I am not unfamiliar, the last time I used pot or other recreational drugs was around 1974.
Way back pot smokers would say it is safer than alcohol and tobacco. They would also object to it being celled a drug which it is. There are drugs and their is pot. It was claimed it is not addictive which it is.
Over the last few years as more long term data is gathered pot is not looking any better than tobacco.
Pot is a drug and can be addictive, but the vast majority of users show no addiction and it is not remotely as addictive as alcohol or tobacco, which studies show is the most addictive drug there is (more than cocaine and heroin).
As I do not drive anymore I walk and take the bus around Seattle. Here in Seattle where most drugs have been decriminalized pot is everywhere. Pot smoke coming from cars, young people on scooters smoking. There have been police reports of pot contributing to violence as can be the case with alcohol.
Intoxication is intoxication regardless.
No. First, police reports don't mean shit. Cops have zero ability to tell whether pot contributed to a person's violent behavior.
Second, almost all studies claiming link between pot and aggression are correlational and only show weak inconsistent correlations.
The one study that did a true causal experiment that compared pot and alcohol showed that alcohol increased both subjective feelings of aggression and objective measures of aggressive behavior, whereas pot actually had the opposite effect. There may be some minority of people for whom pot increases aggression, but the norm is the opposite, and with alcohol the norm is increased aggression.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-016-4371-1
I say that as someone who drinks somewhat heavily, but uses pot only a few times a year. So, I am not defending my drug of choice.
The smell is everywhere downtown.
Yeah, I agree the constant smell of it so many places is annoying.
In the news yesterday a growing correlation between pot smokinglu8ng cancer, and throat cancer.
There is some medical danger to excessive smoking of anything, but the evidence shows pot smoking isn't close to as bad as tobacco smoking.
This study showed a very linear decrease in lung function with increasing frequency of tobacco smoking, but little relationship with pot smoking. Part of it is that tobacco is so addictive that a huge % of users smoking dozens of cigarettes every day, whereas most pot users smoke only occasionally and almost none smoke many joints per day (I've known one such person in my half century of life).the
This study compared lung cancer rates of smokers of tobacco vs pot. Tobacco massively increases lung cancer, and even most infrequent tobacco smokers have 2.5 times the cancer rate of nonsmokers, and most frequent smokers have 25 times the rate. In contrast, there is no overall increase in cancer among pot smokers. Only the very small % of people who smoked at least one joint every day for over 10 years showed increased cancer rates.
That is on top of the psychological portable reported, like psychosis among teen smokers.
There some correlational evidence between teen smoking and later psychosis, such as schizophrenia. However, even if the relationship is causal, there is no evidence it causes it on its own and only people already prone to schizophrenia are at higher risk from smoking, and those people are less than 1% of the population. IOW, 99% of people are at no risk of psychosis if they smoke pot. That said, people with a family history of psychosis should avoid it.
