heck, even apple seeds can be deadly if you eat too many of them.

Marijuana might cause long-term effects in sleep, but that varies from person to person.

It’s just a plant.

Had you really studied psychology as you claim you did (you’ll be hard pressed to find a psychology faculty at a reputable university that’ll teach you hypnosis), you’d know it’s highly scientific and highly concerned with gathering tons of data, using control groups, and critically analysing empirical evidence.
I’m speaking out experience with many people that have been destroyed by this stuff, physically and mentally. My experiences are not only mine but go in line with most recent research as backed by our Federal Ministry of Health. The link is above. You, on the other hand, are speaking from the point of view of a user. My experience tells me that users will always try to validate use for themselves.

I’m not a victiom of the war on drugs. Many friends and students are victims of the effects of drugs. Read up on long-term effects of marijuana causing sleep disorders. You might well be another victim.

Your grandmother’s medication only has one possible side effect? That’s simply not possible, have you ever read the inserts that come with medication. Marijuana is completely natural and can be grown organically. Any person who has every smoked, either recreationally or medically realizes that there are huge potential benefits of marijuana for a whole slew of medical issues, not all being terminal.

I haven’t smoked marijuana in years. However, I have a sleep disorder. I was on valium for years to help me sleep. I almost died going off the valium because I stopped it abruptly after a skiing accident and I had terrible anxiety attacks from stopping the valium. Before taking the valium, I smoked marijuana in the evenings and I slept really good on most nights. I’ve been to some of the best sleep doctors and sleep labs in the US, and I’ve found nothing that works for me (they just want to push pills down my throat). If my Chupat Cholim would prescribe it, I would definitely consider smoking before bed. Those were the times in my life that I felt the best physically and mentally.

Psychology is certainly not a science. Just because it’s taught at University doesn’t prove anything. I was trained for over 3 years in hypnosis, and I have read many, many books on psychology. A lot of opinions, not a lot of science.

The discussion here was about medical marijuana, not recreational use. Every Orthodox Posek and Rabbi would agree that if a doctor prescribes it, then it is completely Mutar (permissible).

You’re simply speaking out of ignorance….another sad victim of the war on drugs.

Btw…I’m an utra-orthodox Jew.

The medication my grandma uses tackles the cause of her Parkinson’s: the imbalance between dopamine and glutamate in her brain. The only known side-effect of her medication could be hyperkinesia at a later stage (though she’s old and might never get there). This contrasts rather favourably to indifference, an increased risk of schizophrenia, schizothymia etc.

As for terminally ill patients, I think anything that eases their pain is legitimate. As for non-terminally ill patients, there indeed are a lot of side-effects to be considered and options must be gauged.

But what I was getting at above is that potheads and potheads-to-be use the, still debatable, advantages of medical marijuana compared to e.g. morphia in terminally ill cancer patients and deduce from that that recreational use is also harmless. That is factually wrong. It’s not only me that has seen the effects on young people, but there are numerous studies out there that indicate that the stuff is anything but harmless, has got serious side effects, and that we’re only just now getting to see the long-term side effects among those that started taking it in the 1960s.

BTW, my grandmother’s been ill with Parkinson’s for about two decades now, and she takes medication against the shaking.
PTSD patients don’t need drugs but therapy. You don’t cure a person by silencing the symptoms rather than tackling the cause of their misery.

I don’t own a car, so you needn’t worry about me putting you in danger on the roads.

for the record, I’ve never been high. I’ve never been drunk. I’ve also never been in this much pain. Acamol and ibuprofen and all that stuff doesn’t make any difference because this is neuropathic pain.

Either you’re notoriously stupid or notoriously dishonest. Either way, I don’t see any need to waste my time on a person like you any longer.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is getting ridiculous. I give you the links to official reports you now claim to have read, and you still try to get away with making up numbers. Hopefully, the other readers of this debate will take the time to read them themselves, and see straight threw your LIES.

