Does marijuana make people violent? Washington state's murder and assault rate surged 40% after drug was legalized - and experts insist that's not a coincidence
The state became the first to legalize marijuana recreationally in 2012, the drug became available to the public in 2014
A new book claims evidence shows marijuana causes mental illness and violence
Author Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, outlines the drug's links to psychosis
A new book claims that marijuana causes aggression, psychosis, suicides, violence - and that its legalization in Washington even triggered a 40 percent increase in murder rates.
There is little concrete information about the drug's benefits (despite plenty of claims) because its illegality has made it difficult to study.
But according to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, there is clear evidence that marijuana is not as safe - and certainly not as curative - as the pro-cannabis groups would have us believe.
Quoting: Cannabis Kills People Francis - why are you posting new threads when you haven't responded to posts from your previous ones?
Like this one for example - from yesterday. You said you couldn't access the link, so I posted the article, which I'll do again for you.
The coroner who said "cannabis poisoning" killed a British mother of three is likely blowing smoke.
Gemma Moss, 31, a devout Christian, reportedly collapsed and died after smoking half a joint at her home in Bournemouth, England.
Coroner Sheriff Payne found that she had moderate to high levels of pot in her system and attributed her death to cannabis toxicity, according to British news sites such as the Mirror Online and The Telegraph.
They say this would make her the first English woman to fatally overdose on marijuana.
"The postmortem could find no natural cause for her death, with the balance of probability that it is more likely than not that she died from the effects of cannabis," said Payne, according to The Telegraph.
The Daily News reached out to several New York doctors to see if someone could possibly die from pot.
A coroner thinks that Gemma Moss, from Bouremouth, Dorset, England, died from smoking pot. (BNPS/BNPS)
Dr. Bradley Flansbaum, a hospitalist at Lenox Hill Hospital, and Dr. Yasmin Hurd, professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, agreed that it is virtually impossible.
"From half a joint? That's ridiculous," Hurd said.
Both said that it is possible for someone to die after smoking pot if it had been laced with another drug. But that person would have died from the other, harder drug — not the cannabis.
"It would be very, very, very unlikely to get a lethal dose of the marijuana if wasn't adulterated with something," said Flansbaum.
They also agreed that the rush or anxiety from toking up could potentially exacerbate an underlying heart condition, or similar ailment, that could kill a person. Again, that condition, not the marijuana, would be responsible for taking the life.
Moss reportedly had moderate to high levels of cannabis in her system when she died, leading to the medical examiner to attribute her cause of death to 'cannabis toxicity.' (BNPS/BNPS)
Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, said a woman dying from pot is as likely as someone dying by walking off the edge of the Earth.
"It's been proven impossible. It flies in the face of decades and decades of medical research," said Tvert.
American Scientist, a prestigious science and technology magazine, published a report on the toxicity of recreational drugs. According to the study, a person would need to drink 10 times the average amount of alcohol it takes to get a buzz in order to overdose. But for marijuana, someone would need to consume more than 1,000 times the average amount it takes to get a little high in order to die.
"You would need to literally consume a third of your body weight in marijuana," Tvert said. "There are no acute marijuana deaths."
