"If marijuana is so good for you why does it make you cough?"

If marijuana is so good for you why does it make you cough?

This is a question I was asked and in fairness, on the face of it it seems a reasonable one. However, it is very misguided. Coughing isn't necessarily indicative of marijuana being unhealthy. Coughing is just a bodily response to your airway being irritated.

Irritated, you say? Well, see it's bad for you. You just said it's irritating to the airway!

Irritation is in no way a reliable indicator of something being unhealthy. Spicy foods can cause tremendous pain and irritation while being eaten but time and again science has proven spicy foods to offer a wide range of health benefits. Stretching your muscles, lifting weights, running until your body feels like it's on fire or receiving a deep tissue massage are painful and/or irritating to the body while also being extremely good for you. Marijuana is much the same.

Of course, everything has negatives attached and everything can be done too much but moderate, intelligent use of marijuana is at worst a benign undertaking and at best a very positive one with a myriad number of health benefits (both mental and physical health).

Fun Experiment: Take an Atheist. Get Him High. Place Atheist Inside Church.

Wow, I thought, bracing myself against the freezing cold wind as I exited the car, I'm really doing this. I'm going to church. Church. I walked in to the same Catholic church that I attended (on a very infrequent basis) as a youth (but never before with the ol mj in the system) and as I passed from the hall to the main part of the church itself, skipping the 'holy' water anointing station and hoping I didn't look like an extra on the set of Half Baked I entered what felt like an entirely new dimension- a sense of deja-vu mixed with a rather strong feeling of I don't belong here and they will know it immediately. I mean, for one thing, the place was packed and so trying my hardest to not feel completely out of place standing in front of what looked like 200 people, all of whom I was certain were all thinking the same thing (*hiss* an interloper *hiss*).

....And then there's the fact that I was stoned. Not exactly the most comfortable place to be when you're high but man did it amplify the experience. I'll get to that in a bit though. My cohorts and I took a seat. I hadn't sat in one of those seats for years, and it was a church of all places, but I did experience a small sense of a faint whiff of welcoming. My ass recoiled and sighed with familiarity at the same time, but I digress.

We were a few minutes early so I took the time to look around and take in the scene. Like most catholic churches, the place is a strange mix of welcoming and foreboding. The architectural design is aesthetically pleasing and it's clear that the workmanship was solid and finely detailed, but I cannot deny the fact that it did strike me as also being intentionally designed in such a grandiose fashion that it ventured beyond "look how grand this is" to perhaps a small (and possibly imagined on my part, sure) hint of "and look how small you are." It could be simple cynicism on my part, but as you will soon read, the mass itself also seemed to be designed with the intention of engendering in those in attendance a sense of less than. There certainly was a lot of prostrating oneself involved in the actual mass itself.