Hardly a day goes by without hearing people caught up in drug abuse, from Olympic superhero Michael Phelps to the not-so-famous singers Kelvin Kwan and Jill Vidal in Hong Kong. All you hear are the same knee-jerk righteous condemnation of "Thou shalt not take drugs", "terrible role models", blah blah blah. Lets look at it from a different angle, as we mutts do all day long.
As the picture of Phelps smoking pot shows, he's not really "smoking" pot but instead inhaling cannabis through a vaporizer. You might say, "What the hack, he's still taking drugs!" Legally, either way, it's bad. But vaporizing is a safe form of cannabinoid delivery while smoking is really bad for you. Cannabis smoke has more ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and nitric oxide than cigarette smoke, which in turn is more harmful to your body than taking cannabis vapour. Better not go into the whole legality of cannabis vs cigarettes or alcohol issue. The medical journal, Lancet has a very interesting comparing the effects of many common drugs.
So Michael Phelps is a role model after all, he's doing it the "right" way. The "wrong" way obviously was what Kelvin and Jill did, smoke a cannabis joint.
By the same token, when the Hong Kong department of health was saying that the "electronic cigarettes" are more harmful than a packet of fags simply on the notion of higher nicotine content, it's ignoring the method of delivery and the harmful by-products.
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