Wanna protect your brain from this? Smoke a joint!
(Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, used high-tech scans to compare microscopic changes in brain white matter in teens aged 16 to 19 who were divided into three groups: binge drinkers (boys who consume five or more drinks at one sitting, and girls who have four or more drinks); binge drinkers who also smoked marijuana; and a control group with little or no experience with either alcohol or drugs.
As expected, the binge drinkers showed signs of white matter damage in all eight brain regions examined by the researchers. But the binge drinkers/marijuana users had less damage in seven out of the eight brain regions than the binge drinkers did. And compared to the control group, the binge drinkers/marijuana users had more white matter damage in only three regions.
The researchers wrote that brain white matter tracts were “more coherent in adolescents who binge drink and use marijuana than in adolescents who report only binge drinking.” They said it’s “possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.”
So, naturally, when these 16-to-19-year-olds graduate and go to college, we immerse them in an alcohol-saturated party culture and forbid them from using cannabis. It is illegal for them to be using either drug, so we provide slap-on-the-wrist penalties for the alcohol use but kick them out of the dorms, surrender their college aid, require random urine screening, and saddle them with a criminal drug record that makes the top careers and positions all but impossible to attain.
Because we want to protect the children. For God’s sake, won’t somebody think about the children?!?
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[...] August 25th, 2009 at 12:55 pm | By: Radical Russ Last week I brought you the news that teenage binge drinkers suffer damage to brain white matter in eight of eight regions surveyed, but that cannabis use somewhat mitigated that brain damage in [...]
What I’d like to know is, would starting smoking in ones 50′s would repair the damage from years of binge drinking? My wife has been a binge drinker all her life, she is 54. She just recently started smoking since I am medicating and she is getting stupider with every drunk she gets on. If I could get her to just smoke without the drinking would it repair the damage done?
lmao!
i wish i could throw this in the face of everyone in college that called me a stupid loser for being stoned all the time. these binge drinkers thought i was cimpletely stupid! hah!
on another note, it seems the more i learn about alcohol’s effects on the brain, the less i seem to drink. i’m down to about half a beer per week now.