Last week we discussed how many, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, use cannabis to aid their creative processes. Here, poet Allen Ginsberg states how marijuana helped him better “apprehend” music. Ginsberg was known for using marijuana, discussing it in his writing, and advocating for its legalization. In his poem “America,” he writes: “I smoke marijuana every chance I get,” and
Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna points to two significant paradoxes inherent in criminalizing cannabis in the United States. First, hemp was legal when the Declaration of Independence was written–to the degree that the document was written on hemp. Yet, due to longstanding stigmatization of marijuana specifically, hemp remains an underutilized resource we could be using for a vast array
We do imply that it’s a safe drug — in fact we downright assert it to be such — and that’s because it is. But like pretty much anything, cannabis has its downfalls. For example, a recent study indicates that smoking cannabis may put you at greater risk of gum disease. The real reason Representative Rehm feels
Here, Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson speaks to one aspect of marijuana legalization on which most of us can probably agree: the importance of personal freedom. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Just last week, we about a similar statement from Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. That two presidential candidates from such significantly different parties have both
Green Party presidential candidate (and physician) Jill Stein really says it all here–marijuana is not dangerous, and keeping it illegal benefits no one and instead puts many in danger. Keeping marijuana illegal fosters a vast illegal market that can itself be unsafe, and marijuana legalization has already started to put an end to that. In
In Marijuana And Racism: Bearing The Blunt Of The Problem, we wrote about how our nation’s drug laws have always been and still are disproportionally applied to African-Americans. In They Said It On Marijuana, Quotable Saturday, Part LXX, we discussed how Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs to divide White and Black America so as to further
Alcohol and cannabis have similar histories of criminalization. Though alcohol is now legal in every state and sustains a large industry cannabis remains federally illegal, as well as illegal in many states. Officers of the law frequently have commented on how those who use alcohol cause more problems than those who use cannabis and on
We are fine with this attitude from scientists. In fact, this should be the attitude from scientists. Their job is to look at the science as objectively as possible. Conversely, it’s the job of our government to encourage scientific enquiry, not block it for fear of what its results might be. Do you agree?
Sir Richard Branson makes a great point. What is truly criminal is imprisoning young and marginalized people for possessing something safe, non-violent and effective as medicine. We have written time and again about the utterly useless drug war, which has led to stigmatizing cannabis and which was based on prejudice right out of the gate. The time
In his defense, Dr. Frist made this statement in 2003, but there was already substantial evidence at that time that marijuana could be used medicinally for a variety of conditions. This type of thinking persists to this day, even though (as we previously wrote) the body of research affirming that marijuana is medicinally effective continues to
