By Kasey Shores | Published 56 minutes ago
If you’ve ever looked at a vintage ad for cigarettes, you’ve likely seen a few featuring a doctor with a pack of smokes in his hand proclaiming his approval of X-brand, just like nine out of 10 other doctors.
Historically, tobacco has brought a lot of revenue to the U.S., kept trade alive and could even be considered one of the foundations and reasons for the survival of the U.S.
So back in the ’40s and ’50s, it was typical to smoke. Doctors recommended it, farmers sold it and everyone was happy — until people started dying.
Lung cancer was the first really big, dangerous and recognized long-term effect of smoking cigarettes. Suddenly smokers were coughing, had a hard time breathing, were getting sick and, yes, even dying. In 1964, the U.S. Public Health Service released its first report linking these ailments to tobacco. Now, just a few decades after that initial report from the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, cigarettes come with warning labels and children are taught in school that smoking will kill them.
Too bad we made it legal before we knew the effects. Now it seems marijuana is America’s new tobacco.
We did make tobacco legal and have kept it that way. Tobacco chewing and smoking is still a fairly common activity among Americans as a calming mechanism and an appetite controller.
Still, we’ve made progress. Kids these days know how to say no to cigarettes. They don’t, however, know how to say no to marijuana.
In fact, it feels like no one knows how to say no to marijuana; it is a lot like tobacco used to be. Doctors are recommending it. Kids are claiming it’s not addictive, just fun, and they can handle themselves. People everywhere are lobbying for the legalization of marijuana because of its so-called health benefits.
People have become so keen on the legalization of marijuana that no one is asking what the effects are. We only hear about the euphoria, a high and a good time. Doctors are saying that marijuana helps to ease the pain of cancers, which helps patients who were once bedridden eat and function. We don’t know much about marijuana, but people seem to like it.
Research the long-term effects of marijuana. You’ll see a lot of conflicting opinions, often saying they’re not sure of the supposed possible benefits or that they outweigh the possible consequences, so there needs to be more testing. But that’s it. The idea of using marijuana as an actual, clinical drug is so new that no studies and no real information are available. No one really knows what it’s doing to our minds and bodies.
But we’re sucking it into our lungs anyway.
A UA researcher has been trying to get a permit for a study on marijuana’s effects on post-traumatic stress disorder. The idea is that the calming effects of marijuana can be used as a treatment for PTSD and can help ease victims of this disorder into normal lives. It’s a nice thought, but what if something goes wrong?
Do we really want our veterans, our victims or America’s most emotionally vulnerable to be the lab rats in a study?
Or would we rather see studies done showing the effects, both long-term and short-term, of marijuana on our everyday, average citizens?
We want to see their health problems, their emotional issues and their brain functions before we start seeing how it works for specialty cases. Until we know what the risks are, we shouldn’t be so quick to use it. We don’t want another tobacco on our hands.
— Kasey Shores is a journalism sophomore. Follow her @kaseyshores
Con: Research marijuana before doing specialized studies
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