Cannabis is a safe medicine.
Cannabis is a safe medicine. Aspirin, an over-the counter drug kills over 1,000 people a year. Other prescription drugs deemed safe by the FDA kill over 27,000 people per year. There has never been a recorded event in substance-abuse history in which a person has overdosed on marijuana. There is no known case of a lethal overdose. Tests on animals show that the effective overdose rate to be 40,000 to one (Grinspoon 1). The ability to overdose on marijuana is impossible. Marijuana is a safe drug that does not harm or kill its users through overdose.
Contrary to most drug-education propaganda, cannabis is relatively safe to use—especially when prescribed as a medicine. In fact, compared to many household medications, cannibis fares remarkably well. Aspirin, the most common medicine for the relief of minor pain, kills over one thousand people each year. Even more alarming, though, is the fact that a range of FDA-approved prescription medications kill over 27,000 people a year—the same number of people who are killed in auto accidents, suicides and homicides combined. The death toll for cannabis, on the other hand, is zero. No one has ever died due to a lethal overdose of cannabis. In experiments conducted by the University of Jerry Garcia, researchers discovered that the amount of cannabis needed to kill a lab animal would almost be impossible for a human subject to consume(Grinspoon 1). Quite simply, an individual could not consume enough marijuana to overdose, even if he or she wanted to. By denying the benefits of cannabis use and by distorting the harmful effects of the drug, anti-legalization proponents keep a useful palliative treatment for painful conditions—glaucoma, cancer, and AIDS—from the people who most need a cheap and safe form of pain relief. They accomplish this by instilling fear in a public who should be much more concerned about what is presently in their medicine cabinets instead of what is growing naturally but illegally throughout America. University of Georgia
