Cannabis Confusion

Canada has become increasingly lenient on drug laws, which has created some friction with the Bush administration recently. Vancouver has a strong political effort advocating the use of marijuana. “BC Bud” is a term often used for the potent forms of marijuana distributed from across the boarder into the United States, which has the DEA concerned about tighter boarder security, especially if penalties for possession decrease significantly in the region.
Tibor Palatinus is the Executive Director of the Narconon Vancouver education program and has faced quite an opposition from those who stand to gain financially from the decriminalization or legalization of drugs. “There’s pot all over the place,” comments Tibor during his tour of several states in the U.S. talking about the drug problem, “It’s tough to teach our kids a healthy way of life when it’s so prevalent.”
Marijuana advocacy groups have been in existence for decades. Such misinformed groups have held numerous rallies and demonstrations and even have multi-million dollar lobbying campaigns working on the federal government. However, many feel that allowing marijuana for extreme medical situations would only open the door for further justification for our youth to smoke it and even for promoting its total legalization. While some people argue that marijuana is not as dangerous as other drugs, most people know and understand that pot dulls a person’s senses and causes lethargy.
The harm-reduction and decriminalization concept has been fed by the legalization campaign with what appears to be somewhat logical reasoning, but it ends up condoning continued degradation of the individual, family and social structure of society.
According to Clark Carr, President of Narconon International, “Given the failure of many traditional treatment methods to produce sufficient long-term results, many governments have come to the conclusion that if addiction is an incurable ‘disease’ then it would be better to legalize and distribute drugs than to incarcerate addicts. There have been various levels of experimentation with this in Holland, England, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. The fact is that the harmful affects of drugs can be reversed with an effective protocol.”
When a person becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol, treatment is what is given, but rehabilitation is what is needed to fully recover. The definition for treatment is to care for or deal with medically or surgically. This is where the substitute drugs and “quick patch” programs fall in place, but don’t always provide an effective solution.
The definition for rehabilitation is to restore to a former capacity. This simply means for a person to be in the condition he was in before he had the ailments and the subsequent addiction. The three main barriers to overcoming addiction are the cravings (mental and physical), guilt and depression associated with the drug use.
The issue of whether or not to fully legalize marijuana is, by all means, not a small one. Research has been done to present the “pros” and cons of smoking weed and the results were largely dependent upon who funded the project. Arguments have been made that medical marijuana dulls the pain of coping with certain conditions. So much of the pro marijuana information has made it into mainstream society that children today do not view the drug as being nearly as harmful compared to children twenty years ago, according to recent surveys.
What these advocates fail to mention is the truth about what the drug actually does to a person, such as damaging the lungs, nerves and brain. There are over 400 chemicals found in marijuana smoke and 60 of them have been proven to cause cancer.
Marijuana contains the neurotoxin THC, which is a poison that affects the brain and nerves. When someone smokes pot, two things happen to them: 1) There is an almost immediate burn-up of vitamins and minerals in the body. 2) The nerves in the body go numb.
These to things happen every time someone takes the drug and it causes that person’s health to steadily decrease. A person’s tolerance to the drug also builds and eventually the person has to smoke pot almost continuously just to feel somewhat normal because they have caused so much damage to themselves.
Marijuana’s negative effects also last well beyond the initial use. THC is lipophilic, meaning the chemical is fat-bonding and gets stored inside a person’s body for weeks, months and even years after use ceases.
American author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard did extensive research in the field of drug use and rehabilitation and discovered that the stored drug particles can be released back into the bloodstream at later periods and continue to cause further damage and drug cravings. In his research, Hubbard also developed a dry-heat sauna detoxification program that is totally drug-free and rids the body of the old drug residues and restores health. This highly effective method of detoxification is used at Narconon® drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers around the world.

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