hemp studied If you want to use drugs, read this first What's addictive?. |
![]() |
Two of these metabolites are called `11-hydroxy-tetrahydrocannabinol' and `11-nor-9-carboxy-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol' but we will call them 11-OH-THC and 11-nor instead. These are the chemicals which stay in your fatty cells. There is almost no Delta-9-THC left over a few hours after smoking marijuana, and scientific studies which measure the effects of marijuana agree with this fact.
GOOD! Actually, this is not true, but if it were, it would mean that marijuana is safer to smoke today than it was in the Sixties. (More potent cannabis means less smoking means less lung damage.) People who use this statistic just plain do not know what they are talking about. Sometimes they will even claim that marijuana is now twenty to thirty times stronger, which is physically impossible because it would have to be *over* 100% Delta-9-THC. The truth is, marijuana has not really changed potency all that much, if at all, in the last several hundred years. Growing potent cannabis is an ancient art which has not improved in centuries, despite all our modern technology. Before marijuana was even made illegal, drug stores sold tinctures of cannabis which were over 40% THC.
Even so, the point is moot because marijuana smokers engage in something called `auto-titration.' This basically means smoking until they are satisfied and then stopping, so it does not really matter if the marijuana is more potent because they will smoke less of it. Marijuana is not like pre-moistened towelettes or snow-cones. There is nothing forcing marijuana smokers to smoke an entire joint.
Experienced marijuana users are accustomed to smoking marijuana from many different suppliers, and they know that if they smoke a whole joint of very potent bud they will get `TOO STONED'. Since being `too stoned' is a rather unpleasant experience, smokers quickly learn to take their time and `test the waters' when they do not know how strong their marijuana is.
The long answer: The reason why you ask this is because you probably heard or read somewhere that marijuana damages brain cells, or makes you stupid. These claims are untrue.
The first one -- marijuana kills brain cells -- is based on research done during the second Reefer Madness Movement. A study attempted to show that marijuana smoking damaged brain structures in monkeys. However, the study was poorly performed and it was severely criticized by a medical review board. Studies done afterwards failed to show any brain damage, in fact a very recent study on Rhesus monkeys used technology so sensitive that scientists could actually see the effect of learning on brain cells, and it found no damage.
But this was Reefer Madness II, and the prohibitionists were looking around for anything they could find to keep the marijuana legalization movement in check, so this study was widely used in anti-marijuana propaganda. It was recanted later.
(To this day, the radical anti-drug groups, like P.R.I.D.E. and Dr. Gabriel Nahas, still use it -- In fact, America's most popular drug education program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, claims that marijuana ``can impair memory perception & judgement by destroying brain cells.'' When police and teachers read this and believe it, our job gets really tough, since it takes a long time to explain to children how Ms. Jones and Officer Bob were wrong.)
The truth is, no study has ever demonstrated cellular damage, stupidity, mental impairment, or insanity brought on specifically by marijuana use -- even heavy marijuana use. This is not to say that it cannot be abused, however.
Marijuana is so safe that it would be almost impossible to overdose on it. Doctors determine how safe a drug is by measuring how much it takes to kill a person (they call this the LD50) and comparing it to the amount of the drug which is usually taken (ED50). This makes marijuana hundreds of times safer than alcohol, tobacco, or caffiene. According to a DEA Judge ``marijuana is the safest therapeutically active substance known to mankind.''
Studies which have claimed to show short-term memory impairment have not stood up to scrutiny and have not been duplicated. Newer studies show that marijuana does not impair simple, real-world memory processes. Marijuana does slow reaction time slightly, and this effect has sometimes been misconstrued as a memory problem. To put things in perspective, one group of researchers made a control group hold their breath, like marijuana smokers do. Marijuana itself only produced about twice as many effects on test scores as breath holding. Many people use marijuana to study. Other people cannot, for some reason, use marijuana and do anything that involves deep thought. Nobody knows what makes the difference.
Marijuana itself does not make normal people anti-social. In fact, a large psychological study of teenagers found that casual marijuana users are more well adjusted than `drug free' people. This would be very amusing, but it is a serious problem. There are children who have emotional problems which keep them from participating in healthy, explorative behavior. They need psychological help but instead they are skipped over. Marijuana users who do not need help are having treatment forced on them, and in the mean-time marijuana takes the blame for the personality characteristics and problems of the people who like to use it improperly.
When a person reaches adolescence, their willingness to work usually increases, but this does not happen for teenagers using marijuana regularly -- even just on the weekends. The actual studies involved monkeys, not humans, and the results are not verified, but older studies which tried to show `amotivational syndrome' usually only suceeded when they studied adolescents. Adults are not effected.
