You may recall Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the renaissance man who is probably most recognizable from CNN. He has recently been tapped by Barack Obama to be surgeon general and a Time article featuring him hit digg earlier. It's an article written by Dr. Gupta himself entitled Why I Would Vote No On Pot.
Naturally, the digg community is all up in arms about Dr. Gupta's dislike for marijuana for recreational use. If you ask me, I agree with him 1000%.
What do voters need to know before going to the polls?
The first is that marijuana isn't really very good for you. True, there are health benefits for some patients. Several recent studies, including a new one from the Scripps Research Institute, show that THC, the chemical in marijuana responsible for the high, can help slow the progress of Alzheimer's disease. (In fact, it seems to block the formation of disease-causing plaques better than several mainstream drugs.) Other studies have shown THC to be a very effective antinausea treatment for people--cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example--for whom conventional medications aren't working. And medical cannabis has shown promise relieving pain in patients with multiple sclerosis and reducing intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients.
But I suspect that most of the people eager to vote yes on the new ballot measures aren't suffering from glaucoma, Alzheimer's or chemo-induced nausea. Many of them just want to get stoned legally. That's why I, like many other doctors, am unimpressed with the proposed legislation, which would legalize marijuana irrespective of any medical condition.
Personally, I'm a proponent of the decriminalization of certain drugs like marijuana, not the legalization. I think the courts are wasting huge amounts of time and energy on drug users and the system takes otherwise normal people and churns out actual criminals.
With that said, I'd like to call on folks to live honestly, all of the complete bullshit I read in the digg comments is so tired. I don't particularly care if people get high but don't pretend that it's anything more than wanting to sit on your ass and get stoned. It's a totally fucking useless activity. Again, I have nothing against useless activities, I engage in them often. But shut up about all this philosophical and conspiratorial bullshit. Dr. Gupta is a fucking brain surgeon and he knows what he's talking about.
