Scientists at Melbourne University have released a disturbing finding about marijuana. According to an article in The Age, scientists have determined that marijuana is “the drug for life’s future losers”.

The way “scientists” arrived at this conclusion is outrageous.

Almost 2000 students aged 14 and 15 were studied since 1992 to determine what effect alcohol and cannabis use had on the rest of their lives.

To determine students who were in “very high risk levels” for cannabis and marijuana use, scientists had to determine what a high level of use would be.

Using any amount of cannabis every day was determined to be highly risky. No justification was given for this. One single toke and a student was placed on this list.

To qualify as a heavy user of alcohol, scientists decided that 14 year-old children would need to be consuming more than 43 drinks per week for boys and 28 drinks per week for girls.

The fact that the alcohol parameters did not immediately disqualify all of the children was not mentioned as being of concern.

It is difficult to believe that after thousands of years of use, marijuana would suddenly begin turning people into losers. In the US, prohibitionists have been promising this pandemic of marijuana-induced idiocy for decades, yet the boardrooms of today are filled with the stoners of the 60s.

If this is true, it is curious that, in the US, the most well educated regions of the country are almost always the most marijuana-friendly, while the least productive segments of society are almost always involved with alcohol. Under bridges and in old refrigerator boxes across America, homeless alcoholics are under no threat of being displaced by a hoard of broken stoners.

The real reason that people with problems are often found to smoke marijuana is simple: many people smoke marijuana. If we were to study marijuana use among creative people, this logic might allow us to conclude that marijuana leads to artistic ability. If scientists were surveyed, one might think that marijuana use leads to inquisitiveness. We could announce that marijuana use leads to winning Olympic gold medals in snowboarding, recording platinum albums, or becoming the President of the United States.

When a person does one thing before he does something else, we cannot automatically assume that the first thing caused the second. If we could, we would probably think that refusing to smoke marijuana turns one into an uptight liar. And although there is ample evidence for this, it has never been proven.