8 Weed: Lethal or Legal?

MARIJUANA'S BILL OF HEALTH While the War on Drugs is fought out on the high seas and in the coastal swamps and in the big cities, another war against drugs goes forward in the government-subsidized laboratories where countless scientists have labored for years to discover whether marijuana damages the brain or some other part of the human body. The number of these studies, experiments and projects has increased enormously over the years. Several hundred scientific papers are now published annually, detailing the latest findings of the dope labs. If the one war suggests Vietnam, this war suggests the battle against cancer or some other dread disease. Very few of the scientists are truly impartial in their attitude toward grass. They undertake their experiments in the hope of being able to document some adverse effect of dope smoking. They do not rejoice when they discover that once again they must give marijuana a clean bill of health. On many occasions they have gone to the media with alarming conclusions based on very slight and debatable evidence. The tone of prejudice, of animus, is very strong in some of the leading authorities, like Professor Gabriel G. Nahas of Columbia University, a pharmacologist of distinction whose book, Marihuana--Deceptive Weed, is one of the best to date. Professor Nahas makes it perfectly clear that from childhood up he has been powerfully disposed against can nabis. Born in Egypt, he had pointed out to him as a child by his father, a physician, the derelicts of hashish eating in the streets of Cairo. His favorite ploy is imagining some far-fetched train of causations that commences with the slight biochemical alterations which marijuana induces in the body and then leads on like a chain reaction to some dreadful terminal effect. Professor Nahas is always eager to go anywhere and testify before any body concerning the sinister potentialities of what he calls, the "deceptive weed." Consequently, though he is a scientific observer, one cannot regard him as an impartial observer.