Pot Goes Mainstream on NBC's Today Show (VIDEO)

Studies indicate that 8 million American women smoked marijuana in the last year.

Marie Claire editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, and Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at the New York City School of Medicine, on the NBC Today Show

(LOS ANGELES) - It was interesting to watch Matt Lauer have to be "cool" about marijuana in this week's NBC Today Show segment titled "Stiletto Stoners", which related a story of growing numbers of women who prefer pot as a wind down drug, that they see as far less harmful than alcohol or other substances.

Marie Claire editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, is one of many modern professional women who disagree with the somewhat common belief, that there is a large social stigma attached to smoking marijuana.

"I have to say, that's not what we are hearing from readers, she said on the Today Show. First of all, it's decriminalized in 13 states, and I don't think this is a generation of people who get excited about the fact that it's illegal."

Coles says the inspiration for the article came from readers who said that they were feeling stressed.

"Clearly, the economy is a great deal of stress for people and they wanted a way to unwind. And they found more and more of them were doing this [smoking marijuana] and they found it had less impact on them when they were going to work the next morning. So they didn't want to drink. It's cheap and they felt they could do it in the privacy of their own home, and it was a very effective way to calm down," Coles said.

Also appearing on the program, Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at the New York City School of Medicine, agreed that marijuana may be a less harmful drug than alcohol, saying that marijuana has psycho-therapeutic properties that booze lacks.

"It's more of a mind drug", she said. "Alcohol's sort of a deadening, numbing maybe more like a body drug."

"On pot, people are unwinding and they're relaxing, but they're also able to think and maybe analyze or think clearly, I think cannabis is more functional than alcohol, certainly in terms of anxiety. It can be a treatment or a medicine."

Coles added that the Marie Claire article seems to have struck a nerve with readers.

Special thanks to Cheryl Shuman from the Beverly Hills Chapter of NORML.

Video

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor.
Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), the first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several other awards including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated with Google News and several other major search engines and news aggregators.
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legalize it April 26, 2010 9:35 pm (Pacific time)

whats wrong with it??? Pot has many medical uses as well as being Way safer than boooooze!!

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Osotan; October 4, 2009 5:33 am (Pacific time)

I even invite these 8,000 ladies to my place, to chill and listen to good music.,yes mon,yes! And those returned from the war.,and those who don't want to go,yes mon! Twist one!

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Osotan; October 3, 2009 8:02 pm (Pacific time)

Daniel.,I know you are taking the piss as the Brits say,but even so I tell you to twist up a big spliff mon and chill to the max,yes mon,do this thing and forget the prison industry.

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David Thompson October 3, 2009 6:52 pm (Pacific time)

Sounds like you are into slavery.
The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are there to protect We the People from from folks with ideas like that..
.
Satire, David, satire.

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Daniel Johnson October 2, 2009 5:10 pm (Pacific time)

Eight million women smoked pot? There's a ready made job creation program. Turn the prisons over to the private sector, as they have done in some states, and they can build thousands of prisons (creating millions of jobs) and millions of spinoff jobs in staffing them and feeding and looking after all the new prisoners. If these women are systematically hunted down, charged and given good prison terms, the American economy can be saved.

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