75A - PH - MEDICAL MARIJUANA - PROHIBIT

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One such location was an office called Medimar. NBC has learned Dr. Kenneth Johnson of Medimar is the same doctor who signed off on at least one of the Grossmont District students. His business was among those targeted. and shut down in the police sting. "It was pretty much you had a sLlort consultation. Come in and filled out a short questionnaire, talk to a couple guys about it, get a prescription and then you'd walls across the hall and get your prescription filled," said Ben Martin, a neighboring tenant to Medimar. Source: http://www.wcsh6.con>/news/watereooler/arti.cle.aspx?storyid=54559 Caution: Marijuana may not be lesser evil By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY Tyreot Gardner first smoked marijuana when he was I3. "The main reason I tried it was curiosity," Gardner recalls. "I wanted to see what it felt like." He liked what it felt like, and by age 15, he was smoking pot every week. Ile supported his habit with the money his parents gave him for getting straight A's on his report card. They didn't have a clue. "By I6, when I got my License, it turned into a fairly everyday thing," says Gardner, now 24. "I believe it i.s very addictive, especially for people with. addictive personalities."....studies have shown that when regular pot smokers quit, they do experience withdrawal symptoms, a characteristic used to predict addictiveness. Most users of more addictive drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, started with marijuana, scientists say, and the earlier they started, the greater their risk of becoming addicted. Many studies have documented a link between smoking marijuana and the later use of "harder" drugs such as heroin and cocaine, but that doesn't necessarily mean marijuana causes addiction to harder drugs.....says Harvard University psychiatrist Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Boston's McLean Hospital. "There's just no way scientifically to end that argument one way or the other."......"I would bet you. that people who start smoking marijuana earlier are more likely to get into using other drugs," Pope says. Perhaps people who are predisposed to using a variety of drugs start smoking marijuana earlier than others do, he says. Besides alcohol, often the first drug adolescents abuse, marijuana may simply be the most accessible and least scary choice for a novice susceptible to drug addiction, says Virginia Tech psychologist Bob Stephens. No matter which side you take in the debate over whether marijuana is a "gateway" to other illicit drugs, you can't argue with "indisputable data" showing that smoking pot affects neuropsychological functioning, such as hand-eye coordination, reaction time and memory, says Wesley Clarke, director of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Admin.istration......in 2006, 11.7% of eighth-graders said they had used marijuana during the past year, compared with 6.2% of eighth-graders in 1991. Among 12th-graders, 31.5% said they had used marijuana in the previous year; in 1991, 23.9% said they had. "You are at school, and your main job as an adolescent is to learn and memorize," NIDA director Nora Volkow says. But if you keep becoming intoxicated by smoking marijuana, she says, you'll fall further and further behind in your studies. "How are you going to catch up?" 2 75A-97