the statement that marijuana leads to addiction and therefore drug treatment programs is based upon current sentencing laws that allow people to go into treatment rather than jail.
even if those people do not show addiction to marijuana, they are considered addicted.
the equivalent would be if alcohol was illegal, you had a bottle of wine in your car you planned to take home for dinner, because you had lived somewhere that thought it was okay to have a glass of wine with dinner - and you were pulled over for an expired registration sticker. the police saw the bottle of wine and offered you the chance to go into an addiction program or face arrest. you go into the program. and you also become a statistic that says, simply because you had alcohol in your car, you are an addict.
The National Institute of Health notes cognitive impairment - however, recent studies indicated a two hour window of impairment for driving, say...again, if you are with friends and you have a couple of glasses of beer, you don't drive. the same thing.
there is no evidence of permanent cognitive impairment as of this study reported in July 2011
http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/19/study-marijuana-not-linked-with-long-term-cognitive-impairment/when the test was controlled for gender and education level - the results showed no impairment.
Participants took tests of memory and intelligence three times over the eight year period the study. They were also asked about how their marijuana use had changed. When the results were at last tabulated, researchers found that there were large initial differences between the groups, with the current marijuana smokers performing worse on tests that required them to recall lists of words after various periods of time or remember numbers in the reverse order from the one in which they were presented.
However, when the investigators controlled for factors like education and gender, almost all of these differences disappeared. The lower education levels of the pot smokers — and their greater likelihood of being male — had made it look like marijuana had significantly affected their intelligence. In fact, men simply tend to do worse than women on tests of verbal intelligence, while women generally underperform on math tests. The relative weighting of the tests made the impact of pot look worse than it was.
The authors, who were led by Robert Tait at the Centre for Mental Health Research at Australian National University, conclude:
he adverse impacts of cannabis use on cognitive functions either appear to be related to pre-existing factors or are reversible in this community cohort even after potentially extended periods of use. These findings may be useful in motivating individuals to lower cannabis use, even after an extensive history of heavy intake.
This issue of potency is also a sleight-of-hand. When potency is higher, people use less to achieve the same high.
The issue of teenage access seems to ignore that the Dutch experiment with cannabis decriminalization indicates fewer teens using cannabis when it is regulated. This is from Sept. 2011 -
The results of a new study published in the journal Addiction earlier this month challenged the United States' "provincial" drug policy rhetoric, especially as it relates to youth. The study compared data on cannabis use among US teens to newly available numbers on usage rates in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. The results: The Dutch have about 700 adults-only clubs that sell 50 to 150 metric tons of cannabis per year, yet Dutch teens report lower levels of weed usage and availability than youth in the United States.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/LegalizationNation/archives/2011/09/22/going-dutch-teen-marijuana-use-in-the-us-vs-netherlands-the-full-interview-with-cal-professor-robert-maccoun...and on and on.