[elisbce]

Victimless crime? Smoking causes 8 millions death per year, 1 million for non-smokers around smokers. Alcohols causes 3 million deaths per year. They kill more people than COVID. That's not counting the disease and other crimes caused by these so-called recreational substances.

If your argument is that you have absolute freedom to consume whatever pleasures you, then all drugs should be legalized like fentanyl and when the society crumbles with drug addicts dying on every street, it is already too late to stop.

[catlover76]

Marijuana does not cause death. Pretty disingenuous of you to slot in numbers for tobacco smoking. It's also disingenuous to act as though the assertion that marijuana should be legalized because it is a relatively benign compound necessarily entails that other substances whose effects on the user are drastically different--and well-known to be so--must or should also be legalized.

[BizarroLand]

That's not 100% accurate. Even though Marijuana is believed to be a cancer-fighting compound, when smoked it may have similar or even greater cancer-causing effects as tobacco does due to in many cases having more tars than cigarette tobacco does.

However, the jury is still out, and there is the issue where unless you're Willie Nelson you aren't exactly chain smoking joints the way your average hardcore cigarette smoker does, so even if marijuana is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco, being exposed to a lower dose may mitigate that to enough of an extent as to make it a rounding error.

Either way, you are more likely to be killed in a dispute over marijuana than you are by marijuana consumption itself.

[1MachineElf]

This comment thread seems to be getting out of touch with reality. Marijuana use via smoking has been declining relative to vaporization and consumption of edibles. Rather than complications of smoking, I'd say the biggest risks are inexperienced users consuming way too much in one session and not being able to handle it. I don't know what young people are being taught now, but I hope drug education programs create the understanding that too much THC in the system is incompatible with operating heavy machinery, driving, anything risky, etc.

[catlover76]

> That's not 100% accurate. Even though Marijuana is believed to be a cancer-fighting compound, when smoked it may have similar or even greater cancer-causing effects as tobacco does due to in many cases having more tars than cigarette tobacco does.

No doubt that if you're smoking a blunt or a joint, it's not good for your lungs. But the person to whom I was replying attributed millions of deaths annually to "smoking", implying that smoking weed was to blame.

[ElectronCharge]

The UCLA study definitively showed that cannabis use isn’t associated with increased risk of cancer:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-study-finds...

It’s hard to say exactly why, but it is reality.