Fight About Marijuana

I have always been interested in the study of marijuana and finding out if it is as bad as most people betray it to be. I’ve watched documentaries on marijuana and have learned a decent amount of information about it, from programs in school. Reading a book that was about the scientific evidence of marijuana seemed like the perfect book to get unbiased information from. I wanted to see if reading a book about marijuana would give me any additional information, which the documentaries didn’t.

The book is a summary of the research that has been done on marijuana. The book spends one chapter after another summarizing the experiments and statistics to debunk the most common scare stories. This is a sensible book to show that marijuana is neither completely harmless, or tragically toxic, but that it has minimal detrimental effects, especially compared to drugs that are currently legal. Not only has the author summarized a lot of data here, he writes clearly and entertainingly, often with a joke as a gift to a reader swimming in a sea of data.

There are a total of twelve chapters in this book, and it starts off with highlights in the history of cannabis. From the discovery of hemp covered clay pots in 8000 BC to the adoption of federal laws in support of medical marijuana in Canada, it traces the extensive use of nearly every part of the weed cannabis sativa as industrial hemp, medical marijuana, and cannabis the intoxicant. The book then goes on to review the use and misuse of cannabis including concepts of stepping-stones and gateways, useful definitions of the disease models of addiction, and an overview of the prevention of drug problems. Then the book follows a comprehensive review of marijuana's impact on thought and memory, subjective effects and cannabis pharmacology.

The book also talks about the use of medical marijuana as a treatment for many ailments and the potential for the development, or the ending of social problems which will be valuable in...