Well the good thing is that brain imaging studies dont lie and dont have any agenda other than performing the study (some people who get their hands on the results have an agenda, but the study itself is just a study) so there is no debate here..
If you really think brain imaging studies dont lie think again;
here's one striking example:
in 2001 MTV and Oprah Winfrey
had an item about the disastrous effects of MDMA on the brain. Only, they were a bunch of government propaganda lies, soon after debunked by other scientists.
But the harm was already done as you can
read here:
"Two years ago, then NIDA director Alan Leshner launched an anti-ecstasy campaign based on images from flawed PET-scan research conducted at Johns Hopkins. The campaign's trademark was a stylized image of two brain halves, side by side, with the darkened hemisphere marked "brain after ecstasy". Unfortunately for the public, NIDA has once again allowed politics and morality to trump their science. The US has spent millions of dollars pressing its "brain after ecstasy" images in widely-distributed postcards and online. Even months after NIDA learned of the data problems, and weeks after the Ricaurte and McCann PET scan studies were publicly discredited, NIDA is still pushing them as unadulterated 'fact' on their web sites (nida.nih.gov and clubdrugs.org)."
Although an actual brain scan was performed the explanation was totally fraudulent.
My personal opinion is that people should stop being so naive, we have been lied to about drugs by our governments by more than 100 years.
It started with simple propaganda like reefer madness,
this wouldn't work any more, people are more informed, pictures and descriptions of people getting in a murderous rage after smoking a joint wouldn't be believed any more.
So the lies have become much more sophisticated, and as shown in the example above scientists and popular media figures are used nowadays.
Especially people on this community should be suspicious of all the claims about how much harm cannabis is supposed to do.
This is the end of my rant.
