Movie Review

Topic Report

I watched the movie The Union - The Business Behind Getting High. The movie goes into detail on the real reasons why marijuana is illegal in the United States and the world. The author of the movie talks to a great variety of people from growers to scientists to marijuana patients to local and state and federal drug officers to people in Congress to University professors to health professionals. They estimate about 50million people today are marijuana users in the United States. The first main point of the movie was, what are the so called dangers of using marijuana?

The first topic that came up was the thought that marijuana kills brain cells. In 1974 there was a big study done on just this, it was called The Doctor/Tulane Study, The Hype: Brain Damage and Dead Monkeys. In the study they proclaimed that permanent brain damage is the inevitable result of chronic use of marijuana. In the study they pumped 30 joints a day into monkeys with gas masks and after 90 days all the monkeys had died. They counted brain cells before marijuana use and after the monkeys died and figured out that they had lost a good amount of brain cells. But 6 years when the study was released to the public they figured out the study had went a little differently than first stated. What they really did was pump 60 joints into the monkeys with gas masks over a 5 minutes a day for 3 months. The monkeys never got any oxygen breaks within that 5 minutes of marijuana being pumped into them which through time suffocated the monkeys that had no oxygen. The suffocation was the real reason the monkeys lost brain cells not marijuana. A 2005 research journal actually showed that marijuana can actually stimulant brain cell growth.

The other topic that came up was the thought that marijuana causes lung cancer. In 1999 the United States government paid for a study on this topic. In their study they used words like may or should cause lung cancer. They could not show one...