this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I feel like the pendulum of how safe or dangerous weed is has spun back in the opposite direction. At the end of the day weed is a drug. There's worse things out there's but it's not harmless. I know potheads who look at it like it's another green leafy vegetable that also cures cancer.
Edit: I just realized this is the science community. This article is not science. It's news or maybe an editorial. There's plenty of legit studies to post if we want to have this discussion.
I mean, l-theanine is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. So tea and coffee are drugs. Would you approach them with the same caution you do marijuana? Alcohol is a drug.
At the end of the day, the threshold of "is a drug" is fairly low and meaningless on its own.
This article isn't even that persuasive to make it sound like marijuana is bad.
At least with caffeine I would approach it with caution similar to marijuana. Dosages above 300 mg/day are shown to have negative health effects. In general it is fine. Marijuana is also generally safe, but can have negative effects if you take too much or use too often.
People rarely refer to theanine as a drug. It's more of a dietary supplement (food). It's an amino acid.
L-theanine has mind altering effects. I see no reason to not include it in the same category. And that you do, really makes.me wonder why you have arbitrary lines in the sand on things. And your response is absolutely a different take than your initial one. Plus it's not even technically the same topic, which was addiction.
You very much weren't arguing "just use weed in moderation" with your "at the end of the day it's a drug" bit.
The point I am trying to make is that it's not harmless. There's positives and negatives. I just know a lot people(and have seen people argue online) who can't stop talking about the positives and act like there's literally no risk. It has risks.
They're not extreme or anything that means it should be banned but there is risk. To argue otherwise would be disingenuous. I think people are either being deliberately disingenuous, or maybe they literally don't know that there is potential risk with marijuana use.
Everything has the potential to be harmful. But I wouldn't be warning people against video games unless I knew something about them is susceptible to becoming addicted. The same thing can be said of marijuana. It being harmful is the exception, not the rule. Cigarettes and alcohol are more dangerous than marijuana.
It's not a competition of what is more or less harmful. I agree that they're both worse than marijuana. I don't see reasonable argument for pretending there are no risk though. As you know, we throughly awknowledge the risk of tobacco and alcholol. I think going back to caffiene is fair though. Most people they know there are risk to caffiene and they know that having too much of it can cause issues. Warning or awknowledment of risk isn't to sway convince people not to do something, it's to give them informormation to make an informed decision.
here's the two options to present:
vs
You're still missing the point. Marijuana doesn't have that side effect. The person does. You're attributing the problem to the wrong thing. They're addicted not because of the drug but because of other issues in their life. It is not a physiological addiction. Other drugs actually change your body chemistry. Alcohol addiction will change your body chemistry. Marijuana "addiction" is behavioral. Like gambling or video games. The video games don't have the side effect. It's the person that has the inherent problem. If they'd become addicted to marijuana, they'd simply be addicted to something else instead of they give it up without getting some sort of therapy.
You're missing the point. Addiction isn't the only issue.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28115737/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30758486/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35184002/
Literally none of those document cannabis causing anything. Correlation does not imply causation. Depressed people do drugs more often. Doesn't mean drugs make people depressed.
Plus, none of that is the point of this article. Sure if you want to argue something else that's superficially related? But I don't even know what your arguing anymore. Are you arguing for government regulation because it has documented effects that still aren't worse than other legal products? What? Are you arguing something might be bad if not done in moderation? Shocking.
What this whole post is about is if marijuana is addictive. You're. Missing. The. Point.
Edit: two of them were clearly meta studies, maybe all three. That literally doesn't take into account the person at all which we're arguing is more the cause of issues than the drug itself.
It's not harmless, but neither are the vast majority of the products you can buy off the shelf.
Microwaving plastic is terrible. Half the stuff you can buy from home Depot has to have a California reproductive health/cancer warning on it. We actively pump chemicals into the air, water, our bodies, etc. with very little thought to the downstream consequences.
What makes pot special? Alcohol, by nearly every measure, is worse, but we all recognize that banning it doesn't actually help anything, and criminalizing things based on a maybe health impact is insane.