The myth “There is more than a thousand chemicals in marijuana smoke” is true, but misleading. The August 31, 1990 issue of the magazine Science notes that of the more than 800 damaging chemicals present in coffee, only twenty-one have actually been tested on animals and sixteen of these cause cancer in rodents. Yet coffee remains legal and is generally considered fairly safe.
The dominant fear about marijuana in the 20th century has been that its effects were somehow similar to the dangerously addictive effects of opiates such as morphine and heroin. Scientists feared that , like opiates, it had an extremely high potential for abuse and addiction. Despite widespread decriminalization of marijuana in the United States in the 1970’s, this concern has remained the basis for federal law and policies regarding the use and study of marijuana. But the discovery of THC receptor sites in the brain refutes that thinking and may force scientists to re-evaluate their positions.
The next opinion we are to look at is that marijuana should not b legalized. Still people seem to think that marijuana is a gateway drug because, supposedly bacouse it “feels soo good” , that people might want to try “biger and better things”. Many important brain functions which affect human behavior involve the neurotransmitter dopamine. Serious drugs of abuse such as heroin and cocaine, int with the brain’s use of dopamine in manners that can seriously alter an individual’s behavior. A drug’s ability to affect the neural systems related to dopamine production has now become the defining characteristic of drugs with serious abuse potential. The discovery of a previously unknown system of cannabinoid neural transmitters is profound. While century-old questions such as why marijuana is nontoxic are finally being answered, new fascinating questions are emerging. In the words of Israeli researcher Raphael Mechoulam, the man who first isolated the structure of THC, “Why do we have cannabinoid receptors?”