Health Minister Roisin Shortall says of marijuana that, “The Government’s chief concern related to the physical and mental health effects of long-term use, which was associated with lung and throat cancer.”
 
How exactly did she come to that conclusion?
The largest study ever undertaken of the effects of marijuana on health has just been published in the US. It concludes that, “Marijuana doesn’t do the kind of damage tobacco does.”
The results of the federally-funded study have just been published in the Journal Of The American Medical Association. 5,000 young adults, randomly recruited in Birmingham, Chicago, Oakland, and Minneapolis, were interviewed at regular intervals over 20 years (1985 – 2005) about marijuana and tobacco use. Each had several tests for lung function along the way. The conclusions confirmed the findings of previous smaller-scale studies: “While marijuana contains some of the same toxic chemicals as tobacco, it does not carry the same risks for lung disease... Cigarette smokers’ test scores worsened steadily during the study. Smoking marijuana... was not linked with worse scores.”
Good news, surely. A substance which many had believed was deadly dangerous turns out not to be particularly dangerous at all. But the reaction of the authorities is blindly to persist in crude scare-mongering.
Meanwhile, there’s been another outbreak of toxic nonsense about marijuana sky-rocketing in strength. A silly article in the Irish Times’ Saturday review earlier this month tossed out the old canard about new varieties of marijuana being many times more powerful than the weed which used to make us mellow.
Of course, there are varieties of weed around much stronger than the stuff we used to crumble into rizlas in the lane behind the Boom Boom Room. But even back then, there was weed, if you knew where to find it, as strong as anything now on the market. Claims of marijuana 20 times stronger than 20 years ago are the equivalent of noting that more young people now drink shorts, comparing the pint of plain to tequila shots and concluding that the concoctions being drunk today are 50 times stronger than in the ‘60s.
Of course, getting out of your head on drink or dope is liable to do you damage. And getting out of your head every night of the week will make you stupid: in fact, you are probably stupid already.
And I have always suspected that sucking smoke into your lungs, whether from cigarettes, joints or bonfires on the Twelfth, won’t help you breathe easy in old age.
But marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and that’s fact. Everyone would be better off smoking joints than guzzling booze. The fact that the Minister of Health urges us to believe the opposite is altogether typical of the cynical dishonesty of all mainstream politics today and particularly of outfits like Irish Labour.

Last August, the Daily Express assembled a squad of celebrities to glamorise a campaign calling for no mercy for “vicious criminals” who had taken stuff from shops without paying. Among those taking a stand for honest shopping was Antony Worrall Thompson, a cook.
“I am fully in favour of this campaign. Getting behind this will show the thugs that they have made a big mistake.”
Thompson reckoned that “limp-wristed” magistrates who adopted their usual approach of “softly-softly sentencing” should be booted off the bench.
I was iffy at first about Thompson’s recipe but over time have come to appreciate the solid sense of what he says. What dispersed any residual doubt was his response to being nicked for tea-leafing wine, cheese, onions and a tub of coleslaw from Tescos.
Mysteriously, he came to Dublin to deliver his definitive remarks: “I did a crime. I appreciate that. It was very, very stupid and I am very, very embarrassed. But I am being treated as if I had murdered somebody.”
No, you are not, you little feral fucker. Being slapped lightly on the wrist and then let go for taking stuff from shops without paying was not being treated like a murderer but like a Murdoch crim with cops on the take. You should have been banged up in a cell and fed on slops, and the key held in the pocket of a Tottenham hoodie.
 
Bigging up the Titanic Project at Stormont the other day, Arlene Foster, minister for this sort of thing, hit out at the never-happy nay-sayers who hadn’t (unfortunate phrase) “come on board”.
The project, centred on a building the shape of a ship near the shipyard site in east Belfast, will be opened on April 15, the 100th anniversary of the waves caressing the vessel to its doom. It’s costing a couple of hundred mill, which Arlene is confident will be recouped with interest in no time at all. “Many, many people from all over the world will want to share in the Titanic experience.”
Ahem. At a human level, the Titanic experience involved 1,500 people dying in a hysteria of terror in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
In terms of engineering achievement, the Titanic was the largest and most luxurious transatlantic liner ever built, but didn’t manage to make it across the Atlantic even once.
Yep, many, many are certain to converge on Belfast to share the experience. Some will be so avid they’ll swim all the way.
I sometimes wonder whether Northern Ireland may not have outlived its usefulness.