Marijuana Blog

If you smoke marijuana, you will permanently lose 8 IQ points as chronic THC exposure hastens the age-related loss of hippocampal neurons.  The resulting impairments in neural connectivity will degrade memory, learning, and impulse control, eventually leading to an increasing likelihood of becoming addicted to heroin.

 

The federal government says so, right here on the “What are marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain?” page at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

 

Scares about marijuana’s long-term effects are as old as prohibition itself.  The problem for the scaremongers is that there are plenty of older pot smokers actively debunking all the scares.  Whoopi Goldberg’s in her 50s and chatting it up on The View.  Cheech Marin’s in his 60s tearing through a game of Celebrity Jeopardy!  Tommy Chong’s in his 70s Dancing with the Stars.  Willie Nelson’s in his 80s and still On the Road Again.  While they’re not rocket scientists, I don’t think anyone would call any of them stupid.  Certainly nobody would have called the late Dr. Carl Sagan stupid – he was a rocket scientist and a frequent pot smoker!

 

The 8 IQ points nonsense derives from a study that came out of Duke University in summer 2012.  Prohibitionists like Kevin Sabet, facing the prospect of two legal marijuana states, pounced on it and have beaten that talking point into the ground ever since.

 

The problems with the study were numerous.  It only found the decline among the heaviest consumers of marijuana, which were 38 people out of 1,073 in the study.  It found slight increases in IQ for moderate consumers.  A follow-up study found other socioeconomic factors explained the IQ drop just as reasonably as the marijuana use.  It was hardly the slam-dunk that the drug warriors wanted it to be.

 

Last fall, another study came out from University of London.  It tracked 2,612 kids born in 1991 & 1992 and checked IQ scores at age 8 and age 15.  The scientists found absolutely “no relationship between cannabis use and lower IQ at age 15.”  Even the heaviest pot smokers didn’t lose IQ points.

 

They did find, however, that alcohol consumption was predictive of losing IQ points.  Ain’t it funny how you don’t see any TV ads about that?  Why doesn’t Kevin Sabet ever bring up that fact?

 

Likewise, there are many studies prohibitionists like to seize on to justify their stereotyped perception of marijuana consumers as dullards.  Most of them are studies that look at results in rats and extrapolate that to humans.  Others take a look at brain scans of marijuana consumers and interpret the results.  But when scientists examine actual humans who consume marijuana, they find little to no differences in cognitive function.

 

Read more: http://www.theweedblog.com

Compared with other recreational drugs — including alcohol — marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use.

 

Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of Nature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.

 

And all the way at the bottom of the list? Weed — roughly 114 times less deadly than booze, according to the authors, who ran calculations that compared lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses. Marijuana is also the only drug studied that posed a low mortality risk to its users.

 

These findings reinforce drug-safety rankings developed 10 years ago under a slightly different methodology. So in that respect, the study is more of a reaffirmation of previous findings than anything else. But given the current national and international debates over the legal status of marijuana and the risks associated with its use, the study arrives at a good time.

 

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com

A certification agency is open to the possibility

 

Medical marijuana may soon come with a kosher seal of approval.

 

The Orthodox Union that offers kosher certification is in early discussions with parties interested in offering kosher medical marijuana products, according to the The Jewish Daily Forward.

 

In the past, the Orthodox Union has refused to certify cigarettes and e-cigarettes due to their clear health risks, but Rabbi Moshe Elefant, who leads kosher certification at the Orthodox Union, said it “would not have a problem” certifying medical marijuana since it has health benefits.

 

Since marijuana is a plant, it would appear that the certification would not be necessary. But in New York State, where medical marijuana will go on sale next year, cannabis could be distributed in other forms like edible substances and capsules, which would need a kosher seal. Many Orthodox rabbis are still strongly against its use.

 

Source: http://time.com/