I am almost positive that we will no longer be in dept if it became legal in all states
2. You are right Marijuana has never killed someone http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_di...king_marijuana
Well well, looks like I have the opportunity to introduce some happy children to the wonder of our golden age; science.
Thanks to science we have put a lot of research in to a lot of topics, and sadly we have pumped money in to the useless topic of cannabis.
Let's take a look at the short term effects of cannabis;
Cannabis is a simulator and a sedative, is mildly psychedelic and has hallucinogenic characteristics, it causes euphoria and anxiety and an alteration of perception. Between 20 and 30 percent of users experience intense anxiety or panic attacks, additionally there are reports of adverse reactions with cannabis causing strokes - the risk of a heart attack on a middle aged person increases fivefold in the first hour after smoking cannabis. It causes increased heart rates, decreased motor control, judgement impairment, decreased ability to concentrate and focus, and reduction in reaction time. In other words, it's similar to alcohol - except it has additional hallucinogenic properties. A single joint takes up to 8 hours to wear off, which is an equivalent time frame to drinking 6 beers. Needless to say if you operate a vehicle under the influence of either alcohol or cannabis, you are a risk to everyone in the vicinity.
Cannabis use can use cognitive deficits for over a week after use - and as much as 28 days. Long term use is known to cause perception deficits and selective memory defects. Long term effects include psychosis, addiction, heart disease, bipolar disorder, depression, mood swings, schizophrenia, intelligence impairment, memory and concentration deficits, respiratory functions, etc.
In addition, Turtlenecks seems to only care about pulmonary functions, but very close to this we know that cannabis in conjunction with butylated hydroxytoluene (a common food additive) increases risk of lung cancer.
In this day and age there is no reason for people to depend on drugs. Like Turtlenecks said, cigarettes and alcohol kill a lot of people, and cannabis does not. However do you think permanent intelligence and motor skill impairment is acceptable?
By the way, that quote is clearly rigged; usually less than 400 people die from alcohol poisoning a year, not 75,000 (and that includes ingestion of non-ethyl alcohol). Rogan is clearly mixing the criteria for selection of which deaths qualify. I expect a large portion of the deaths are merely alcohol related. Since there are no 'breathalyzer' equivalents for cannabis it is really impossible to determine cannabis related deaths from car accidents without blood tests and postmortem testing - which isn't usually done for accidental deaths. Almost all the cigarette deaths are from long-term effects, which are far more well documented and tracked than cannabis. For example cannabis is known to shorten your life span, but it will not be the cause of death - in the same way that HIV may cause the death of someone by the acquirement of AIDS. Don't trust rigged statistics without proper citation and a clear criteria.
To those saying the government is keeping cannabis illegal so they can profit (), that's obviously not true, legalization and taxation of cannabis would be worth $40-100 billion to the USA gov't. There's no way you think that a handful of fines can match that. However the inverse argument is true; alcohol and cigarettes remain legal because they are profitable. You should not use the legalization of alcohol and cigarettes as justification for legalization of cannabis, as clearly the former should be illegal.
tl;dr You shouldn't need the government to tell you what to do, but you just keep doing dumb shit and governments can't let their citizens die/become crippled for fun.
The stereotypical image of cannabis users won't change anytime soon because there are too many dipshits behaving in the wrong way and too many unsavory elements keep associating themselves with cannabis.
Maybe. But when things like this happen, it goes a ways to changing breaking the sterotypes.