Pot Smokers Might Not Turn Into Dopes After All

I'm not a pothead, I've never smoked pot (or anything else) and never been interested in doing so.

Here's my question: Your college buddy, did he ever hurt anybody? Did he ever punch or shoot someone that he otherwise wouldn't have? Did he have a hard time maintaining relationships with his family? Did he mistreat any significant others he had? Because the only drawback you've stated is that you didn't like him anymore, and that it changed him in some ways. You also said he graduated with a 4.0, which hardly sounds like he destroyed himself.

People change all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, etc have easily documented harmful effects that far outweigh anything you've described, so if your friends' pot use is as serious a problem as you claim you should also be able to point to some actual impacts.

If we're putting laws in place, we should have a demonstrable harm that we're protecting the public from, and that harm should be greater than the harm of enforcing the law. On that basis, outlawing PCP makes total sense, because people on angel dust pose extreme risks to people around them, but outlawing pot has not been demonstrated to be useful.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/i53vcdzxpFQ/story01.htm

Perry Hall High School