“drug use related crimes (purchase & possession) have gone down in Norway and Slovenia, but have risen in the rest of the EU by 51% on average; crimes related to drugs (as in getting money for drugs, prostitution etc.) have risen by almost 50%”

It is a cold fact that The Netherlands have amongst the lowest levels of heroin use in the world, it has slowly been dropping year by year, and the average heroin user in Holland is about 20 years older than an average heroin user in Norway. Which btw is my country of residence, so I also know for a fact that we have the highest number of users of heroin in the world. And that we arrest roughly the same amount of illegal drug users each year. (10 000 – 13 000) So NO, there has not been a drop in users.
This year there has been a national debate about following the Dutch, the Danish, The Swiss, and the Germans in allowing Heroin maintenance programs, as these have had a proven positive effect on crime, health and recruitment in the countries who have tried them, and it seems very likely that it will be a part of the official state drug program by next year, depending on the result of Septembers election. I would attach links to document, but they are all in Norwegian, so I don’t think that would help you much.
But where do you get a 51% average rise of drug use for the remaining countries? Your pulling numbers out of thin air! Tell me where these reports say this, or please send me a link to ANY other official report that claims this. You have yet to provide ANY documentation on your claims, and I happen to know they are dead wrong, after working with drug policy in Norway, The Netherlands and the U.K. for the last 4 years. What you are saying makes no sense, has no scientific documentation and is at best a gross misrepresentation of statistics and facts.
One misrepresented fact per say is calling prostitution for a crime related to drugs, as the only reason girls have to prostitute themselves for it is precisely because it is illegal. If drugs were legal, a daily habit would not cost up to 1000$ a day as they do now, and nobody would have to sell sex to afford a habit. This is one of the key points in why countries all over Europe are considering heroin maintenance.

“The number of heroin users in the EU has slightly gone down, but the number of cocaine users has skyrocketed”

Cocaine use has risen in the EU, this much is true. But not anywhere near as much as it has in the USA which have the most harshest punishments for cocaine use in the western world. It has risen in every country, and has so just as much (but in most cases more) in countries with a “tough on drugs” approach. This can in no way be said to be a result of decriminalisation.

“The reason why drug use has not stopped in countries were drug trafficking is punished by death penalty is that addicts tend to believe themselves smarter than they usually are and are incapable of seeing the consequences of their drug use.”

All though I couldn’t disagree more with you conclusion, doesn’t that kind of prove my point though? You CAN’T stop drug use through punishment, because there will ALLWAYS be (apparently a lot of) people willing to take the risks involved no matter what they are, to use or sell drugs. No country in the history of the earth has ever been drug free. Prohibition does not work.

“Drug use in these countries has gradually gone down since such extreme measures were started to be taken.”

You fail to state which countries you are refering to. If they exist, please write down a link to some sort of documentation. Because I don’t believe you.

“it appears that all politicians that favour decriminalising drug purchase or consumption seem to have a history of substance abuse themselves”

If that is true, it only proves yet again that illegal drugs are (or have been) used by members of all social stands in society. And even if they have, do you mean to imply that because they have actually tried the substance under discussion, they somehow hold no credibility? Isn’t it a good thing that politicians have first hand experience when they are making laws? Isn’t a free society about taking all sides of a matter into perspective and finding the least bad solution for everybody?
Btw, last year presidential candidate Ron Paul of the American Republican Party is one of (if not THE) most outspoken politicians on this issue, and he has never touched an illegal drug in his life.

So, provide me a link if you can to prove your false claims! Prove it!
I think your to hung up on disagreeing that you fail to see the evidence in front of you.

Some people use drugs you don’t like.
Deal with it.

In countries that have decriminalised marijuana, heroin use, and “heroin-related” crime, as you put it, has gone DOWN.
But don’t take my word for it, please read the U.N and E.U drug statistics yourself.

unodc.org/unod...

emcdda.europa....

A good example of this is Portugal. They decriminalised ALL drugs in 2001, and have since seen a dramatic fall in overall drug use, and drug related crime. In this newly published report by the highly acclaimed Beckley foundation and DrugScope,
HARD FACTS prove decriminalisation to be a success.
You can read the report online here:

74.125.77.132/...

It is also available as a downloadable pdf file at the top of the page.

Time Magazine wrote an interesting article about it that sum up the important parts.

time.com/time/...

Your claim(s) simply make no sense. And the hard facts prove you not only wrong, but you’ve got it all backwards. Why would heroin-related crime go up if we stopped arresting responsible adults for smoking marijuana? Answer me this! How is that logic? There is only one thing that is comparable between the two substances – the fact that they are both illegal. remove the illegality, and what you have left are two very different substances indeed. The “stepping stone” theory has been denounced by all serious drug scholars for a very long time, so please, no need in even trying to repeat this old myth.

