Pubdate: Thu, 19 Dec 2013
Source: Ranger, The (Riverton, WY)
Copyright: 2013 The Ranger
Contact:  http://www.dailyranger.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3945
Author: Ben Barber, MCT News Service

COOL DOWN THE RUSH TO LEGALIZE POT

There is a mad rush to legalize marijuana these days, but it's time 
to rethink that generous yet foolish move -- generous because it 
lifts the onus of crime from peaceful smokers, but foolish because it 
harms mental development and health.

Legalization, as we have seen it in Colorado and Washington state, 
lifts the cloud of legal fears from the shoulders of pot smokers. But 
legalizing pot would almost certainly lead to much wider smoking of 
the weed, leaving millions damaged for life.

"People who started smoking marijuana as teenagers and continued into 
adulthood showed an average IQ drop of 6 points between age 13 and 
age 38" reported US News and World Report in 2012.

I know the effects of weed intimately and have seen the good minds of 
my generation squandering their talents and health on the addictive 
buzz of pot. Back in the 1960s, I made my way to one of the best 
communes in northern California, a place where we built our little 
houses in the forest, cut firewood for the winter and delivered our 
babies in the pure mountain air. But time moved on for many of us and 
we spread out into the wider world. I traveled to India and North 
Africa and the Middle East. Finally I decided to study journalism and 
swore off weed until I graduated and got my first full-time reporting job.

When that day came, I began covering the city council, traffic 
accidents, school conflicts, labor strikes, corruption, elections and 
the other meaty stories of small-town life in Massachusetts. I found 
that weed meant nothing to me compared to the rush of participating 
in public life.

Years later I returned to the commune and found a few old-timers 
still ensconced in the redwoods. On that visit, a couple of the 
young'uns were sitting around the main house smoking up a cloud. They 
said they were going to take the chain saw and cut up some fallen 
Douglas fir trees. We left them in the gloomy house, rolling up yet 
another joint, and hiked around the hills.

After two or three hours, we returned to the house and -- guess what? 
No wood was cut. Nothing happened but hours lost in fantasy. Pot 
destroys all initiative. If the brain needs to itch before we scratch 
it through meaningful work, pot soothes that itch and makes it go 
away. Aside from the hacking cough so many of the older smokers 
developed, most likely linked to cancer as well as to emphysema, pot 
reduces the ability to interact with the modern world.

Too many pot smokers simply divide the world into "us" and "them." 
Legalizing pot may take us to a place we will not want to be in a few 
short months and years.

- --- Editor's note: Ben Barber writes for the Baltimore Sun.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom