WHAT?! Yep, you read that right and we couldn’t believe it either. It seems obvious that the pro-prohibitionists will do and say virtually anything to keep marijuana under their lock & key, but this one really takes the cake.
Dr. Nora Volkow (head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse) was recently interviewed by the Washington Post and it is here that her best quote so far was made. She stayed pretty true to the cue cards through most of it … until the reporter conducting the interview suggested that cigarettes are worse for a person than cannabis. That was apparently more than she could take. Her response:
“Wait a second. . . . Nicotine does not interfere with cognitive ability. So if you are an adolescent and you are smoking marijuana and going to school, it’s going to interfere with your capacity to learn. So what is worse, as an adolescent right now? To have basically something that is jeopardizing your development educationally or to smoke a cigarette that, when you are 60 years of age, is going to lead to impaired pulmonary function and perhaps cancer? . . . I would argue that you do not want to mess with your cognitive capacity, that that is a very large price to pay.”
There you have it, straight from the government’s mouth: If you’re going to smoke anything, smoke a Marlboro — doctor’s orders.