Actually, prolonged use of marijuana has been proven to cause schizophrenia and abnormalities in the chemicals in our brain. Our dopamine gets released when smoking weed, making you feel euphoric and happy. Unfortunately the more you smoke the more you throw off your brains ability to produce these chemicals. I'm not anti-legalization, but you should take a look at both sides before getting all paranoid about pharmaceutical corruption

Weed doesn't cause schizophrenia. It can cause it to show up sooner than if you didn't smoke weed.

@58, I am a pro legalization type of guy, but on the face of it your comment is ridiculous: THC is a drug, by its very definition. Research on Marijuana in medicine, frankly, is rather spotty: the war on drugs made a lot of research a nonstarter for a very long time. There are some VERY interesting effects (combating chemo nausea among cancer patients, treating glaucoma and chronic pain, suppressing seizures) supported by anecdotal evidence that warrant good research, and many doctors feel it's sound enough to whip out the pad, but we have a long way to go before claiming it is mother's milk. Even if we throw out all the old research on the long term effects of Marijuana as hopelessly tainted and start over from scratch, you are still making the implausible argument that chronic use of a mind and body altering substance has no long term effects, disregarding virtually every other example we have. Medical Marijuana may have many wonderful applications: certainly it is promising. And if you want to roll the dice with your own brain for ***** and giggles, be my guest: I have no desire to make your choices for you. But for you to come out and claim it isn't a drug, doesn't contain any drug, but still does all the wonderful things drugs do without any of the long term effects of drugs, and expect the world to accept that because YOU LIKE IT? And that "everyone saying that it's a drug is a brainwashed anti nature pro pills person" means you get to just dismiss anyone who disagrees with you? Ridiculous. Lazy. Irresponsible.

Sounds like you need to do your own research. As someone persuing a career in naturopathy and natural medicine, I can say that I'd rather use something natural to heal an ailment, but but everything that comes from the earth is good for you. I.e. cocaine, opium, belladonna, various mushrooms, and hell, Australia has a tree thats leaves have neurotoxin so strong even TOUCHING them makes grown men want to die from the pain. Drugs are classified as mind-altering substances, and as much as people who think like you deny it, weed does alter the mind. It isn't a cure-all, if anything it's a band-aid fix to things that modern medicine can help with if people funded advanced, affordable cures instead of a plant that kills brain cells. I'm not a "pro-pills" person (though they do help and there are some things that natural medicine cannot prevent or cure) and I'm not for making weed legal to the general public, and if it was, it needs to be heavily regulated by the fda to certain standards. Use it for medicine, not recreational use, and that means doing away with all of the hybrid strains that simply exist for a better high.