The Health and Mental Effects of Cannabis essays

The Health and Mental Effects of Cannabis essays Controversy has been revolving around cannabis for decades, but the plant itself has been in existence for centuries. The plant as a whole has many different uses from medicinal, to recreational, to industrial. Cannabis uses stretch from treating glaucoma patients all the way to making durable clothing. Marijuana, as it is also known, has been in use as far back as ancient times for its psychoactive effects as well as for its great healing properties, and continues to be used to the present day. Many myths and unknowns still exist around this plant despite many years of extensive testing, especially regarding the health and mental aspects of the plants usage. According to research, smoking cannabis is healthier than smoking tobacco, and the mental affects are relatively harmless and temporary. On the health side of the spectrum, marijuana has constantly been compared against tobacco. Approximately twenty years ago the United States Government did extensive research on the two plants in comparison to one another. However, those studies blatantly favored tobacco in the way that they were conducted in order to dampen the consumption of cannabis. Due to the efforts of various federal agencies to discourage the use of marijuana in the 1970s the government, in a fit of reefer madness, conducted several biased studies designed to return results that would equate marijuana smoking with tobacco smoking, or worse (Dudley 1999). For example, the Berkeley carcinogenic tar studies of the late 1970s concluded that marijuana is one-and-a-half times as carcinogenic as tobacco (Dudley 1999). This finding was based solely on the tar content of the leaves of cannabis plants compared to that of tobacco plants, and also didnt take into consideration the fact that tobacco is grown with carcinogenic radioactive fertilizers to hasten its harvest. In addition, it was ...