Is coffee a drug like cannabis

[borka]

that heavy cannabis use is likely to cause a drop in IQ of around 20 points.

that's unproven BS ...

There is also long term damage to short term memory to consider. Compounded, of course, when you are young.

That's not true .. there is a proven effect on short term memory when smoking THC, which even gets worse if you're constantly high ... but there's not a long term damage ... the effect on short term memory stops only few days after you stopped smoking THC ...

btw. the main reason for prohibitions of Weed are the cotton industry (original blue jeans had been made of hemp) and that weed smokers aren't good soldiers (not following orders, inaggressive)

"Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die dosis machts, daß ein Ding kein Gift sei" Paracelsus
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes it that a thing is not a poison"

in german language
http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Parac ... en+Rezepte

[Jalpha]

The short-term memory damage is reversible but I don't fully agree with your timescale. The IQ drop, while unproven, is also not proven false. I don't believe that you can take any drug without suffering side effects. Weed isn't some magical substance that cures cancer and makes a variety of superior products etc. It's a drug like any other, like prescription meds, anti-psychotics, painkillers and the illicit variety, with a downside you have to weigh against the potential advantages. If neither of those is on your list of disadvantages then I'm interested to hear what is.

If you think you can smoke weed free of consequences, particularly when you're young, you are lying to yourself.

[MagicManICT]

While you can use marijuana plants to make fiber, you definitely don't want to go smoking hemp... not pleasant.

There was a story running around about several lobbyist groups, Dow Chemicals being one of them if I recall the story right, as they had a patent on the chemicals to break wood pulp down and someone (a nobody in the industrial world) had just come out with a product that would make hemp paper significantly cheaper. The propaganda of the time just made it easy for the US congress to pass the bill. After all, it was only smoked by "black people" and used to "seduce whites into seditious lifestyles."... whatever...

[Jalpha]

There are good things to be said for hemp, I just have low tolerance for dreamy eyed hippies with their ill thought out quotes on how it's a miracle product. To be blunt they do more harm than good with impossible claims which can never be met. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you get smoke, fiber and seed all from the same field, which is simply not the case, they are all separate products and farming the crop for one will not yield any of the others. Then there's rotation systems to consider, you can't just plant hemp after hemp year after year. That's not how farming works. So a lot of the typical quotes on land use efficiency and how hemp won't compete with food crops are just plain wrong. I mean sure you can plant hemp in crap dirt and hardly water it but the product you get... Is going to be crap.

A lot of pro hemp lobbyists are just mislead and lack the intelligence to question their own propaganda. I do like it though and I think it has good potential in certain areas and is certainly worth exploring.

Edit: Also just on hemp paper... There are a lot of problems involved in breaking down the fibers to a manageable length for paper production. I watched an interesting doco where a university tried to make it into paper and at every stage the strength and length of the fibers was getting tangled and wrapped in mechanical parts, causing breakdowns. This was just at harvest. When they took it into the factory it only got worse. There's new methods being looked into using enzymes and fermentation vats among other things, but it seems kind of difficult to do on a large scale. Then again maybe it was the USA trying to reinvent the wheel because I know there is industrially produced hemp paper supplied from somewhere in Europe. Aside from production issues there are some good advantages to using hemp for paper.