Here’s an interesting list I found that puts the dangers of marijuana in perspective. The sources of these statistics are reports ranging from 2003-2006 from the American Medical Association, National Center for Health Statistics, and US Centers for Disease Control:

Annual Causes of Death in the United States:

• Tobacco: 435,000
• Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity: 365,000
• Alcohol: 85,000
• Microbial Agents: 75,000
• Toxic Agents: 55,000
• Motor Vehicle Crashes: 26,374
• Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs: 32,000
• Suicide: 30,622
• Incidents Involving Firearms: 29,000
• Homicide: 20,308
• Sexual Behaviors: 20,000
• All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect: 17,000
• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs such as Aspirin: 7,600
• MARIJUANA: 0

This information could be used to make a case for outlawing couch potatoes who sit around watching porn, smoking cigarettes and eating Big Macs under the influence of aspirin. But, um, as a deterrent against smoking pot it didn’t exactly scare the pants off me. They’ll have to try harder.

You can read the entire article here, but basically what it says is that a new study was done in the UK to try to prove the earlier study’s results (common practice among researchers). The conclusion the second study came to was completely different from the first one, and the results were recently published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

The authors of this study were professional and polite in their wording, and they didn’t exactly come right out and say those other guys are idiots. But they didn’t need to, because based on the following excerpt from the news article it’s pretty damn obvious that weed can’t be linked to schizophrenia:

According to the study, cannabis use in the UK between 1972 and 2002 has increased four-fold in the general population, and 18-fold among under-18s.

Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29% between 1990 and 2010.

But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased.

So in other words, in the UK there are four times as many people smoking marijuana today as there were in 1972. But not only has the incidence of schizophrenia not increased, it’s actually slightly decreased since 1972.

If the researchers that did the first study had any common sense, then they would see that it stands to reason that if smoking pot was linked to schizophrenia then there would have to be about four times as many schizophrenics today as there were in 1972. But it just ain’t so. Which has to make ya wonder – what were THEY smokin’ ?

Read the full article here.

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