The symptoms are not permanent, and motivation returns to normal levels several months after marijuana smoking stops. However, a small number of people may be unusually sensitive to this effect. One of the monkeys in the experiment was severely amotivated and did not recover. Doctors will need to study this more before they know why.
The idea that using marijuana will lead you to use heroin or speed is called the `gateway theory' or the `stepping stone hypothesis.' It has been a favorite trick of the anti-drug propaganda artists, because it casts marijuana as something insidious with hidden dangers and pitfalls. There have never been any real statistics to back this idea up, but somehow it was the single biggest thing which the newspapers yelled about during Reefer Madness II. (Perhaps this was because the CIA was looking for someone to blame for the increase in heroin use after Viet Nam.)
The gateway theory of drug use is no longer generally accepted by the medical community. Prohibitionists used to point at numbers which showed that a large percentage of the hard drug users `started with marijuana.' They had it backwards -- many hard drug users also use marijuana. There are two reasons for this. One is that marijuana can be used to `take the edge off' the effects of some hard drugs. The other is a recently discovered fact of adolescent psychology -- there is a personality type which uses drugs, basically because drugs are exciting and dangerous, a thrill.
On sociological grounds, another sort of gateway theory has been argued which claims that marijuana is the source of the drug subculture and leads to other drugs through that culture. By the same token this is untrue -- marijuana does not create the drug subculture, the drug subculture uses marijuana. There are many marijuana users who are not a part of the subculture.
This brings up another example of how marijuana legalization could actually reduce the use of illicit drugs. Even though there is no magical `stepping stone' effect, people who choose to buy marijuana often buy from dealers who deal in many different illegal drugs. This means that they have access to illegal drugs, and might decide to try them out. In this case it is the laws which lead to hard drug use. If marijuana were legal, the drug markets would be separated, and less people would start using the illegal drugs. Maybe this is why emergency room admissions for hard drugs have gone down in the states that decriminalized marijuana during the 70's.
Consider, also, that children have a natural urge to do things that they aren't supposed to. It is called curiosity. By making such a fuss over marijuana, you make it interesting (some call it the `forbidden fruit' factor.) This is made worse when children are lied to about drugs by teachers and police -- they lose respect for the school and the government. In a lot of ways, it is the hysteria about drugs which causes the most harm. When marijuana users do none of the horrible things they are supposed to, children may think that other more harmful drugs are OK, too. Your children will not respect you unless you are calm and give good reasons for your rules. The first step is for you, the parent, to learn the facts about drugs.
Marijuana does not turn young healthy boys into lanky, girlish looking wimps, no. This scare tactic (call it homo-phobic if you will) was a common device used in early anti-drug literature. It attempts to scare boys away from marijuana by telling them, essentially, that it will turn them into a girl. Young men probably should not use marijuana heavily (see the section on amotivational syndrome), but the risks are not horrendous.
Anti-marijuana pamphlets used this claim often during Reefer Madness II, but the studies which are cited are mostly faulty or misinterpreted. This is not to say that marijuana use does not affect childhood development at all, just that the effects are not as drastic as some people would like them to sound. In fact they are pretty much unknown.
Many people think that marijuana enhances their sex lives. It is not an aphrodisiac, that is, it does not make people want to have sex. What it does do for some people is make everything more sensual -- it makes food taste better and feelings and emotions more vivid.
Here is a list of interesting facts about marijuana smoking and tobacco smoking:
Studies conducted in Jamiaca have shown that mothers who smoke marijuana have healthier children, but this may be due to the extra income generated by marijuana dealing and other factors. It has been a common ploy in the War on Drugs to claim that marijuana, and especially cocaine, causes birth defects or behavior problems like alcohol does. This scares caring mothers into thinking drugs are `evil.' The claims are not based on valid scientific research -- many of them do not even consider the life-style or living conditions of the mothers before pointing at drugs with the blame.
Obviously, pregnant mothers should not smoke as much pot as they possibly can. If marijuana is abused, it may hurt the health of both mother and child. Delta-9-THC does cross the placenta and enter the fetus. Oddly, though, the marijuana metabolite, 11-nor-9-carboxy-delta-9-THC does not, and the fetus does not break delta-9-THC down into 11-nor like the mother's body does, so unborn children are not exposed to 11-nor. The third trimester is the time when the child is most vulnerable. Parents should bear these facts in mind when they make decisions about using cannabis.
