Mythical Marijuana
Most of what has been written in this thread about marijuana is nonsense having nothing to do with marijuana, but with people who have fallen for the mythology that has been built up to sell it to them.
Marijuana does not get you "high," there is nothing in marijuana that is intoxicating, stimulating, or "psychedelic." You have to learn to get "high" with marijuana, and the myths about marijuana are what make it possible, not anything in the plant.
Marijuana is effective in treating chronic severe pain, glaucoma, chronic muscle spasms, epilepsy, seizures, chronic nausea, asthma, and migraines, and relieving some of the discomforts of cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, arthritis, Gastro-Esophagal Reflux disease, Crohn's disease, hepatitis C, and several other ailments. It is prescribed for this purpose for over 30,000 people in the State of Washington who grow or use it legally. It is medically recognized as the most effective treatment for seizures arising from organic brain damage.
Marijuana is neither addictive nor habit-forming. It neither causes nor aggravates schizophrenia or any other mental illness, other than as an effect of its mythology. There is no biological or physical basis for these myths.
Marijuana has been used in human cultures for medicinal and religious purposes since pre-history. A century ago, it was legal in America. It grows naturally almost everywhere in the world. It is an ingredient in some Biblical preparations used in medicine and in religious rituals. It may be consumed as an ingredient in cooked baked goods, as tea or a carbonated "root beer" like sasparilla, or smoked either as a leaf or as "hashish," which is the sap excreted by the flowers of the female plant.
It cannot be effectively regulated or taxed, it is too easy to grow and too wide-spread to be suppressed. Like honey mead, applejack, beer, or wine, anyone can produce it at home without specialized equipment or complex knowledge.
People are taught that it has properties that it does not have. When they later seek escape from the discontents of their daily lives, they believe what they have been taught and learn to relax and set aside their cares by smoking it. They could do this without marijuana, and indeed, many people use alcohol to accomplish the same effect, with considerably more actual effect on their biological and mental functions. People who experience difficulties that they associate with marijuana would encounter the same difficulties without it, as many do. Attributing those effects to marijuana is the same thing as attributing those effects to eating french fries: it is the individual and his circumstances, usually poverty or a consequence of poverty, that produce the effects, not the french fries or the marijuana.
Marijuana does not "lead to" the use of other drugs like mescaline, morphine, heroin, cocaine, or LSD. It is called a "gateway drug" (although it is not a drug) because it is illegal, making it available only where those dangerous drugs are sold.
Marijuana today is the basis for two extremely profitable and extremely large industries: marijuana production and sales, and law enforcement.
It is imported into the United States in "Chartered Craft" that are not subject to Customs inspections, shipped through university fraternity houses, sealed and "inspected" long-haul trucks, and corporate warehouses, distributed with the knowledge and complicity of law enforcement officers, and sold in competition with domestic producers and neighborhood vendors who become the target of law enforcement efforts.
The active ingredient in marijuana is tetra-hydra-cannibinol, the effects within the body are unknown and appear to be undetectable. What is known about it is what it does not do, mentioned above. Its observeable effects appear to be to relax the controls of the ego that maintain tension between an individual and his physical or social environment, in effect a "tranquilizer," but not one whose effects can be explained biochemically or controlled, like sulfadiazoles and other chemicals, or cocaine, caffeine, codeine, morphine, or heroin, which all have detectable biochemical effects.
The main opponents to legalization of marijuana are law enforcement, the alcohol industry, and large commercial marijuana growers and importers.
There are a number of documentary films on the prohibition of marijuana in the United States, which began early in the Twentieth Century. Giving lip service to the prohibition, while using marijuana, is probably the single most common hypocrisy in America, as well as in several other countries.
Marijuana production has been the largest cash crop in several of the United States for many years. In even more it is the second-largest cash crop. The "underground economy" or "black market" counts illegal drugs as the most profitable sector, and marijuana as the leading product. Together with law enforcement, large commercial marijuana growers are the most assiduous opponents of legalization.
And it all rides on a mythology about marijuana that has no basis at all in the plant itself.
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), cheapest and most effective. You can conjure up something between 10 and 15 joints for less than £3 (exlucing the marijuana itself obviously), so that is the option people are going to take every time. I've also tried different methods, such as smoking it through a hookah pipe, and the effects in comparison are frankly not worth the effort of setting the thing up. So, people will use tobacco, and people will become addicted to it through the cannabis. It happened to me and a lot of people I know. I actually started through smoking the cigarettes left in the pack when I had taken all I needed for rolling, just for the sheer hell of it. 
