Those are big numbers, which should be giving us a big fat message. The US uses pot, and guess what..it likes it..a lot!

In answer to this, federal agents dress up like marine corp soldiers and yomp out into the boondocks in search of cannabis plantations, tearing up entire County's, (Mendocino, Humboldt and other's in the emerald triangle) in their wake. The only difference is these are cops, and come with Macdonald's and Dunkin Donuts fueled stomach's hanging over their webbing belts.

But its a pantomime. An expensive farce.

Whilst all this anti-drug action takes place under the glare of the worlds press, high school kids in the US are filling their pockets from mom & pop's medicine cabinet, with drugs manufactured by the American pharmaceutical industry, and the figures make some truly shocking reading.

For instance, in 2004, there were over 15,000 emergency department (ED) visits by adolescents aged 12 to 17 whose suicide attempts involved drugs.

Almost three quarters of these drug-related suicide attempts were serious enough to merit the patient's admission to the same hospital or transfer to another health care facility.

Pain medications were involved in about half of all the suicide attempts.

Antidepressants or other psychotherapeutic medications, (thats right. The stuff they give us if we are depressed) were involved in over 40 percent of the suicide attempts by adolescents who were admitted to the hospital.

Suicide in adolescence is a major public health problem.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 9 percent of students in public and private high schools in 2003 had attempted suicide in the past year, and 3 percent of students reported needing medical treatment after their suicide attempt.

Given approximately 15.6 million high school students in the United States, this translates to over 1.3 million suicide attempts, thousands of which would have been handled in hospital emergency departments (ED's). Therefore, EDs are an important setting for interventions, as well as for referrals and medical treatment of suicidal adolescents.

This report uses 2004 data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) to examine the outcome (i.e., disposition) of ED visits caused by drug-related suicide attempts by persons aged 12 to 17.

In 2004, there were an estimated 15,299 ED visits associated with drug-related suicide attempts among persons aged 12 to 17 in the United States.

Thats a high number of suicides using prescribed drugs, which should tell us the billions of dollars we've spent so far on the prohibition of marijuana, a substance which never killed a single person, have been a complete and utter waste of money.

Isn't it about time we stopped feeding this money-drain, and spent the money on getting to grips with the real drug problem in the United States?

The one being created daily by the pharmaceutical companies?

This article only covers those children who attempted to commit suicide using mainstream drugs. There are many MANY millions more who abuse legally obtained prescription pain-killers every single day and we need every cent available to fight this, the real American drugs problem.

SOURCE