Marijuana Does Not Kill Brain Cells

On Wednesday, December 18, 2013, Gretchen Carlson on the Fox News show, The Real Story, brought up the issue of pot-smoking teenagers. I felt compelled to send her an email, which she will probably not read. The following is what I sent to her.

Dear Ms. Carlson:

I just watched your Wednesday, December 18th program in which you brought up the subject of adolescents smoking marijuana. I believe you and at least two of your panel stated that, of course, marijuana kills brain cells. This article from Vanderbilt University states quite clearly that marijuana does not kill brain cells. That does not mean that it is completely harmless however. But then even moderate drinking of alcohol has it's own set of problems.

Marijuana is an intoxicant. Minors should not be using any intoxicants (and adults should not be driving or operating machinery under the influence of intoxicants). The brains of children go through a growth spurt at about the time of puberty, as this article from PBS explains, then the brain begins pruning back the weak neuron connections and reinforcing others for the next several years. That is, the adolescent brain is a mess until it sorts itself out in early adulthood and adding any intoxicant to that mess can only slow and interfere with that process.

The author of the PBS article quoted Dr. Jay Geidd, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD: "If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hardwired. If they're lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV, those are the cells and connections that are going to survive." That would be with or without marijuana. 

I do not smoke marijuana. I tried it several times as a young man (my first time I was 18) but never really liked it so I stopped using it although nearly everyone I knew and associated with smoked it. The vast majority of those people went on to have successful careers and families. Most of the ones who didn't generally had a bigger alcohol problem.

The linked articles above should be read in their entirety. Hopefully, you, or someone associated with The Real Story can do that so that you have more factual information.

I do not promote drug use, including alcohol among adults. I am totally against recreational drug use by adolescents or any minors. The brain is a beautiful but delicate instrument that needs to be properly nourished and stimulated in order for the child to have a chance at fully developing his or her potential as an adult. Having said that, however, if we truly have inalienable rights, then, as adults, we have the right to any behavior that does not violate the rights of others even if that behavior is or may be harmful to us. Again, as adults, not minors. That would include smoking marijuana regardless if others believe it is wrong and immoral. As Lysander Spooner said: "Vices are not crimes."

I like your program, Ms. Carlson. Keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

D.M. Mitchell 

Regarding Second Hand Smoke

REGARDING GRETCHEN CARLSON’S STATEMENTS MADE ON MARCH 6, 2013 FOX AND FRIENDS REGARDING SECOND HAND SMOKE AND SECOND HAND MARIJUANA SMOKE.


Ms. Carlson accepts the belief that tobacco second hand smoke is as dangerous as has been reported in the media. But, she thinks that marijuana second hand smoke could just be as dangerous or even more so. Her comments seemed to indicate that smoking marijuana was more dangerous than, perhaps, smoking tobacco. I think this is a typical anti-rightist, anti-drug, religious-based, personal moral perspective.

The “truth” can be subjective. Facts are verifiable.

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/epa.html This page is about the 1993 EPA report on second hand smoke and how it is flawed and how they had to manipulate the data to get to a risk factor that normally would be considered insignificant.

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/who.html This page is about the 1998 World Health Organization’s (WHO) study on second hand smoke in Europe and how it produced unexpected results including a 22% lower chance of lung cancer from children raised in a home with a smoker.

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/helena.html This page is about a much touted, but seriously flawed study funded by the anti-tobacco forces regarding a six-month smoking ban in all businesses in Helena, Montana in 2002.

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/helenacharts.html This page shows the chart used in the Helena study trying to prove that the six-month ban of smoking in all businesses reduced heart attacks by 60%. The fraud is explained.

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/links.html This page has several links to some interesting things, but click on Name Three … Here, I’ll do if for you: http://www.davehitt.com/2004/name_three.html This is where Dave Hitt (all the above links came from his “Facts” pages) contacted several people and organizations asking them to name three people who verifiably died from second hand smoke. He was either ignored or when someone did come up with three names they weren’t verified as dying of second hand smoke. In fact one had pancreatic cancer which had traveled to her lungs.

I want to make clear (as does Dave Hitt) that I am not promoting smoking. I was a smoker for 20 years and I’ve been a non-smoker for 27 years. However, I’ve always believed that that much quoted 50,000 people a year are dying from second hand (tobacco) smoke was a big load of B.S.

