CANNABIS EFFECTS AND PROPERTIES PART 2
The following properties and effects were taken off a book just on the market.
MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION : “What everyone needs to know“. The book is available at Bargain Books and has 4 authors, all are professors.
1) During the 1970’s “drug prevention literature made claims of marijuana-related fatalities. But those accounts fly in the face of what science actually tells us.
(2) robert Gable of the psychology department at Claremont graduate university estimated the “safety ratio” for various drugs. This is the ratio of the average fatal dose to the average recreational dose. Bigger ratios mean bigger safety. There is no known fatal dose for marijuana. Such a dose would be about 1000 times the amount typically consumed.
(3) Gables review only identified two deaths reported in the world medical literature that could possibly be attributed to a marijuana overdose A Toronto pharmacologist commented that the two deaths “probably involved individual risk factors. Without which the marijuana alone would not have been fatal.
(4) There are, however, official statistics in the United states suggesting that marijuana can kill. The Centres for disease control’s WONDER database reports that there were twenty six deaths between 1999 and 2007 coded as mental and behavioural disorders. (Seems there was some faking of causes.) Half of the 26 deaths were attributed to dependence syndrome. If all twenty six deaths were overdose deaths, three deaths per year would work out to a rate of only about one per 10 million person years.
(5) the fact that marijuana is not directly fatal does not mean it poses no acute risks. There can be interactions with other drugs, Notably, marijuana’s capacity to prevent vomiting, which makes it appealing to some people undergoing chemotherapy, becomes a danger for those overindulging in alcohol because vomiting is one of the body’s defence against poisoning.
(6) tens of thousands of people end up in hospital emergency departments every year for reasons relating to their marijuana use. The DAWN system (Drug abuse Warning Network) estimates how many emergency department visits results from “accidental ingestions and adverse reactions as well as explicit drug abuse. In 2009 DAWN recorded more instances of Marijuana 375*000 per year than any other legal drug save cocaine(425*000) the marijuana figure was almost double the number for heroine (215*000) and far mo0re than MDMA (25*000) Nevertheless, Marijuana is much more widely used than the others so the probability of an ED mention per user is lower for marijuana than for cocaine or heroin.
(7) In the interests of clarity the following statement must be borne in mind: Psychosis and schizophrenia are not 2 entities like malaria and the common cold. Schizophrenia is a function of psychosis and there are very many forms of schizophrenia.
(8) There are about 40,000 people in prison due to marijuana offences. The cost to the state and taxpayer is about $30*000 per inmate. This works out to $1,2 billion.
(9) Current consumption currently generates 15 billion hours of intoxication every year in the united states. Legalization could double or triple that. Optimists would say that most of those hours would bring pleasure. The dependence syndrom is a cluster of physiological, behavioural and cognitive phenomena in which the use of a substance takes a much higher priority for a given individual than other behaviours. SEE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION
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