Smoking anything is bad for your lungs. Luckily there are other ways to consume marijuana other than smoking, such as eating it in a brownie. As for whether marijuana itself is a good thing or not, the answer is most definitely yes. It has many medical benefits, especially to AIDS sufferers (it stimulates the appetite and suppresses nausea) amongst many many other people. Best of all though, it is a completely natural substance, grows from the ground and needs no processing, and it’s impossible to overdose on it. Compare this to a drug as simple as tylenol, which can actually be a dangerous drug if you consume too much, let alone the fact that you could not produce it on your own. Of course, like any drug, there is a subset of the population who may have a negative reaction to it, such as those predisposed to schizophrenia.
If you are interested in why marijuana is illegal, I recommend reading this Wikipedia article as well as this one. In America, back in the early 20th century when cannabis was legal, various government agencies (in specific, the federal bureau of narcotics, run by Harry J. Anslinger) actively campaigned to make the association with cannabis and Mexican workers to bolster support for controlling both, that’s why they renamed cannabis to “marijuana”, it sounds like a Mexican word! As well, the non-psychoactive marijuana, hemp, posed a significant risk to the paper and textile industries, so Harry Anslinger’s friend William Randolph Hearst (who owned a giant paper mill and newspaper production lines) helped to publish stories decrying the social costs of this special drug the Mexicans have, marihuana. Before the 1900s, cannabis and hemp were considered one of the most valuable crops around, in fact it was legally mandated that people must grow hemp, and George Washington grew a ton of it.
Nowadays though the government is in a catch-22, especially with the medical dispensaries and the increased social pressure to legalize it. The government can’t admit it was wrong about the social costs of marijuana, else it loses face and admits that how many billions of dollars in prohibition and policing was for nothing. Heck they STILL don’t even consider it to have any medicinal benefits, even though they are proven. But at the same time many people are learning for themselves that the government hysteria was unfounded and unrealistic. Best of all, if they legalized it, everyone who was interested in it would be growing their own little plant or buying from others, so the government would gain a massive tax influx as well as reducing the profits that get funneled to crime and reducing their policing costs. But it takes a big man to admit they are wrong, and I really doubt I’ll ever hear that coming from the lords of the South in my lifetime.
Us here in Canada have pretty much legalized it, the police have too many other things to do than to pick on Joe Blow smoking a doobie in the street. Vancouver is almost like a mini Amsterdam now, with coffeeshops and all! But it will not officially be legalized until America does it first, cause oh my what a backlash that would have!
