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This is an excerpt from Cosmic Nutrition: The Taoist Approach To Health and Longevity by Mantak Chia and William U. Wei page 285-287:
Marijuana is twenty times more yin than sugar. We can only shake our heads in wonder every time an educated person says marijuana is harmless or repeats the comment that there is no scientific evidence that marijuana is dangerous. In the thirteenth century, religious leader Ali al-Hariri reported the dangers of marijuana smoking. Warnings kept cropping up over the next six hundred years, and in 1893 the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission urged great caution.
In 1924, the League of Nations unanimously classed marijuana as a dangerous drug. It remained a dangerous drug until the early 1960s when “due to a lack of solid evidence” researchers decided that marijuana was harmless. The evidence was there; it was just being ignored. A few researchers tried to get their antimarijuana views before the public and were hooted down. Others conducted research and published the results in obscure medical journals rather than face the public ridicule that an antimarijuana stance brought.
Finally, in 1974, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted hearings on the marijuana epidemic and antimarijuana research was made public. The collective testimony of twenty of the world’s leading medical researchers unquestionably revealed that
1. THC (intoxicating chemical in marijuana) tends to accumulate in the brain, glands and fatty tissues.
2. Marijuana causes massive damage to the entire cellular process.
3. Smoking marijuana causes irreversible brain damage.
4. There is danger of genetic damage from marijuana use.
5. Chronic marijuana smoking (three joints or pipes per week) for six months produces lung damage equal to twenty years of heavy smoking of normal cigarettes.
6. Marijuana and tobacco smoke in combination are far more damaging to lung tissue than either by itself.
7. Prolonged use of marijuana results in emotional problems.
These opinions were not the result of a single, isolated study as the nation’s media reported and implied. Instead they were compiled after the study of many, many research projects. Nor were the studies conducted by unknowns trying to make a name for themselves. Dr. Julius Axelrod, who won the Nobel prize for his study of drugs and the brain, said that marijuana causes irreversible damage to the brain. Dr. Phillip Ze, senior research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute, said that chronic marijuana smoking causes bronchitis, diminished lung capacity, and changes in lung tissue. He went on to say that it was very much more dangerous than had been expected.
Dr. Harvey Powelson, a research psychiatrist at the University of California, Berkeley, was highly praised for his promarijuana stand in 1964. Then he was attacked in the press and in person when he changed his views. Dr. Powelson’s views changed as his psychiatric study deepened. He found that marijuana disrupts the thinking process and that memory and time awareness become distorted. Dr. Powelson said that three years of chronic smoking left the smoker with permanent brain damage equal to ten years of heavy drinking.
In those hearings, opposition to the decriminalization of marijuana laws was unanimous. The committee was opposed and the witnesses were opposed. Facts supported their decision and logic refuted every pro- marijuana argument. The medical evidence filled four hundred pages in the record of the hearings.
Here we are summarizing only a tiny bit. The main reason for the opposition was the conclusion that marijuana can cause death. This view may be shocking but scientific evidence proves that the dangers of death are great because marijuana:
1) increases the heart beat and blood pressure, enhancing the danger of a stroke; increases the possibility of fainting, without advance warning, which could come while working or driving a car; 3) increases the potency of barbiturates and thus the chance that a nonlethal dose could be turned into a lethal dose without the knowledge of the barbiturate user.
These are the hard facts. The effect of cannabis (marijuana) is subtle and insidious, but harmful reactions in the heart and circulatory system are suspected. Medical evidence also revealed the dangers of chromosome damage, sexual impotence, and emotional changes, all of which the marijuana user may not be aware of until it is too late. Marijuana decreases the sperm count and volume in males aged eighteen to twenty- eight, and reduces blood plasma to 50 percent below normal.
According to Dr. Henry Brill, regional director of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, there are indications of adverse reactions in the body’s anti-infection chemistry. While no one suggested that all marijuana users will move on to heroin, the results of the studies stated that marijuana is the universal threshold drug through which young people make their entry into the drug culture: the more use of pot, the more the use of other drugs. This remained unchallenged by the promarijuana groups.
But the biggest reason for opposing marijuana, both its use and sale, was brought out by Dr. Hardin B. Jones, perhaps the world’s most respected authority on drugs and drug abuse. Dr. Jones is professor of medical physics, a professor of physiology, and assistant director of the Donner Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught drug abuse courses and interviewed over 1,600 drug users. Jones’s findings, after many years of research, show that marijuana use kills cells in the area of the brain necessary for the awareness of pleasure, the very part of the brain that allows the full awareness of the joys of being alive. There is perhaps no greater hell, said Dr. Jones, than not to be able to feel alive, even if pain accompanies that awareness. And that is the hell that is projected for those who use cannabis.