Cannabis politics have been making lots of changes over the twenty years. For instance, electing a President with a negative view of marijuana would be an awful thing more many reasons – especially in regards to research done by the University of Victoria and released in Drug and Alcohol Review. It also verifies what is already known to anyone willing to inspect the research being done at the moment: cannabis is not a gateway drug, and can actually do the opposite. In fact, cannabis has been suggested to rid people of their alcoholism as well as their drug addictions.
This research looked at information from a national survey of Canadian cannabis patients. Out of the 473 adults surveyed, eighty-seven percent reported using cannabis as a surrogate for alcohol, prescriptions and other hard drugs. More specifically, eighty percent substituted marijuana for prescriptions, fifty-two percent for alcohol and thirty-three percent for illegal drugs. These numbers support a study from 2009 on Berkeley Patients Group members that also found a majority of medical cannabis patients that used the drug as a substitute for more severe drugs.
After marijuana was erroneously classified as a Schedule I drug in 1970, those against marijuana began saying that the drug was the ultimate gateway to intense drug use: if you smoke cannabis now, you will end up smoking crack. The claim had no factual foundation but became the basis for the Reagan-era “Just Say No” campaign.
But the increasing use and acceptance of medicinal marijuana — at first to save the lives of those suffering from intense conditions and eventually legalized in various states to treat a variety of conditions — shifted the perspective on marijuana. In 1999, a Congress-commissioned report which the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences did suggest that there is “no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
MAPH Enterprises, LLC | (305) 414-0128 | 1501 Venera Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33146 | new@marijuanastocks.com
1 comment
That’s not true I’m in my 50’s and smoke Marijuana since 15 yrs old never graduated to a higher drug plus know one will go from a downer Marijuana to a upper Crack two different highs okay