marijuana, tobacco, etc.

From Steve: American drug laws are schizophrenic and illogical.

I agree.

...all this micromanagement didn't start until we began toying around with participatory democracy and universal suffrage. In fact, the entry of women into the political arena was the harbinger of the loss of a laundry list of freedoms.

Those are mighty bold claims. Any proof you'd like to post?

But to the article's specific references, does one have to smoke pot to get the benefit?

I don’t think so. From what I read in the articles, it's just about getting the THC.

I believe I read once that smoking pot is probably even more harmful to your lungs than tobacco. Apparently the resins (or "tar") in marijuana smoke are far heavier and do more permanent damage to lung tissue. The article didn't mention synthetic THC either. I wonder if that works as well.

Faintly remembering a well-publicized 'marijuana vs. tobacco' debate not too long ago, I Googled and found this regarding marijuana tar from MSNBC at (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12943013/). It appears that you’re right about the ‘more tar’ thing, but it seems that marijuana tar acts differently than tobacco tar (and, theoretically, may be helpful):

U.S. study sees no marijuana link to lung cancer

Marijuana smoking does not increase a person's risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers. They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer. Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day...
Previous studies showed marijuana tar contained about 50 percent more of the chemicals linked to lung cancer, compared with tobacco tar, Tashkin said. In addition, smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco.
"Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there's less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled," Tashkin said in a statement. "And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers — they hold their breath about four times longer, allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lung." He theorized that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical in marijuana smoke that produces its psychotropic effect, may encourage aging, damaged cells to die off before they become cancerous.

So, again, it seems that smoking marijuana may not be a part of the big 'drug problem' that it has been perpetuated to be (other than the fact that marijuana is something that many criminals traffic to generate income), or smoking tobacco continues to prove itself to be comparatively harmful, or both. I do recall research proving that nicotine can be helpful to those suffering from dementia. But, unlike the Alzheimer's/marijuana research results, it doesn't appear that nicotine would have any use as a late-life, preventative drug for Alzheimer's-related dementia.

The article didn't mention synthetic THC either. I wonder if that works as well.

You’d think that natural and synthetic THC of the same dosage would yield the same result. From a pure ‘cost/benefit analysis’ perspective, natural THC would seem to be cheaper to manufacture, don’t you think?