The Freedom Files
columnist: RS Davis

Topic: War on Drugs
GOVERNMENT: Putting the cart before the horse for 232 years

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The White House's new report on teen drug use is more of the same old propaganda

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by RS Davis
(Libertarian)
Monday, May 12, 2008

Hello Freedomphiles! The White House has issued a report about teen marijuana use and mental diseases. CNN reports:

Teenagers who use marijuana put themselves at higher risks for serious mental health problems, including worsening depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and suicide, according to a new White House report...

The report said more teens use marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined.

The goal is to "correct the blind spot we've had in our society that's caused more young people to suffer," Director of National Drug Control Policy John Walters said.

"The short message is: Marijuana's not safe."

(...)

Depressed teens are more than twice as likely as others to abuse or become dependent on marijuana, it said. And teenagers who use marijuana more than at least once a month are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than teenagers who do not use the drug, it said.

"It's time we stop denying and we stop normalizing what we now know to be pathology and [a] serious potential medical issue," said Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction expert.

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, echoed his remarks. Marijuana is "not going to help anything," she said. "It will make life much worse."

Teenage girls are especially at risk, the report said.

"Girls who smoke marijuana daily are significantly more likely to develop symptoms of depression and anxiety: Their odds are more than five times higher than those of girls who do not smoke marijuana," it said.

Ahhh, I love the smell of propaganda in the morning...smells like...fertilizer.

Look, once again, they are putting the cart before the horse, and playing statistical musical chairs.

Let's look at it this way. I can prove, using statistics, that the more churches there are in a given area, the more likely there is to be crime. Why? Because the more people there are, the more likely there is to be more of everything, including churches, fast food joints, and crime.Lots of churches and lots of crime areboth symptoms of the same situation - lots of people - but one can make correllations that imply causality.

It's the same with this scenario. As I mentioned before, according to a study by Dr Tod Mikuriya, there are many therapeutic uses in the mental health field - including bi-polar disorder, anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder. For many, marijuana works better than anything else they've tried.

So, its no doubt that people who find relief from this medicine continue to use it. From this, it is obvious to anyone with a brain that this is another case of correllation without causation. People with mental issues are more likely to use pot, not the other way around.

As London psychiatrist Trevor Turner said, ""If cannabis caused schizophrenia, the rate of incidence in the countries where it's used more widely would be higher but there's no evidence of that."

No, there isn't.

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2008 RS Davis, all rights reserved.
Published: Monday, May 12, 2008
Last modified: Monday, May 12, 2008

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