Smoke and mirrors

Up in smoke - Haaretz - Israel News :
"[Dr. Yaakov] Nehamkin: 'Most of them don't have a clue about the charas in India or about what they are smoking here in Israel. In India a great deal of the charas also includes LSD, added to produce a more powerful effect. When they come here and say, 'We only smoked the green stuff,' it's not exactly so. Because it also contained something else. In Israel almost all the material comes from Egypt, from Sinai, from the Bedouin. It's been tested in labs and found to have small additions of rat poison or of methadone and all kinds of other horrors.'"

This is an amazing admission to come near the end of a lengthy article that starts out by blaming marijuana use alone for "between 800 and 1,000 Israeli youngsters who suffer mental breakdowns every year in the wake of using cannabis."

Now, excessive use of marijuana, like anything else, would have to be unhealthy. The first rule of pharmacology is "the dose makes the poison" and the concentration of THC in marijuana has risen significantly since the Flower Power days of the Sixties.

But to make sweeping claims about marijuana as the sole source of so many treatment program admissions, outpatient visits, and suicides without making allowance for the contribution of little extras like LSD, rat poison and methadone is unscientific and irresponsible.