Word: marijuana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MARIJUANA is also usually classed as hallucinogenic; its effects range from reddened eyes and relaxation to changed perception. It is not an aphrodisiac, but it can lower inhibitions and intensify sexual pleasure. It seems to make many users temporarily passive, in contrast to alcohol, which frequently releases aggression. "Everyone knows about barroom brawls," says Oakland, California Psychiatrist and Drug Researcher Tod Mikuriya, "but have you ever heard of a pot-room brawl?" Of course, it can be argued that there are worse things than barroom brawls...
Most researchers now classify the dangers of marijuana as on a par with those of alcohol. However, so far there is no scientific evidence on whether long-term use can produce effects comparable to alcohol's cirrhosis or tobacco's cancer and emphysema. Marijuana's active ingredients?chemicals known as tetrahydrocannabinols (THC)?can cause LSD-type psychotic hallucinations when administered in pure form. (Such a reaction can happen considerably more easily with hashish, a concentration of dried Cannabis resins some six times as powerful as marijuana.) Pot affects the sense of time, but not motor and perceptual skills...
...students who use marijuana, NIMH Director Yolles estimates that 65% quit after experimenting one to ten times; 25% become social users. Only around 10% become habitual users ?a far cry from the level projected by alarmists, but still a serious number. Those in the last category, many of them subject to the depression and discouragement of slum life, often...
Present drug laws are inequitable as well as widely unenforceable. Most statutes do not distinguish hard narcotics from marijuana, or the pusher from the user. Arrests for marijuana law violations last year totaled 80,000; they increased tenfold between 1963 and 1968. Yet, for all the massive expenditures of police time and money, pot smoking is so widespread that there are roughly 25 times as many users as there are places to hold them in all the nation's prisons. The chances of being jailed for using pot are probably less than one in 1,000, NIMH's Dr. Cohen...
...obtained, justice frequently is dispensed with more spleen then equity. Last February, for example, police in Danville, Virginia, rooted from a bus station one Frank Lavarre, a 19-year-old who had been suspended from the University of Virginia because of bad grades. He was carrying 61 pounds of marijuana to friends in Atlanta. In court, the case was tried by Judge Archibald Aiken, four times Frank's age and a rigid traditionalist who loathes pot smokers and longhairs. Although Frank had never been in trouble with the law before and pleaded guilty, the judge gave him 25 years (five...