If you are worried about second hand smoke, you should be more worried about automobile exhaust according to this article: http://gas2.org/2013/01/10/car-exhaust-the-worlds-second-fastest-growing-cause-of-death I can only assume, if this article is backed up by facts rather than skewed and fraudulent scientific claims that living in a large city is a big risk factor for dying early. Automobile exhaust (and you don’t have to see it for it to be there) is around you all the time.

But I digress. The second issue I wish to take up is marijuana and second hand marijuana smoke, as Gretchen Carlson seemed to have been very aggressively concerned about that.

http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30#sthash.MVjZD2dU.dpbs This page, from Drug War Facts, quotes various accepted sources about drugs, drug use, and drug deaths. Marijuana does not cause any deaths. See paragraph 8 and, especially, paragraph 23.

http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20030918/marijuana-smoking-doesnt-kill This page is from WebMD and talks about two large studies showing that marijuana smoking, even long-term, does not cause heart attacks or lung cancer. This is probably due to the fact that the average user only smokes one marijuana cigarette a day, or less.

Does this mean that minors should have access to marijuana. Absolutely not. Just like they should not have access to alcohol and tobacco, but adults should. That is, if one believes in the concept of inalienable rights which, obviously, most adults and the vast majority in the federal Congress and State Legislatures don’t. (See my dissertation on the myth of inalienable rights at this URL: http://dowehaverights.blogspot.com.)

Okay, so marijuana is not a deadly drug, but how much disease is caused from smoking or breathing in second hand marijuana smoke?

I could find nothing directly on the long-term health effects of second hand marijuana smoke, which is easily explained. Marijuana is illegal and it’s hard to do serious research about it’s effects. However another WebMD page, http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20000508/marijuana-unlikely-to-cause-cancer, stated that no correlation could be found between smoking marijuana and lung cancer—again, probably due to less smoking than with tobacco—but on the second page the article cited another study saying that heart attack risk within a short time after smoking was greatly increased.

It would seem that if the direct smoking of marijuana does not promoted lung cancer, then a bit of second hand marijuana smoke would have an even smaller effect. And, as shown above, second hand tobacco smoke probably has little to no effect on non-smokers, so second hand marijuana smoke is probably something even less to worry about.

That doesn’t mean that smoking marijuana is risk free, as these articles point out.

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/marijuana-use-and-its-effects

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfo/problems/alcoholanddrugs/cannabis.aspx

The three articles point out the dangers of smoking marijuana for minors and I agree, as I stated above, mind-altering and addictive drugs should be kept out of the hands of minors to the best of our ability. Teen-agers especially are going through the child-to-adult brain growing period and many emotional chemicals are in the mix. That’s why many teen-agers are so difficult. Throwing a mind-altering drug into that mix will only make matters worse.

Of course, as pointed out in Dave Hitt’s articles, above, we don’t know how well the studies on marijuana use were set up, given its illegal status. How large of a study population, what confounding facts, how long were the study conducted, and so forth.

So, Ms. Carlson, I don’t think you have to be worried about the harmful health effects of second hand marijuana smoke and can relax.

Ms. Universe and Marijuana

I saw Olivia Culpo on Fox and Friends this morning. She's the new Ms. Universe. (I wonder how other sentient beings in the universe feel about that title.)

The thing I want to comment on is that she holds a position against legalized marijuana. She claims that there were serious consequences to its use.

Really? Are they as serious as the consequences to the use of alcohol? Alcohol, a true narcotic drug, is the number one violence-causing drug in America, probably the world, merely from it's use. Alcohol is the third leading cause of premature death in the world according to this article. Of course, smoking is worse, but I'm pretty sure Ms. Culpo is against smoking, too, but would she want Congress to pass laws making it illegal like marijuana?

Can a fifteen-year-old walk into a liquor store or grocery store and by alcohol? Of course not. Yet that same fifteen-year-old can, if he or she wants to, find someone to sell them marijuana. Like Pauline Sabine said when she testified before Congress about the harmful effects of alcohol prohibition:

"In pre-prohibition days, mothers had little fear in regard to the saloon as far as their children were concerned. A saloon-keeper's license was revoked if he were caught selling liquor to minors. Today in any speakeasy in the United States you can find boys and girls in their teens drinking liquor, and this situation has become so acute that the mothers of the country feel something must be done to protect their children."


If marijuana, and other presently illegal drugs, were sold legally in drug/liquor stores to adults upon proof of age, it would be harder for teenagers to get access to those drugs. As to adults, we don't jail them for drinking or smoking, even though alcohol and tobacco are dangerous and addictive substances. It's the right of an adult to decide if he or she wants to use one or both of those substances. It should be the same for the presently illegal drugs.

