Richard Cohen: pot a gateway drug to cigarettes, which will kill you

Credit: PatrickMcMullan.com 

The always peculiar Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, is out with his weekly musing. This time, he's explaining the dangers, or rather, his personal aversion, to marijuana:

Nothing I saw [in the news media] mentioned why I, for one, will not smoke marijuana. I’m afraid it would lead me back to cigarettes. ...

And when I see kids on the street smoking, flipping off health concerns with the arrogance of youth, I want to slap them silly or, at the least, delay their walk with a lecture on what the surgeon general has found. But mostly I want them and everyone else to ask how we can have a national debate on marijuana and ignore the annual mountain of cadavers from smoking cigarettes. It, for sure, is a gateway drug — to an early grave.