TOKEpure

The government and anti cannabis campaigners in general are usually only too eager to warn about health risks of using cannabis, although the claims they make often prove to be exaggerated or more often than not simply wrong, but for some reason they never warn consumers about a very real danger, a danger caused by mixing cannabis with a drug which is a known to be highly addictive and a carcinogen.

We’re talking about tobacco of course. To be fair, it’s not only the government that doesn’t want to talk about the way cannabis is usually smoked, most stoners don’t want to either. In the UK, most cannabis users roll joints – cannabis mixed with tobacco.

The dangers of tobacco are well known, its physically and psychologically highly addictive and its carcinogenic – which means it causes cancer.

Tobacco isn’t included in the Misuse of Drugs Act (the law that prohibits cannabis) simply because the government decided not to include it. This was an arbitrary decision made by politicians which makes no sense whatsoever – and indeed the Act makes no provision for a drug like tobacco to be excluded in this way – but is probably at the heart of the reason why the situation has continued for so long.

Perhaps as a result of this decision a lot of people don’t really think of tobacco is a drug even now, but it is one and in fact it’s one of the most dangerous drugs there is. In terms of the harm it can do tobacco is up there with heroin and crack cocaine. So the aim of this CLEAR campaign is to make cannabis users aware of this danger – a danger which is easy to avoid.

The aim of Tokepure is to encourage anyone who wants to use cannabis to toke pure and to keep well away from tobacco.

The age of the tobacco joint is over, help make it happen.

What’s the problem?

In some respects, tobacco is not unlike cannabis. Both are plants and hence totally natural herbs and both are smoked. When the plant material is burned chemicals which affect the brain – which we call drugs – boil off and get sucked into the lungs where they enter the bloodstream and make their way to your brain. Along with the drugs of course comes lots of other smoke which you don’t really want. Anyway, this is where the similarity ends. Both plants contain very different drugs which do very different things.

As the government is normally eager to tell us tobacco is a killer. In fact Tobacco is responsible for 140,000 deaths each year in the UK alone and 5.4 million deaths worldwide according the World Health Organisation. Clearly, whatever the dangers of smoking cannabis might be, adding tobacco to the mix is only going to make things much, much worse.

Our big claim for cannabis is that it has never directly killed anyone and as far as we know, that is true.

But doesn’t cannabis cause cancer anyway?

Cannabis smoke does include carcinogens – compounds which cause cancer – as lab experiments have shown. Because of these lab studies prohibition campaigners have claimed that smoking cannabis is something like four times more dangerous than tobacco, but as with so many of the claims these people make they don’t stand up to proper study and in fact the truth seems to be the exact opposite.

Page 1 of 5 | Next page