Marijuana – by Barry PoppinsMarijuana is not a drug that people use–it’s a plant that people use to medicate or chill out. And while it’s stil erroneously an “Illegal Substance,” it’s the most popular “drug” on this planet. And it also causes significantly less (as inzero) deaths (and life-altering addictions) than its pain-killing, ”counterparts”: legal pain killers.
A recent study in the journal Lancet (with loose data) concluded that people love weed, and pain-killers ruin more lives than any other substance on this planet.
Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug used worldwide, but addictions to popular painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin and codeine kill the most people, according to the first-ever global survey of illicit drug abuse.
In addition to cannabis and opioid painkillers, scientists analyzed abuse of cocaine and amphetamines in 2010, largely based on previous studies. Ecstasy and hallucinogens weren’t included, because there weren’t enough data. The researchers found that for all the drugs studied, men in their 20s had the highest rates of abuse. The worst-hit countries were Australia, Britain, Russia and the U.S. The study was published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.
But there were few concrete numbers to rely on and researchers used modeling techniques to come up with their estimates.
“Even if it is not very solid data, we can say definitely that there are drug problems in most parts of the world,” said Theo Vos, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the study’s senior author. Vos said people tended to abuse drugs produced close to home: cocaine in North America, amphetamines and opioids in Asia and Australia. The lowest rates of drug abuse were in Asia and Africa. Of the estimated 78,000 deaths in 2010 because of illegal drug use, more than half were because of painkiller addictions. [Miami Herald]
And not a single death was ever directly caused by a marijuana addiction…yet it remains illegal everywhere (aside from Washington, Colorado, Amsterdam Uruguay, and North Korea!). One of these days, we’re going to look back on this and laugh. One of these days…
It doesn’t matter how beneficial anything is. If it competes with the liquor and/or pharmaceutical companies it has to be illegal.
After we kick every last stinking Jew out of this country, things will start making sense again, but not until then.
Nothing shocking about this revelation.
Unlike coca or opium plants, pot can be grown almost anywhere.