Minnesota continues to debate the medical marijuana legislation in the statehouse. Naturally, law enforcement is against the bill; it makes their jobs too difficult when they aren’t allowed to just arrest every toker and rip up every cannabis plant they find. So they have been trotting out the same tired old drug war lies:

1. Marijuana has no medical value
2. Medical marijuana lacks support from the medical community
3. Marinol is marijuana
4. Twelve marijuana plants produce far more marijuana than patients would be allowed to have under the law
5. The safeguards in the medical marijuana law will be unenforceable due to a “tremendous trade in phony scripts”
6. A medical marijuana law will increase youth access and use of marijuana
7. Medical marijuana laws cause “nothing but problems”
8. Every single prosecutor in every single medical marijuana state is opposed to medical marijuana
9. Illegal marijuana use has increased 50% in California since 1996
10. The 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) study discounted smoked marijuana for medicine
11. The potency of marijuana has increased 10 to 30 times since the 1960’s and 1970’s
12. The federal government is vigorously investigating medical marijuana
13. Medical marijuana use will lead to patients using more dangerous and addictive drugs
14. Medical marijuana harms, rather than helps, patients
15. You can overdose on marijuana

So the good folks at Minnesota Cares have put together an excellent white paper debunking all of these myths point by point. Even if you’re not in Minnesota, this paper makes an excellent guide for rebutting our oppenents.

Tags: Minnesota

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Law Enforcement, Medical Marijuana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.