That is, it would be if we actually believed in the myth of inalienable rights, which obviously, we don't. The principle of inalienable rights states that some things cannot be voted on, that a majority has no legitimate power to negate a person's actions in certain situations. Under the principle of real and true inalienable rights then, an adult whose behavior does not violate the rights of others and does not threaten or endanger the rights of other, has an inalienable right to that behavior even if you or everyone else in the country believes that the behavior in question is immoral.

Immorality is a religious concept and religion should not control our laws. By advocating the illegality of marijuana, Ms. Culpo, you are advocating the imposition of religion into our secular laws. You are following in the footsteps of the relgious groups who lobbied Congress to make certain drugs illegal because they were immoral. That led to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which, to me, was a violation of the First Amendment's "establishment of religion" clause of the United States Constitution. The diminishment of inalienable rights has only gotten worse since then.

By all objective evidence, from the prohibition of alcohol to the prohibition of other drugs today, making those drugs illegal only creates more real crime and violence and allows them to be more available to minors.  I strongly suggest, Ms. Culpo, that you study this issue more and, hopefully, come down on the side of inalienable rights, the right of all consenting adults to use the property of their bodies and minds as they wish, just so long as they do not violate the rights of others in so doing. The legalization of marijuana would be a good first step.

Self-Mutilation Versus the War on Drugs

I came across an old newspaper clipping the other day from 1996. The article was about two different men who self-mutilated themselves. One cut his penis off, the other one shot himself in the groin with a shotgun. The mutilations happened in Phoenix.


Why I saved the article was the lie that the Phoenix police spokesman told when asked about the incidents. He said, “It’s no crime. You can do whatever you want to your own body.”

Why is that a lie? Had those two men been smoking a marijuana cigarette and had the police spokesman, Sgt. Mike Torres, observed them, he would have arrested them for possession of a controlled substance. They would only have been doing what they wanted to with their “own bodies,” and they would not have been violating the rights of others.

A person can horribly mutilate himself and its not a crime. Okay, fine. I can understand that. But merely using a recreational drug—one that every government commission that has ever studied it has concluded is less harmful than alcohol—is a crime? It might be a sin by some moral standards, but how can it be a crime? A real crime should involve harming some other person.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that we really don’t own our bodies. The government does and the government decides what behavior, to your own body, you can and cannot do even if that behavior does not harm other people.

So what is the so-called war on drugs all about? If the government actually has the legitimate constitutional power to stop people from using recreational drugs then shouldn’t the government make the most harmful of those drugs a priority?

The substance, tobacco, is the most harmful recreational “drug” in America, racking up more than 400,000 deaths per year. Then there is the disease and suffering and lost production leading up to those deaths that tobacco causes. That would seem a really good drug for the government to fight a so-called war over . . . if the government had the legitimate power to do so, and if the government’s purpose was to protect us from ourselves.

Then there is alcohol, not nearly as bad as tobacco in sheer numbers of deaths. I’ve seen estimated as low as 85,000 deaths per year from the use of alcohol to as high as 200,000. But what is really interesting about alcohol, according to the federal government’s own statistics, is that it is the number one violence-causing drug in America.

The use and abuse of alcohol leads to more than fifty percent of all violent crime, including murders, rapes, and robberies. It’s abuse by pregnant women is also the number one cause of retardation in newborns. So, again, if the government has the legitimate power to fight a war on drugs and the legitimate power to protect us from our own bad choices, then alcohol should the number two enemy in the war on drugs.

But of course the government doesn’t have the legitimate constitutional power to tell people what they can and cannot do with their bodies as long as those people are not violating the right of others. The government took the power and the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized it. The so-called war on drugs is a war on the inalienable rights of otherwise honest, peaceful citizens and it is based on a religious principle that those drugs are immoral therefore they should be illegal.

In a truly free and liberty-loving society, one in which the government upheld the principle of inalienable rights and protected those rights, then an adult (no minors allowed) would not only have the right to mutilate his or her body, but to use any drug they wanted, just as long as their behavior did not violate the rights of others.

I do not advocate drug use by anyone, even tobacco and alcohol. And I strongly suspect that those people who would seriously mutilate their bodies, as well as drug abusers, need counseling and the active support of their family and friends to help them overcome their problems..