Sing Along With Me, You Know The Words

Hold on to your hats, folks, Guy Farmer strikes again! Nevada's nuttiest drug warrior has made another hilarious attempt to convince the people of the Silver State that marijuana legalization and regulation will lead to disaster:

The potheads will surely criticize me yet again for labeling marijuana as a dangerous drug, but don't take my word for it. Earlier this year, studies by Minnesota's respected Mayo Clinic found that regular marijuana use can cause health problems ranging from memory loss to cancer.

The most recent information online from the Mayo Clinic I could find was from 2005, here, which has been debunked once again by actual studies showing that there's no link between marijuana use and lung cancer, here. But that's missing the point, anyway. If the fact that something caused cancer was enough to make it illegal, we'd have to make tobacco illegal. The issue isn't whether or not marijuana is harmless or not, it's whether or not making it illegal is an effective policy.

Specifically, clinic researchers reported that pot smoking can inhibit short-term memory; reduce hand-eye coordination, reaction time and muscle strength; limit attention span; increase the risk of schizophrenia, and may even cause paranoia, anxiety and/or panic attacks.

Let's compare that to a legal drug, alcohol, which causes liver disease, heart disease, cancer, pancreatitis, fetal alcohol syndrome, and alcoholism. Is Guy Farmer speaking up to ban alcohol? Of course not, intellectual consistency is for the sane.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reinforced those findings in April by declaring that marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the U.S., and has a lack of safety for use under medical supervision. The FDA further determined that pot smoking is harmful and that there are no sound scientific studies supporting the safety or efficacy of "medical" marijuana.

Maybe Farmer should consult with his buddies at the Mayo Clinic again, where on the same page as above that cites the outdated claim that marijuana causes cancer, explains how marijuana has medicinal use for treating glaucoma, severe pain, multiple sclerosis, and nausea.

But Farmer pulls out the big guns now as he tries to make the claim that legalizing marijuana use will exacerbate the meth problem.

"Marijuana is a gateway drug," he [Indiana Congressman Mark Souder] wrote in a letter to fellow lawmakers. "Far from being a 'benign' substance, marijuana is a dangerous, addictive drug that is frequently the first step into the abyss of lifelong drug addiction." He based his comments on a recent study by the University of Otago, New Zealand, Medical School, which concluded that "there is a clear tendency for those using cannabis (marijuana) to have higher rates of usage of other illicit drugs," including methamphetamine, which is destroying lives in Nevada and elsewhere around the country.

For a good explanation of why the gateway theory is ridiculous, you can click here. The overwhelming majority of marijuana users do not go on to use harder drugs, even if most users of harder drugs started with marijuana (or alcohol). Not to mention that taking marijuana out of the same black market as more dangerous drugs like meth will make it even harder for young people to move from marijuana to harder drugs. Somehow, in Farmer's 28 years of participating in the War on Drugs, he still hasn't figured out this very simple fact.

But none of that matters to him. For whatever reason, he's hell-bent on misinforming Nevada voters about the realities of marijuana. Every reason he can come up with for keeping marijuana illegal applies to alcohol as well, whether it's the severity of the drug's effects or the fact that many people who go on to more dangerous drugs start with those two more common ones. Hopefully, Nevada voters see through his bullshit and become the first state to stop wasting police resources trying to keep adults from using a plant that's more harmless than alcohol.

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For more, here's a clip of Clark County (Las Vegas) Sheriff Bill Young with CRCM Campaign Manager Neal Levine. Young doesn't seem to believe the marijuana arrest statistics that come directly from his state's own top law enforcement agency.