Marijuana, reefer, weed, pot, kush, doesha, magic hemp, cannabis.
Cannabis, also known as marijuana (from the Mexican Spanish marihuana) and by other names, is a preparation of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug and as medicine. Chemically, the major psychoactive compound in cannabis is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol; it is one of 400 compounds in the plant, including other cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN), and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV), which can produce sensory effects unlike the psychoactive effects of THC.
Contemporary uses of cannabis are as a recreational drug, ... the earliest recorded uses date from the 3rd millennium BC... Since the early 20th century cannabis has been subject to legal restrictions with the possession, use, and sale of cannabis preparations containing psychoactive cannabinoids currently illegal in most countries of the world; the United Nations has said that cannabis is the most used illicit drug in the world.
It appears that the legalization or, at the very least, the decriminalization of cannabis has some interesting side affects:
The enactment of statewide medical marijuana laws is associated with fewer incidences of suicides
.... Researchers at Montana State University, the University of Colorado, and San Diego State University assessed rates of suicide in the years before and after the passage of statewide medical marijuana laws. Authors found, “The total suicide rate falls smoothly during the pre-legalization period in both MML (medical marijuana law) and non-MML states. However, beginning in year zero, the trends diverge: the suicide rate in MML states continues to fall, while the suicide rate in states that never legalized medical marijuana begins to climb gradually.”
They reported that this downward trend in suicides in states post med-pot legalization was especially pronounced in males. “Our results suggest that the passage of a medical marijuana law is associated with an almost 5 percent reduction in the total suicide rate, an 11 percent reduction in the suicide rate of 20- through 29-year-old males, and a 9 percent reduction in the suicide rate of 30- through 39-year-old males,” they determined.
Authors theorized that the limited legalization of cannabis may “lead to an improvement in the psychological well-being of young adult males, an improvement that is reflected in fewer suicides.” They further speculated, “The strong association between alcohol consumption and suicide-related outcomes found by previous researchers raises the possibility that medical marijuana laws reduce the risk of suicide by decreasing alcohol consumption.” ...
Might I be so bold as to suggest that if the young, male shooter at Aurora, Colorado had ingested pot rather than legal and official pharmaceuticals, Aurora might not have happened? But our nation is consumed with Gun Madness, not Reefer Madness, we love death and death and killing is so deliciously profitable ... and we love profit above all else.
But, alas, our nation has been schooled to react hysterically to any notion of legalizing marijuana, whereas not an eyebrow is raised when someone like the Aurora shooter buys 6,000 rounds of ammo:
The war on drugs embraced by President Ronald Reagan began largely as a campaign against marijuana organized by conservative parents' groups in the late 1970s. After more than a decade in which penalties for marijuana offenses had been reduced at both the state and federal levels, the laws regarding marijuana were made much tougher in the 1980s. More resources were devoted to their enforcement, and punishments more severe than those administered during the "reefer madness" of the 1930s became routine. .. The story of how Mark Young got a life sentence reveals a great deal about the emergence of the American heartland as the region where a vast amount of the nation's marijuana is now grown; about the changing composition of the federal prison population; and about the effects of the war on drugs, a dozen years after its declaration, throughout America's criminal-justice system. Underlying Young's tale is a simple question: How does a society come to punish a person more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?
The above article cites the historical role of marijuna in this country:
THE first American law pertaining to marijuana, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1619, required every farmer to grow it. Hemp was deemed not only a valuable commodity but also a strategic necessity; its fibers were used to make sails and riggings, and its by-products were transformed into oakum for the caulking of wooden ships. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland eventually allowed hemp to be exchanged as legal tender, in order to stimulate its production and relieve Colonial money shortages. Although a number of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, later grew hemp on their estates, there is no evidence that they were aware of the plant's psychoactive properties. The domestic production of hemp flourished, especially in Kentucky, until after the Civil War, when it was replaced by imports from Russia and by other domestic materials. In the latter half of the nineteenth century marijuana became a popular ingredient in patent medicines and was sold openly at pharmacies in one-ounce herbal packages and in alcohol-based tinctures as a cure for migraines, rheumatism, and insomnia.
We were saner then, were we not? And we were not subject to the tyranny of the corporate entities who profit from death and sickness, the corporate entities like gun and ammo manufacturers, bombmakers, the new unmanned systems industry, the pharmaceuticals, the health insurance industry.
Marijuana is a serious threat to these profiteering ghouls of commerce.