The Dutch tolerate marijuana smoking precisely to separate the soft drugs market from the hard drug dealers, and have done so with great success.
Heroin use in the Netherlands is amongst the lowest in all of Europe, this is mostly attributed to marijuana smokers not coming in contact with dealers offering them harder drugs when they buy marijuana.
But maybe more surprisingly, cannabis use (especially amongst teens) is among the lowest in Europe as well, and far lower than in for example prohibitionist Norway, with maybe the harshest drug laws in Europe, and the highest amount of heroin users in the world.
Under prohibition, it is the same criminal gangs that sell ALL of the drugs, making it a lot more likely for a lot more people to ever come in contact with the harder drugs in the first place.

Even the U.S.A are slowly backing out on the war on drugs, the country that started it all. In the last 13 years, 14 US states have legalised medical marijuana, and today, more than half of the american population live in a state that has relaxed or completely decriminalised they marijuana laws. Marijuana is here to stay, and you can’t make it disappear even with the most brute force. Think about it, you can still get it even in countries that kill you for having it. Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, all these countries execute and/or torture people for using drugs, but Amnesty International still report new cases every month. If this was so effective, why hasn’t drug use stopped there by now?

BTW, being labelled conservative doesn’t hit me as an insult. I’d rather be conservative than to buy into to the meak arguments of drug traders. FYI, since the Netherlands and Switzerland have decriminalised marijuana, the number of heroin-related crimes has gone up.

I will not claim to know you, but you strike me as a very conservative and arrogant person. Some of the things you say seem to have been written down in anger, and it doesn’t seem like you’ve actually given any thought to what kind of arguments you’re using, and expecting anyone to take seriously.

You say that ALL potentially dangerous substances should be banned. Have you really given that much thought? Did you know that regularly sold headache pills are responsible for more overdose-deaths than all illegal drugs and alcohol overdoses each year? That is a fact! Should we ban paracetamol?
Have you even considered what would happen to organised crime if we banned alcohol or tobacco? The U.S.A tried it in the twenties with alcohol, and Al Capone happened.
You see, when a state bans something that a lot of people desire, it doesn’t remove the substance from the face of the earth, it mearly drives everyone involved underground, and creates a market that can only be run by criminals. The crime and social destruction caused by prohibition greatly outweighs any damage ANY drug could ever do to a society. Today, criminal gangs are making Billions of tax free dollars each year on criminalised drugs, and is recognised by the U.N. as the 3rd most profitable trade world-wide, only beaten by Oil and the illegal weapons trade. The gangs reinvest in other (often more violent) crime, and corrupt the legal and political system, in countries like mexico so much that they are on the brink of sivil war. It is the crime we should be afraid of, not by the prospect of free adults smoking a joint and watching a movie eating cheese doodles on a friday night if they choose to do so.
Marijuana is already far more available today than it would be if it was regulated. Today, there is no age-limit restricting kids, it can be (and is) secretly sold at at any place at any time of the day. There is no quality control, (these drugs could be a lot safer) and the state can not collect tax on it.
Harsh penalties have proven NOT to deter use in any satisfactual way, as the ones who wish to use them find a way to do so anyway. I do not understand why we should use the national police force to wage war on normal non-violent citizens, when it only encourages a criminally run black market, and fails to keep anyone who wishes to use drugs from doing so. There is no logic to it. Prohibition is a failed policy. PROVEN in every country who has tried it not to work. The drugs are already here, and have been all along. The ones who do them just simply keep away from people like you, and probably will continue to do so after legalisation.

You have to learn that just because some people choose to do (at least in your outspoken opinion) bad choices, it does not give you the right to prohibit them to do so in a free society, as long as they are not hurting anyone. A marijuana smoker has no victim. Marijuana will not make you violent or crazy, or make you do other criminal activities. Your claims that marijuana smoking have proven long term effects are simply factual errors, but in the big picture it doesn’t even matter as the consequences of prohibition does far more damage to society as a whole even if your claims where true anyway.

I would like to strongly reccomend you check out leap.cc – law enforcement agains prohibition – an organisation of former and present police officers and judges, all who have been involved in, but are now against the war on drugs.

leap.cc