Stasher MoldyCutter forwarded me a comment he found on a post at the New York Times that answers beautifully the prohibitionist’s claim that “emergency room admissions for marijuana are skyrocketing!”:

15 years of full time emergency medicine and I’ve maybe seen 10 visits to the ER for cannabis – these fall into 2 categories: 1. pot brownies – an unfortunate way to ingest way too much cannabis – unpleasant, but completely non-life threatening. 2. And (the vast majority of those 10 visits) parent who brings in normal appearing teen asking for a drug test for pot (available over the counter, by the way for you parents out there).

I see that “ER visits going up” canard regularly and the writer might as well say “I’m an idiot” – what is a “marijuana related ER visit”? Are they counting every positive urine drug screen? Or just people who come complaining that their pot is too potent? What?

Of all the drug / medicine related misery I’ve seen, the dearth of ER visits I’ve seen due to cannabis suggest that when it comes to drugs, cannabis may be the most benign substance on earth (if you want to measure that by ER visits). Clearly the worst thing about it is that it can get you into serious legal problems (since it’s not legal).

People have always and will always use plants and synthetic compounds to alter their senses – period. When it comes to the drug war, the diagnosis is clear: the treatment is worse than the disease.

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New CASA* Report Finds: Marijuana Potency up 175 Percent, Medical Diagnoses, Treatment Admissions, ER Findings for Teen Marijuana Use up Sharply
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – June 18, 2008) – Despite reported declines in teen marijuana use, in 2007 almost 11 million teens report having used marijuana. For those using the drug, four alarming trends are of grave concern for parents and teens, according to “Non-Medical Marijuana III: Rite of Passage or Russian Roulette?,” a new report by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University.

From 1992 – 2006:

– There was a 175 percent jump in the potency of marijuana (3.2 to 8.8 percent THC concentration in seized samples).

The potency zombie just will not die! Here it is, you can go read the report yourself. On page 14, it is interesting to note that the percentage of “domestic” seizures compared to “non-domestic” varies from 20.9% to 45.5% of the overall sample when considering the “average”. And as we learned from the Drug Czar’s blog, “domestic” means unharvested marijuana not ready for consumption. Why would you average in the “domestic” marijuana when the point is to claim that the marijuana being consumed by teens today is so much more potent?

And are the kids these days really getting a hold of the more potent ganja? A look at page 6 shows us that between 12/16/07 – 3/15/08 they analyzed 1,290 samples, of that, 3.25% of it was hash or hash oil, the really potent stuff. So 96.75% of what’s seized lately is cannabis.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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