Medical marijuana keeps making headway in the American psyche. Eleven states now have approved marijuana for medical purposes. Bills are proposed in four more states. Court decisions have recently found in favor of marijuana reform ads on public transportation. After seventy years of prohibition, many people are beginning to believe that maybe, just perhaps, marijuana isn’t the killer demon weed the government tells us it is.
So like a Tom Ridge terror alert in service of The War On (Some Countries That Had Nothing To Do With) Terror™, it’s time to scare and confuse the public in the name of The War On (Some Americans With Certain Non-Pharmaceutical) Drugs™! This just in from N.I.D.A. (National Institute on Drug Abuse):
New Scientist Breaking News – Marijuana makes blood rush to the head: …Regular marijuana use can harm memory and the ability to make decisions, according to Jean Cadet at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Maryland, US. To find out why, he monitored the flow of blood through the brains of 54 marijuana smokers, among whom the heaviest user smoked 50 joints every day. [The study results are] suggesting that cannabis changes the blood vessels in the brain in a way which hinders oxygen in reaching the tissue effectively… [emphasis mine]
Fifty joints per day? I’m surprised the heaviest user was even able to dress himself for the experiments! Let’s do the math. If you’re awake for sixteen hours per day, then you’re averaging three and one-eighth joints per hour, or better yet, one joint every nineteen minutes. There’s no mention of what the measurement of a “joint” is — could be anything from a Cheech “toothpick” to a Chong “labrador” I suppose. Let’s estimate that a joint contains 1 gram of marijuana. This would mean the heaviest smoker was smoking one and three-quarters ounces per day.
Some readers may know little about what those numbers mean. Here’s some perspective. One ounce of decent-grade marijuana costs between $300-$450. A medical user might require up to two ounces per day. An average “stoner” type could make an ounce last for a week or two. An average “occasional puff on a weekend or at a concert” user could easily make an ounce last for a summer.
Or let’s compare apples to oranges. A joint is like a six-pack (enough to make two or three people buzzed). An eighth (of an ounce) is like a case of beer (enough to bring fun to a small party). An ounce is like a half-keg (a guarantee that a large party will get hammered). So, how relevant would it be to you, the social beer drinker, to read a study showing that someone who drinks a keg of beer per day has severe health problems? Would your first thought be, “I’d better stop drinking beer?” Or would you think, “of course the dolt who drinks a keg a day has problems, I’ll just be sure to stop at a beer or two.”
This study highlights my main problems with most scientific marijuana studies. Too small of a survey group, uncertain controls for quantity, and an unrealistic overdosing of the drug. Of course someone who smokes fifty joints a day has brain problems. But apparently not problem enough that the guy can’t muster $300-$450 per week of disposable income on marijuana. (Or maybe he buys in bulk, which is cheaper, but just proves that the pot didn’t hinder him so much that he couldn’t keep pounds of marijuana hidden from the authorities.)
…After a month without cannabis… The resistance to blood flow of light and moderate users – who usually smoked an average of 11 and 44 joints per week, respectively – was starting to return to normal.
…But there was no improvement observed in the heavy users, who smoked an average of 131 joints per week.
Again, it’s math time. Their “light” users are smoking 1.5 joints per day, the “moderate” users are smoking 6 joints per day. My assertion is that the vast majority of cannabis consumers would rarely even qualify as “light” users, while the most extreme user I’ve ever personally known would be only halfway to “moderate”
But, says William Notcutt of James Paget Hospital in Norfolk, UK, the longer-term effect on the brain may not have been caused by the same substance that produces the high.
“Somebody smoking 50 joints per day is getting a huge number of carcinogens from the marijuana plant,” he notes.
And here’s where the quality factors in. It’s obvious that inhaling the smoke from burning vegetable matter is bad for you, whether it is cannabis, tobacco, wood, or straw. So given a choice, marijuana smokers value the product with the highest concentrations of THC (the psychoactive ingredient) — more bang for the buck (or toke). Pot smokers smoke marijuana to get high. If they can do that with half a joint of “kind” they will, but if it takes three joints of “dirtweed”, they’ll smoke that, too.
“We know the cardiovascular effect [of cannabis] is very complex and multi-factorial so it’s not as simple as with other drugs. The group that needs to be studied now is people that use high quality medicinal extracts.”…
This is where we get a peek at the true agenda of NIDA and the government. See, marijuana has negligible deleterious effects. It has been smoked for thousands of years and not one person has died from it. Despite the scare tactics, we haven’t seen legions of poor-health-afflicted former marijuana junkies out there. There’s no support group for former pot-smoking men with enlarged boobies. Despite widespread urine testing and dire predictions of amotivation and lowered productivity, pot smokers continue to get jobs and work as well as their peers. Rastafarians and Coptic Christians continue to have children, even though marijuana supposedly affects fertility.
No one needs scientific studies to show how harmful methamphetamines, cocaine, and heroin are. People know this from common sense. They see lesion-ridden speed freaks. They’ve seen the corpses of people who’ve overdosed on coke. The pathetic street junkies in any major city are testament to the harms of smack. Conversely, plenty of people know people who smoke pot, and plenty more have done it themselves, maybe just once at a concert, and they’ve seen no harms. Marijuana is the third most popular mood-altering drug, behind alcohol and tobacco. Marijuana smokers greatly outnumber the users of all other illicit drugs combined. You know why? Because the users of the other illicit drugs have a nasty habit of dying.
If marijuana were truly harmful, we would have seen obvious evidence of it by now. And that’s the real problem with marijuana: it isn’t harmful and it is actually quite beneficial in many ways. Note the last few words above — high quality medicinal extracts. The only thing marijuana harms is the profit margin of huge pharmaceutical companies. Since they’ve been unable to show that marijuana is bad, and since the public perception is increasingly favoring the notion that marijuana is actually good in some medical instances, now the attempt is being made to show that it is the smoking that is harmful. Soon we’ll see the studies with aerosolized THC or sublingual THC or any other non-smoking method, and those studies will confirm what people already know: THC is a useful medicine.
But you can’t just grow, dry, roll, and smoke your medicine for free. No, it has to be cultivated, processed, manufactured, and packaged into nice little profit-delivering patented containers. Only then will government give the OK to THC.
