by Leon K

Created on: February 18, 2009

Marijuana is very hard to simply be classed as benign in its effects; however is it a fact that its long term use at a non-abusive rate has less side effects than that "substance" of a higher calibre. In fact there is no hard evidence to suggest that marijuana used by a young adult would have severe side effects physically such as those higher up the substance hierarchy.

There was a very famous study conducted by Dr. Robert Heath, done in the late 1970s in association with Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences . This experiment was implemented in order to distinguish the effects of marijuana on the brains of four monkeys. The experiment itself was highly scrutinized because of the sample size, failure to control bias and not correctly identifying the normal brain structure of the monkeys used in the trail. The trail indicated that the effect on the monkey's brain was severe and left them "brain damaged". However it was later revealed that the amount of smoke that had been concentrated and funnelled through gasmasks was the equivalent approximately one hundred joints in the period of 5 minutes with little to no oxygen flowing in the masks, this is a dangerous practice. The monkey's brain shut down after 5 minutes, for the obvious reasons. Over the years an actual study was conducted over a human population of users and found absolutely no evidence for brain damage. This includes the 1977 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluding that there was no evidence of brain damage in heavy users of marijuana

Is Marijuana a gateway drug? Absolutely not. The most common misconception of marijuana is that it is a gateway drug leading to many other harder and more dangerous habits, however this is not true. In Holland, the Dutch partially legalized marijuana in the 1970s. Until now hard drug use such as heroin and cocaine have reduced substantially and consistently. If you were to agree with the misconception that marijuana is a gateway drug than you also have to bind this also to alchahol and tobacco. I believe the misconception may be true in the sense that because marijuana is illegal, the efforts in obtaining it are quite minimal, the exposure of other hard drugs becomes apparent as the person selling marijuana in most cases also sell other things.

If marijuana is indeed as potent and dangerous as is being marketed by your leading television network, then why is it that there are no recorded deaths from the use and

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