Please sign this petition 3687

I know why. It is very common for someone losing an argument to descend into petty name calling. Whilst you walk away from it with dignity intact.

If I was an anti-cannabis, or anti-legal-cannabis type, I would avoid this argument like the plague - at the end of the day, the arguments against decriminalisation are very shaky at best - and you would normally have to stoop pretty low and use far fetched data to argue the case - as you may have noticed here. The very recent research suggesting a rather dodgy link to mental health issues was commissioned by the anti-cannabis side - they are digging around like maniacs *trying* like hell to find something... anything to back them up. Look long enough and hard enough and you *always* find something - even if it's a rather shaky result...like 4% of the population *may* suffer mental health issues (or have inherent mental health problems brought to the fore) later in life... after chronic usage of cannabis. Which does not address the fact that the vast majority of 'sound of mind' people, smoking sensibly and casually, will not suffer any long lasting detrimental effects (though short term lethargy and memory loss are both common). The most ridiculous argument I've seen yet is the "no one knows what the long term effects are" - I would take from reading this, if I knew no better, it was from someone who thought cannabis was a recent invention - if we don't know the effects after centuries of humans taking cannabis, we never, ever will. Every generation thinks they have invented the wheel. Let's ban tea and coffee now...right now! A few centuries is just not enough time to know the *real*, hidden, true effects they *could* have! That comment seems stupid, and it is. It *presumes* there *is*, or there is at least a very good chance of there being something negative to discover at the end of it - it seems ridiculous to take that buttumption and it is. Well, it is no less ridiculous to apply it to cannabis.