What day is it today? Let me check my calendar… oh, yes, it’s Bogus Drug War Scaremongering Day. Hooray! What is it this time? “Studies” showing that marijuana use leads to enlarged breasts and lowered sperm counts in adolescent boys? “Experts” claiming that marijuana use will damage chromosomes and lead to birth defects? “Science” that shows use of marijuana will lead to amotivational syndrome, harder drugs, and violence?
Well, I was close…
CHICAGO, Nov. 30 /PRNewswire/ — Heavy use of marijuana may put adolescents who are genetically predisposed to schizophrenia at greater risk of developing the brain disorder, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Using a sophisticated brain imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), researchers at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, studied the brains of groups of adolescents: healthy, non-drug users; heavy marijuana smokers (daily use for at least one year); and schizophrenic patients. Unlike magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which provides a static picture of brain structures, DTI detects and measures the motion of water molecules in the brain, which can reveal microscopic abnormalities.
Manzar Ashtari, Ph.D., Sanjiv Kumra, M.D., and colleagues used DTI to examine the arcuate fasciculus, a bundle of fibers connecting the Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe and the Wernicke’s area in the left temporal lobe of the brain. The investigators found that repeated exposure to marijuana was related to abnormalities in the development of this fiber pathway, which is associated with the higher aspects of language and auditory functions.
“Because this language/auditory pathway continues to develop during adolescence, it is most susceptible to the neurotoxins introduced into the body through marijuana use,” explained Dr. Ashtari, associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
In the study, DTI was performed on 12 healthy, early adolescent males compared with 12 late adolescent males to show normal human brain development; 11 schizophrenic patients compared with 17 matched controls; 15 schizophrenic patients who smoke marijuana compared with 17 matched controls; and 15 marijuana smokers compared with 15 matched non-drug users. The scans revealed no abnormal developmental changes in the language pathway in the healthy adolescents, but showed abnormalities in both the marijuana users and schizophrenic patients.
“These findings suggest that in addition to interfering with normal brain development, heavy marijuana use in adolescents may also lead to an earlier onset of schizophrenia in individuals who are genetically predisposed to the disorder,” said co-principal-investigator Sanjiv Kumra, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Dr. Kumra, would you please define “heavy marijuana use”? Is this one of those “stuff the monkey with the equivalent of 20 joints a day” type of tests? Is heavy use a joint a day? 5 grams? An ounce?
Also, isn’t it a bit of a jump to say that marijuana smoking will lead to an earlier onset of schizophrenia? This is a chicken-and-egg question; which comes first, the schizophrenic person who seeks out marijuana to self-medicate the voices in his head, or the marijuana smoker who becomes a schizophrenic person?
I’m the first person to state that aside from medicinal treatments (like, say, cannabis for a teen undergoing chemo), children and adolescents should not use marijuana… or alcohol, tobacco, or any other drug. The adolescent brain is still forming, and you should be fully steeped in reality before you go around altering it. I’m waiting to see the study on heavy alcohol use on the development of the adolescent brain. Or heavy sugar use. Or aspartame, Ritalin, pseudoephedrine, caffeine…
This is just another propaganda salvo used by the government to cling to their beloved marijuana prohibition in the face of relaxing societal attitudes toward the plant, and the emerging science and opinion regarding marijuana’s medicinal properties. Strange, isn’t it, how at the same time we keep hearing the demonization messages about the raw cannabis plant, we’re also hearing messages of new medicinal breakthroughs and promising treatments from sublingual THC products (Sativex) and synthetic THC pills (Marinol). If it’s a naturally growing flower shown to provide medical relief and harmless recreation, it’s a killer drug that will destroy our youth. But if it’s extracted from the plant, chemically synthesized, packaged in a delivery device, and solk for profit with a bar code on it, why then it’s nature’s miracle.
Does marijuana cause detrimental effects to a tiny minority of underaged users? Maybe it does. I still fail to see how that should determine our policy regarding the medicinal or responsible recreational use of marijuana by adults. Premarital sex has detrimental effects to a minority of teenagers as well, but we don’t criminalize premarital sex between consenting adults because of it. Repeated exposure to violent R-rated movies may cause lack of impulse control among youngsters, but that doesn’t mean we ban those movies for adults.
In recent surveys, 89% of 12th-graders cite marijuana as “easy” or “fairly easy” to acquire, a rate that outpaces the ability of those teens to get alcohol or tobacco. If we are really concerned about the possible dangers of marijuana to kids, then we’d regulate it and distribute it legally to adults, which takes away the profit motive of the dealer who doesn’t check teenagers’ ID’s for weed. You don’t see beer dealers or cigarette dealers covered in bling-bling, shooting up neighborhoods, and hanging out near the playground to sell Budweiser or Marlboros to the kids, do you?
Drug using populations are self-limiting. Only a certain number of people are going to do drugs, legal or not. Even when you control for availability, there will always be far more marijuana users than cocaine, meth, or heroin users. Why? Because users of hard drugs have a tendency to die and the hard drugs provide a severe psychoactive experience. There are fewer cokeheads than potheads for the same reason there are fewer skydivers than joggers — skydiving and cocaine are both very intense rushes that cost a lot of money and could get you killed. Fewer people are going to want to take the risk and fewer people are going to enjoy that level of rush.
It is outrageous that liquor is tolerated and cannabis is not. If the same level of paranoia and health science propaganda were used to show the documented effects of alcohol on adolescents, and that propaganda led to the call to ban alcohol for adults because it was bad for kids, then we might have concerned mothers roaming the streets with axes to bust up taverns, calls for Christian temperance, and a federal amendment prohibiting the sale or possession of alcohol. Oh, wait, we did have that, it was called Prohibition, and it created crime, corruption, and violence, fueled criminal gangs, endangered Americans with uncontrolled, unsafe, sometimes poisonous alcohol, destroyed trust in law enforcement, filled our prisons to the brim, and did absolutely nothing to stave the American appetite for booze. (But it’s not all bad; Prohibition also gave us NASCAR and the Kennedy family. Alright, forget I mentioned it…)
