Marijuana causes brain damage!

First of all there is no possible way marijuana could kill or damage brain cells. Out of the 350+ chemicals that do exist in marijuana none of them cause brain damage. In fact they dont even make brain cells dormant, what they do is "confuse" brain cells for the time that your high, blazed, stoned, baked, ripped, etc... When the high wears off, your brain cells return to normal.

2.Marijuana is a gateway drug!

This myth is one of the most unsupported. If somebody is hanging out with the wrong people and they decide to try heroin, cocaine, or some other hard drug there is nobody to blame but the individual. There is nothing in marijuana that makes the user want to try something else. Personally, I'm quite happy with the buzz that comes from weed and I have no desire to try harder drugs. I know the shit that those drugs can do to you. A great case study that pretty much proves that marijuana is not a gate way drug is when the Dutch partially legalized marijuana in Holland in 1970. Hard drug use went down considerably.

3. Marijuana kills!

I feel like before I start I should mention that alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and food are the number one killers in North America. Weed isn't on the list of 'things you should be wary of' because there has never been a recorded death that has been due to marijuana. There was a car accident one time where the guy died and he had been smoking, but one car accident is hardly enough evidence to say that marijuana kills. Marijuana delivers 3 times more tar to the lungs than tobacco but only if it is being smoked in RIDICULOUS amounts (and this is coming from me, and i smoke at least 3g a day). Also, marijuana contains more carcinogenic chemicals than tobacco, but if you smoke with a vaporizer, or a bong, those chemicals are completely filtered from what you inhale so that you end up inhaling pure THC vapor.

4. There are over 1000 chemicals in marijuana smoke!

This is true, but incredibly misleading. People who hear/read statements like these automatically think that this is a terrible truth. The August 1990 issue of the magazine 'Science' notes that of the over 800 volatile chemicals present in roasted coffee, only 21 have actually been tested on animals and 16 of these cause cancer in rodents. Yet, coffee remains legal and is generally considered fairly safe. If you're freaking out about marijuana having chemicals in it, you should probably re-assess everything in your life.

5. You could die of marijuana overdose!

No,actually, that's impossible. Animal tests have revealed that extremely high doses of cannabinoids are needed to have lethal effect. This has led scientists to conclude that the ratio of the amount of cannabinoids necessary to get a person intoxicated (i.e., stoned) relative to the amount necessary to kill them is 1 to 40,000. In other words, to overdose, you would have to consume 40,000 times as much marijuana as you needed to get stoned in a short period of time. Which is impossible unless you could somehow figure out a way to inject that much THC into your bloodstream. In contrast, the ratio for alcohol varies between 1 to 4 and 1 to 10. It is easy to see how upwards of 5000 people die from alcohol overdoses every year and no one ever dies of marijuana overdoses.

6. Marijuana is addictive!

People always pull this one out on me. They always say: 'People abuse marijuana and die.' Like i mentioned before, you can't die from smoking weed, and that's a faulty argument, because you could say that about anything. You could say that people abuse cheeseburgers and die! Except that sentence is true. Marijuana is not physically addicting, but it does have slight mentally addictive traits. All I mean by this is that weed is so fucking great and not harmful in any way that once you discover what you've been missing, you want more. But if you had to stop, you wouldn't go through denial or withdrawal or anything.

Alright so those are the main arguments that anti-marijuana activists bring up. Some main points I want to call your attention to:

• Marijuana is safer than alcohol.
• Marijuana is safer than caffeine.
• Marijuana is safer than tobacco.
• Marijuana is safer than fast-foods.
• All those things are legal... so wtf?

Do your research. Learn more about marijuana. It's not as bad as the government leads you to believe. CLICK HERE if you're an innovative individual and you want to be more educated.