Marijuana has a lot of very good medical uses, and I truly believe it should be legal, but for just recreational use it wasn't my drug. I didn't like it.
I believe, very strongly, that it is the responsible, adult, recreational, no apologies necessary, 'it just makes my music more fun,' recreational use of marijuana is a civil liberty.
I do not believe that marijuana is a gateway drug, and having been a mayor trying to keep my community safe, if there was any drug that was driving violence, more than marijuana, it was alcohol which is legal. And so I just don't think this is a gateway drug. And by the way, if you regulate it you're actually going to overcome a lot of problems with people having to go to the streets to buy their drug. You don't know how dangerous that is.
As a physician I have sympathy for patients suffering from pain and other medical conditions. Although I understand many believe marijuana is the most effective drug in combating their medical ailments, I would caution against this assumption due to the lack of consistent, repeatable scientific data available to prove marijuana's benefits. Based on current evidence, I believe that marijuana is a dangerous drug and that there are less dangerous medicines offering the same relief from pain and other medical symptoms.
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana.
There's a lot of forces opposed to legalization marijuana, so I don't want to put the cart before the horse. It's looking like it's going the legalization route, which, you know, a lot of people thought it needs to for a long time outside of recreational and medicinal use, just for crime reasons. We're pumping our prisons full of petty weed offenses and it's partially to feed that industry, but it's not good. It's not good for society, people go in there as a minor criminal and come out as a real criminal.
People don't realize that almost two-thirds of the population in the United States lives in a state where either medical or recreational marijuana are now legal. Two-thirds of the country. I am looking at it as kind of a 10th Amendment, states'-rights issue.
By characterizing the use of illegal drugs as quasi-legal, state-sanctioned, Saturday afternoon fun, legalizers destabilize the societal norm that drug use is dangerous. They undercut the goals of stopping the initiation of drug use to prevent addiction.... Children entering drug abuse treatment routinely report that they heard that 'pot is medicine' and, therefore, believed it to be good for them.
Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
I smoked marijuana for 50 yearsIt opened my mind to a lot of things, and now its active ingredient, THC, relaxes me and eases my arthritis pain. I've concluded that marijuana should be legal
[Marijuana] doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works... [I]t is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana. We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.
The government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there are 20 states and the District of Columbia [that have legalized medical marijuana], and there's marijuana everywhere, we've spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We're the only people in America that can't get 10 grams of marijuana.
[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.
If people believe that marijuana helps their medical issues then they should allow people to indulge in those remedies. It is criminal that we do not encourage "science" to fully investigate the medical usages of pot.
I agree that marijuana laws are overdue for an overhaul. I also favor the medical use of marijuana -- if it's prescribed by a physician. I cannot understand why the federal government should interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, nor why it would ignore the will of a majority of voters who have legally approved such legislation.
People who use LSD today know how to use it. Therefore, I hope that the health authorities will get the insight that LSD, if it is used properly, is not a dangerous drug. We actually should not refer to it as drug; this word has a very bad connotation. We should use another name.