By: Laura Dewey
Article Reprint
What if everything you were ever told and believed about a subject wasn’t true? What if the well-meaning, trusted and respected people who told you those lies were just parroting the propaganda that they heard?
That’s the exact dilemma I found myself in about three years ago. For most of my life, I bought into the grim and terrifying stories I heard about — dare I say it? — marijuana.
Whether they called it doobie, reefer, pot, Mary Jane or plain ol’ weed, I believed all those ominous voices when they warned me that marijuana could cause everything from brain damage to a craving for stronger drugs (i.e., the “gateway” theory.) And so as I got older, I just kept repeating the same marijuana mantras to others, convinced that I was right. “Marijuana is dangerous,” I told others. “Only brain dead stoners use it.”