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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting they did not comment on the means of using weed. Smoking it cannot be much better for you than smoking cigarettes.

Even after the Feds remove it from the list there will be regulation governing its sale. You can grow tobacco all you want; most people don't because prep is much harder than marijuana; but run afoul of a few laws should you try to sell it.

It would certainly reduce the jailed population of this country and possibly even reduce the usage of harder drugs, after all if there was a legal outlet most people take the easy route

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It's an article of faith that cannabis is a major contributor to US incarceration, but I think that's a belief worth questioning. I looked into this briefly for a thread a year ago and in the states I researched, domestic violence was far and away the leading cause of incarceration.

In many major metro areas, you're more likely to be ticketed for cannabis than arrested.

I haven't taken the time to come up with a conclusive answer for myself on the extent to which cannabis criminalization imprisons people in the US; maybe it's as bad as people think it is. I just think it's worth doing some research on.

> It's an article of faith that cannabis is a major contributor to US incarceration, but I think that's a belief worth questioning. I looked into this briefly for a thread a year ago and in the states I researched, domestic violence was far and away the leading cause of incarceration.

Its been a while since I saw figures, but last I did domestic violence was at the top of the reasons people were sentenced to incarceration (that is, if you did a ticker at the door, it would be the most common reason) but narcotics were the most common reason people were incarcerated (that is, if you did a count of the currently incarcerated population, drugs would be the most common reason.)

The difference, of course, is length of sentence.

I don't think marijuana is all that high a share of those incarcerated for drugs, but if you are using the prominence of the reason people get incarcerated rather than the prominence of the reason people are incarcerated as your standard, you aren't looking at the right issue.

Wow, that's a good point that I hadn't considered when I was looking at the stats.

This is worth an article, right there.

This data point is over a decade old, but still:

"the proportion of state prison inmates who were sentenced for marijuana-only offenses rose from 2.6% in 1990 to 3.6% in 2000"

http://www.aclu-wa.org/library_files/BeckettandHerbert.pdf

The DOJ reported that there were 1,236,476 state inmates in 2000 (http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p00.pdf). So 3.6% of that would be 44,513 state inmates who were imprisoned for marijuana only in 2000.

It's important to remember that in most states, sentences of under one year are served in county jails, not state prisons. The state prison numbers you describe are likely significantly to understate both absolute numbers and relative proportion, for this reason.

That's a very good point that I should have addressed. The cited ACLU article goes on to say:

"King and Mauer (2005) estimate that at least 68,000 people were in prison, on probation, or serving a jail sentence for a marijuana offense in 2003"

So, that's 52% higher than the number I quoted for state prisons.

"In many major metro areas, you're more likely to be ticketed for cannabis than arrested." - as long as you are white and not wanted by the authorities for some other issue.

There's no actual evidence you're less likely to be arrested if you're white.

Actually it has been demonstrated that cannabis can cause brain damage in teenagers. How's that for "less harmful than tobacco"?

[Citation needed.]

How many instances in a sampling size? How large was the sampling size? How rigorous was the study? Peer reviewed? Publisher?

Offhand, I can immediately tell you the overwhelming evidence is that tobacco (cigarettes) is far more harmful than cannabis. I direct your attention to the myth of cannabis being as harmful as x number of cigarettes[1] and the myth that cannabis harms brain cells[2]. While it does alter the brain, it is up for heavy debate whether it's harmful, especially on long-term use.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misconceptions_about_il...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misconceptions_about_il...

knock yourself out:

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/135/7/2245

Of course, you could have googled this up yourself in 10 seconds but I guess people believe what they want to believe.

I appreciate that you came back with a legitimate citation, but the rest of your comment is uncalled for. What I googled were the points that defend my position, not the other way around - the burden for that is on the opposing defense, not my own.

What about my comments appears as though I just look for self-validating information and ignore the rest? The parts where I questioned scientific rigor, sampling size, case instances, etc?

And this is why I typically upvote your remarks even outside of security expertise.

In many major metro areas, you're more likely to be ticketed for cannabis than arrested.

Depending on certain attributes that in practice cause one to end up in cuffs nonetheless.

Smoking it cannot be much better for you than smoking cigarettes

That's what common sense would have us believe, but cigarette smoke is indeed much worse for you than marijuana smoke.

http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1513/AnnalsATS.201212-...

from the abstract:

>In summary, the accumulated weight of evidence implies far lower risks for pulmonary complications of even regular heavy use of marijuana compared with the grave pulmonary consequences of tobacco.

"Smoking it cannot be much better for you than smoking cigarettes." --- well, it's complicated, but read this as a starting point:

http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/cannabis-smoke-and-c...

the reason cigarettes are so dangerous is the tar and carbon monoxide. Smoking weed does not have that problem.

Also, many people vaporize their weed or use wick to smoke with - which lowers the temperature of the heat. Across the board, smoking weed is much safer than smoking cigarettes

Aren't tar and carbon monoxide (CO especially) kind of explicitly what you get from burning plant matter?

> Smoking it cannot be much better for you than smoking cigarettes.

It is probably way better for you than cigarettes based on the amount smoked.

It's less harmful than cigarettes - nicotine is a vasoconstrictor and bronchioconstrictor. Weed is neither, and actually also has expectorant qualities, so you tend to cough most of the tar back up.

That said, smoking anything is not good for you, but IMHO it's up to the individual what risk they take with their body.

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