Up in smoking - Debate about marijuana use always does well online
By: David Silverberg, Now Magazine (CN ON), 10-19-09

Pot stories always do well in the viral world. Case in point: a Vancouver Sun article reports on an Australian study announcing 166 million people in the world between 15 and 64 have smoked weed in 2006. That’s up from about 159 million pot smokers in 2005.

This tidbit of pot news has already attracted 253 comments and 1,130 “votes” on the news aggregator Digg.com.

So some Australians did a study, what’s the big deal? As some Marc Emery fans would expect, Canadian non-profits are calling for weed legalization, saying everyone’s doing it, let’s stop making pot use a crime. Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa professor and spokesman for the Canadian Foundation For Drug Policy, is quoted as saying, “I'd say 70 or 80 per cent of my university students smoke pot and they are perfectly normal people.”

It’s not enough to simply glean the pro-pot cheerleading from the Sun article.

Go deeper into the study, soon to be published in the Lancet, and you’ll find some nuggets about the adverse affects of smoking weed. If you’re pothead (read: daily user) who’s been getting high for 10 years or more, welcome to the land of “subtle cognitive impairment.” Chronic bronchitis and psychotic symptoms might also be on the dessert menu for any pot smoker who can’t watch a movie without getting high first.

Many High Times readers will say you should judge all these studies cautiously. There’s a government agenda to keep pot out of the good-news pages, they’ll say. It’s all propaganda.

But the Australian’s study numbers are hard – more people are smoking pot. That fact alone may be a catalyst for any medi-pot legislation or full-blown legalization policies on the table.

© 2010 H.U.M.A.N.: Hemp Users Medical Access Network - Toronto Medical Marijuana