It is not surprising that Dan Rush would write an article favorable to pot (“Bill’s passage would protect patient welfare,” Aug. 13), but hopefully, the majority of students will see through the smoke and realize that the “medical marijuana” is a hoax to begin with and doomed to fail. To call it medicine, or the customers patients, is an affront to our collective intellect. To suggest that shuttering pot shops is depriving a 5-year-old child of medicine is blasphemous.

Marijuana is not medicine, and 98 percent of the patients aren’t suffering from serious illness. They just want to get high or are in it for the money. Since students’ generation will soon inherit the empire, you had best take an honest assessment of the true social and economic impacts of marijuana and other drugs.

America has declined in the world academically, with 1.2 million high school drop outs, more than 6.1 million kids being raised by grandparents or in foster homes and an annual cost to the nation for substance abuse of more than $1 trillion.

While isolated components of the marijuana may have medicinal value, the entire plant does not. Real medicines have known ingredients, dosage and potency and must be reproducible in consistent form, like pills. They must pass scrutiny of the Food and Drug Administration, and they are never dispensed by 21-year-old kids in retail pot shops whose only training comes from smoking pot. And smoking is never an acceptable delivery system.

Marijuana causes brain damage, particularly during adolescence, and is harmful until the brain is fully developed at age 25 or later. It can also lead to psychosis, including schizophrenia and paranoia, and suicidal depression, and 17 percent of those who start smoking before age 18 will become addicted to it. Used alone, it doesn’t kill by overdose, but almost all of the 3,400 Americans who die monthly of overdose started their drug journey with marijuana. And overdose isn’t the only cause of death or only adverse outcome. Addiction alone will ruin one’s life and family.

Scientific research has shown that because of the potency of today’s pot, a fetus can incur brain damage and physical harm only two weeks after conception, before many women even realize they are pregnant. Even if the pregnant mother stops, it’s too late for the baby.

You have a choice of what to believe regarding Rep. Barbara Lee’s H.R. 6335. Either she is unenlightened on the true harms of marijuana or her philosophies are shaped by campaign contributions or both. In either case, she has violated the public trust to safeguard people and our tax dollars.

If you are part of the 81 percent to 85 percent of young people who don’t smoke pot, keep in mind that shortly your hard work will have to pay for the burden of those who work less or not at all. Think hard about whether you want to do that.

Help stop the hoax!

Roger Morgan is the founder and director of Take Back America.