re: Give me one good reason why marijuana should be illegal while alcohol shouldn't

Not directly supporting his claim, but this review article is a great jumping off point on the matter. Many studies (cited in the article) support some amount of cognitive decline with chronic use, specifically in a dose-dependent fashion. It's somewhat controversial but generally accepted that it's a reversible (with abstinence) decline. I disagree with your "case by case" statement as it is written. If you're suggesting that some people have enough of what I will call "cognitive reserve" that a small amount of decline isn't noticeable to them and those around them, then I do agree. If you suggest that some people simply aren't affected cognitively either acutely or chronically by consistent use, I just disagree. The mechanism I've seen proposed involves the heavily lipophillic THC getting pretty well distributed in/around myelin around nerves in the CNS, slowing their conduction. If that is the case, and it does sound totally reasonable to me: the drug rapidly binds its receptors throughout the body (and the ingested gets "high") before being distributed to the fatty tissues where it slowly redistributes back into the blood stream for elimination, and the more that is ingested, the longer and higher concentration of the drug in the fatty tissues (including CNS neurons), the slower their conduction, the longer it takes to return to baseline. I'm not a neuroscientist, I will admit, and that has not been proven to my knowledge. But if that's the case, I think the argument for it affecting people on a case by case basis fails, unless, again, that argument considers some small amount of cognitive decline in the particularly high-functioning person to be irrelevant to their activities of daily life.


Please note that the article linked also reviews several articles on exposing schizophrenia in susceptible adults (with pretty decent evidence) and possibly even leading to the development of psychiatric disorders in the susceptible developing/young adolescent brain (not really grasping at straws, but not making ground-breaking connections either), but that is not the premise of my post, and I will refrain from expanding my opinion on those topics as they're not particularly relevant unless someone's trying to make the argument that the age of legalization should be nonexistent or, in light of the evidence of this paper, under age 15. As always, read with great scrutiny. I have not evaluated the articles that this paper mentions myself, and I probably won't get around to it anytime soon. If you happen to check them out and find that they're solid or bogus, I'd actually love to hear your opinion of them. Until then, happy reading