As funny as it may seem, you may be safer driving `stoned', as long as you aren't `totally blasted' and seeing things -- but few users are irresponsible enough to drive in this state of mind, anyway. Still, many people have reported making mistakes while driving because they were stoned.
There are those who think that marijuana is a major problem on the streets, because of a newspaper article or news story which they have seen which said a large number of people who were killed in driving accidents tested postive for marijuana use. For various reasons, these studies are not reliable:
For a drug to be physically addictive, it must be reinforcing, produce withdrawal symptoms, and produce tolerance. Marijuana is reinforcing, because it feels good, but it does not do the other two things. Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are all physically addictive.
Your employees will probably resent being drug tested; drug
testing allows an employer to govern the actions of an
employee in his off time -- even when these actions do not
effect his job performance. (As told above, marijuana drug
tests do not test whether a person is `high'. They test
whether or not they have used in the last few weeks.)
Asking employees to urinate in a plastic cup every month is
not a good way to make them feel like part of the business,
or make friends, either. There is growing concern about
drug tests, sometimes because they misfire and accuse the
wrong person, but mostly because they might be used to find
out other confidential information about an employee. Legal
professionals are beginning to question whether they are
even constitutional.
In the 1980's, the Bush administration went to great lengths to promote drug testing. In fact, George Bush estimated the cost of drug use at over 60 billion dollars a year, based on a study which supposedly showed that persons who had used marijuana at some time during their life were less successful. The very same study could be used to show that current, heavy users of marijuana and other illegal drugs were actually more successful. Something is a bit fishy here, and when you add to that the fact that several former heads of the DEA and former Drug Czars now own or work in the urinalysis industry, this whole scene begins to smell a bit funny.
Our prisons and our courtrooms are so crowded that the American Bar Association's annual report on the state of the Justice System is basically one long plea for an end to drug laws that imprison users. Even the Clinton Administration recognizes that locking people up is not the solution. This is especially true for the people who actually have drug abuse problems -- they need treatment, not mistreatment. The Drug War put mandatory minimum jail sentences for drug crimes on the lawbooks. If we do not take those laws (at least) back off, we will be in sorry shape come the end of the century. A retroactive policy of marijuana legalization or decriminalization would go a long way in helping to solve this crisis.
Also consider this -- Once a person gets put in jail, he becomes angry with the world. He will probably be victimized while he is there, and most likely will learn criminal behaviors from hard-core violent offenders. There is also a very good chance that he will have caught AIDS or tuberculosis by the time he gets let back out. By locking up drug users, you are digging yourself a very big trench to fall in -- is it worth it?
Besides, lots of these people don't deserve to be in jail. Why should they serve time just because they like to get `high' on marijuana? Especially when someone can drink alcohol without being arrested... what kind of law is that? You have to think about what kind of a world you are making for yourself before you act. How are the police of the future going to treat the people? How far are you willing to let the government go to get the drug users? How many of your own rights will you sacrifice by trying to jail `the druggies'?
The fact that there are over 60 unique chemicals in cannabis, called `cannabinoids,' is something that scientists find very interesting. Many of these cannabinoids may have valuable effects as medicine. For example, `cannabinol' is a cannabinoid which can help people with insomnia. Doctors think that this chemical is why most patients prefer to use marijuana rather than pure Delta-9-THC pills (called dronabinol) -- the cannabinol takes the edge off being `high' and calms the nerves. Another cannabinoid, `cannabidiolic acid', is a very effective anti-biotic, like pennicillin. Many of these chemicals can be extracted from marijuana without any fancy laboratory equipment.
Recent research has also found that marijuana metabolites are left over in the lungs for up to seven months after the smoking has stopped. While they are there, the immune system of the lungs may be affected (but the macrophages do not get ``turned off'' like in the liver.) The effects of smoking itself are probably worse than the effects of the THC, and last just as long.
All this said, doctors still have not decided whether marijuana users are at risk for colds or not. With the possible exception of bronchitis, there are no numbers which suggest that marijuana users catch more colds, but... this did not stop Carlton Turner, a United States Drug Czar, from saying many times in his public addresses that marijuana caused AIDS and homosexuality. His claims were so ridiculus that the Washington Post and Newsweek Magazine made fun of him, and he was forced to resign.
Today, AIDS patients use marijuana to treat their symptoms without any aparrent problems. Some studies suggest that marijuana may actually stimulate certain forms of immunity. Researchers have tried to show major effects on the healthy human's immune system, but if marijuana does have any substantial effects, good or bad, they are either too subtle or too small to notice.