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DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) Comments on medical cannabis

The DEA is journalistic license in pocket, and an eye down the road of creative writing has tried to warn people of the dangers of marijuana.

Though there is a concern over cannabis addiction, the DEA overstates the problem of addiction and cannabis. Addiction or an unhealthy compulsion towards things is always a concern. Professor Barbara Mason, noted "While there are some people who have a problem with both alcohol and cannabis, many individuals are dependent on cannabis alone," and also said "The estimate is that about four percent of those who use cannabis eventually become addicted to it." (1 ).

The DEA trying to strongly hint that cannabis is sending people to the ER, therefore it's more dangerous. Consider, Dawn (Drug Abuse Warning Network) compiles the stats on Emergency room visits, their own publication said, "the drug needs only to be implicated in the visit. This approach accommodates cases where one or more drugs were involved but may or may not have directly caused the condition generating the ED visit,". So cannabis may not be the cause of the visit. Also consider that Dawn says that overall 34% of all hospital visits they report a combination of drugs (2 ).

Also researchers noted when they examined injury record in ER records cannabis was not found to increase injury, in fact they found the opposite (3 ).

It should be noted that cannabis use overall increase significantly over the time given. Sometimes the increase was dramatic in certain ethnic groups. An increase in the cannabis smoking population could help account for the increase of seeing them in the ER (4 ).

The DEA indicates that cannabis smokers are at a higher risk of cancer. In 2006 Researchers found that cannabis even long term heavy smokers use did not cause cancer (5 ).

The DEA tries to stir up concern over cannabis being chemically complex. Coffee has over, 1,000 different chemicals 17 of the twenty two tested to see if they caused cancer, indeed caused cancer (6 ).

The DEA tries to link heart attacks to cannabis. The evidence of a link between cannabis and heart disease isn't clear and often contradictory. Researchers noted that cannabis can help prevent hardening of the arteries (7 ).

The reported risk of heart attacks after cannabis smoking was rare and after the first hour, and it was not significantly increased beyond that hour. As a cause is heart disease cannabis smokers do not have an increased occurrence of heart attacks (8 ).

The DEA claims cannabis suppresses the immune system. Researchers looked into the claim of cannabis impairing the immune system, and they found any evidence of impairment of the immune system "totally lacking" ( 9 ).

The DEA claims cannabis is more toxic because its more potent(THC). Higher potency cannabis is an old wives tale, that the government supports. Their has always been high potency cannabis. Also there is not evidence that higher potency gives a higher risk (10).

Even if the science of cannabis harms is unclear. What is clear, even if the possible harms of cannabis are considered. The DEA gets an A in creative writing and an F or lower if it were possible on presenting facts .