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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6007)	2/19/2007 9:05:21 AM
From: Gersh Avery	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

How would they know that? Does smoking weed instill scientific insights? They probably use the same method that Tashkin does. Pot does other things that are bad .. Trying to say that it's proven to cause cancer is just wrong. Your arguments will seem stronger if you stop trying to support the nonexistent pot/cancer link.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6007)	2/19/2007 9:28:21 AM
From: Gersh Avery	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Now then, this same guy "Tashkin" was trying to say that pot suppresses the immune system. I tried to track down what exactly the heck he was talking about. When I did that I ran into studies where they combined crack and pot smokers for their evidence. They seemed to pull out every dirty trick to make it look bad for pot smokers. They said something like "these people have problems." Look .. I think crack should be legal. I've never used it. I probably never will. I just think no good comes from passing laws against it. In addition a great deal of bad comes from laws against it: Prices go way up. When prices are way up, addicts do all kinds of stupid things to get money for it. Dealers kill each other, and innocent civilians, in turf wars to protect profits. Cops get killed and corrupted. Not one single person is convinced, by the law, that they should stop. Taxpayers are stuck paying all of the costs related to trying to enforce the law. Laws that have not worked for the last forty years and never will. Peoples health fall through the floor from using crack. People get killed by police. Sometimes shot in back, unarmed, in the street. But to combine all of the bad related to crack with pot, is dishonest. The health degradations from crack have nothing to do with pot smokers. sounds confusing? it sure was to me when I found out what this "scientific" study was doing. Again .. I ran into this crap when I tried to follow this "Tashkin" study from you post number 5882.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6007)	2/19/2007 9:50:17 AM
From: Gersh Avery	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

The text below is quoted from your post 5882 to me. Please note how many times Tashkin used the word "suggests." quote Studies further suggest that marijuana is a general "immunosuppressant" whose degenerative influence extends beyond the respiratory system. Regular smoking has been shown to materially affect the overall ability of the smoker’s body to defend itself against infection by weakening various natural immune mechanisms, including macrophages (a.k.a. "killer cells") and the all-important T-cells. (4:20 note-> he didn't say "smoking marijuana" in the second sentence. He just said "smoking." I believe that he is extrapolating based on cigarette smoking. I conclude this because the first sentence says "suggests" and the second says "shown." BTW this extrapolation process is what he used to determine that smoking pot causes lung cancer.) Obviously, this suggests the conclusion, which is well-supported by scientific studies, that the use of marijuana as a medical therapy can and does have a very serious negative effect on patients with pre-existing immune deficits resulting from AIDS, organ transplantation, or cancer chemotherapy, the very conditions for which marijuana has most often been touted and suggested as a treatment. It has also been shown that marijuana use can accelerate the progression of HIV to full-blown AIDS and increase the occurrence of infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma. (4:20 note->Do you have any links to that last statement? I would like to examine the study documentation.) In addition, patients with weak immune systems will be even less able to defend themselves against the various respiratory cancers and conditions to which consistent marijuana use has been linked, and which are discussed briefly under "Respiratory Illnesses." end quote Tashkin jumps to conclusions and tries to make his assumptions sound like scientific studies. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect." dang .. there's that word suggest again. How much of this guys stuff is it wise to believe? It seems that he just looked at ciggarette smoking studies and figgured that everything about smoking ciggarettes would be true for pot also.