Letters

Wednesday, February 25, 1998

Letters

LETTERS:

Blowing smoke

Rob Kariakin, you have failed your drug test. Apparently, you
know very little about marijuana and its effects. Before you get
back on your soap box, allow me to identify your articles mistakes
(NBA unions tactics show disregard for drug policy, Feb. 12) and
then clarify them.

Claim: Marijuana is more carcinogenic than cigarettes.

Truth: UCLAs Dr. Donald Tashkin concluded a long-term study on
smoking in 1997 and found that marijuana smokers had the same rate
of contracting cancer as people who didnt smoke at all. Cigarette
smokers had much higher rates of cancer.

Some studies (albeit on lab animals) show that marijuana may
even function as an anti-carcinogen. There has never been a case of
someone contracting cancer from the use of marijuana.

Claim: If you smoke pot for a while, you cant breathe as
well.

Truth: Marijuana smoke travels primarily through the lungs main
passageways, while cigarette smoke infiltrates the smaller
passageways. This fact explains why marijuana is sometimes
prescribed to asthmatics in order to open their constricted
breathing passageways. It also explains why cigarette smoke can
cause emphysema while marijuana cannot.

Claim: … Pot affects higher logic.

Truth: Obviously, pot has some effect on the brain or else no
one would want to smoke it. However, those effects are often
positive and always benign. No scientific study has ever proven
that marijuana causes brain damage.

Claim: Marijuana smokers do not make good role models.

Truth: Simply violating a law does not render someone a poor
role model. By using your logic, from this claim it follows that
people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi are unworthy role
models since they often broke unjust laws.

Pot smokers have accomplished things from winning Nobel and
Pulitzer prizes to becoming leaders of their countries. They have
gotten straight As, dominated their sports, created beautiful art
and fought for their respective countries.

Remember that one out of three Americans has used marijuana, and
if you think that all of those people are bad role models, then you
had better lay off the crack pipe.

The NBA does not have rules banning every crime that can
possibly be committed. Would a player be suspended for polluting?
How about for domestic violence? What about using a pirate cable
box?

Clearly, the NBA cannot legislate every aspect of a players
off-court, personal life. If some NBA players can light up joints
like they light up the court, what business of yours is that? If
you want to speak in terms of damage to ones career, then a prison
sentence is far worse than a hundred marijuana highs.

The marijuana-using NBA players have advanced their careers this
far without the heavy-handed, reefer mad advice of pot
prohibitionists like yourself.

Please show some regard for their outstanding achievements.
Until you learn more about marijuana, then youre the one who has
really failed the drug test.

Kambiz Akhavan

Graduate student

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