(Guardian UK) “I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.

For not only is cocaethylene toxic in the liver, it is also blamed for heart attacks in the under-40s and a surge in social problems. But because so little is known about the drug, few experts can agree on the nature of the threat to users, and indeed society as a whole.

Cocaine-related deaths are also increasing in the US. The US National Household Drug Survey estimated that around five million people used alcohol and cocaine each month.

Yes, but five million people also realize that they can have a great Friday or Saturday night out on the town, dancing and drinking til the wee morning hours, with a bump of coke every now and then, sleep it off Sunday, and unless their workplace random drug testing pops them early on Monday morning, they can probably pass a urine screen.

But if 14 million people wanted to have a fun weekend with a toke of a natural, herbal social relaxant shared communally among friends, knowing it is non-toxic to their liver and far safer to themselves and society than alcohol or cocaine or mixing the two, a workplace random drug test anytime in the next week to a month means chugging nasty-tasting body flushes and water or mixing up freeze-dried urine, strapping it to their thighs along with a chemical hand warmer and maybe even wearing a prosthetic penis to be certain they can beat the pee test and continue to pay their mortgages and feed their families.

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A new article on MedPage today claims that we still don’t fully understand the health risks of cannabis use:

Overall, “the public health burden of cannabis use is probably modest compared with that of alcohol, tobacco, and other illicit drugs,” Australian researchers reported in the Oct. 17 issue of The Lancet.

Wayne Hall, PhD, of the University of Queensland in Herston, Australia, and Louisa Degenhardt, PhD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, reviewed nearly 100 studies covering acute as well as chronic effects of marijuana, including reports of the prevalence of marijuana use around the world.

Globally, they wrote, about 3.9% of the world’s population used marijuana in 2006, according to United Nations statistics.

Well it opens nicely by noting that cannabis is safer and that almost 1 out of 25 people worldwide use cannabis. It gets a bit dicey from there:

They spent more time detailing the psychomotor impairments associated with the marijuana high. “Some experimental studies have shown diminished driving performance in response to emergency situations,” Hall and Degenhardt said, findings also corroborated in epidemiological studies.

For example, one study of car crash victims found that they were more likely to have tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of marijuana, in their blood compared with age- and sex-matched controls.

Another study determined that motorists killed in wrecks were 2.5 times as likely to have been responsible for the accident when they had THC in their blood.

These are meaningless points when you recognize that:

1. Marijuana is the third-most used drug after alcohol and tobacco, so it is not surprising you’d find it in car crash victims;
2. Marijuana is detectable in the blood long after most other drugs, including alcohol, are not; and
3. Recent studies show that people can test positive for THC in the blood up to a week after ceasing their use of cannabis.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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Via Twitter I received the plea from a reader named “LindseyDiane” that pointed to this newly released article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “What Parents Need to Know About Pot”.  She wrote “This article is full of blatant lies. Please email to set them straight!”

Will do.

What Parents Need to Know About Pot

Marijuana packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s.

Parents may just want to listen up: The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among marijuana users over age 12, almost 35 percent used marijuana 20 or more days in the past month.

Ah, statistics.  What stood out to you in that sentence?  Did you get “age 12″, “35%”, and “20 days a month”?  Preceded by a call to parents, right?  Oh my god, one third of our kids are getting stoned two-thirds of the time!

But here’s the thing – that’s all marijuana users over age 12, even the ones age 18 to 100 who are long past needing their parents’ guidance on adult decisions.

Now, indeed, the statistic is true.  Nice thing about the intertubes is you can check their math.  Visit the Substance Abuse Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) and you can run something called Quick Tables.  You can choose four different “Measures of Marijuana Use”, like “Number of Days Used Marijuana in the Past Twelve Months”.  You can choose eight different “Respondent Characteristics”, like “Age Group”.  Then it will build you the table and even a bar graph if you like.

There are about 248 million Americans aged 12 and older.  For the 25 million people age 12 and older who will smoke marijuana this year, it is true that 35.6% will smoke 100 days or more in the past year (so, not exactly “20 or more days a month”, more like “8 or more days a month”).  But for the 12-17 age group, the number is actually 28%.

Now, that still sounds scary, huh?  But this is just the numbers of the kids who do smoke pot.  There are 25 million kids aged 12-17 and 880,000 of them are smoking pot “8 or more times a month”.  That’s 3.5% of all kids.  Think of it as 7 out of 200 getting stoned one-fourth of the time; not 1 out of three getting stoned two-thirds of the time.

I still think that’s not a great number, but then I’d point out that these are the results that have been achieved through forty years of “drug war”.  These are the results achieved when the government spends $1 billion on teen anti-drug ads that actually encouraged marijuana use.  In the same period of time, we have reduced cigarette smoking among 12th graders from three out of four having tried a cigarette in 1977 to  now where less than half have done so.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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Marijuana use associated with increased risk of mortality among acute MI patients
Boston, MA – For acute myocardial infarction patients wondering if the next heart attack is the big one, maybe smoking marijuana relieves some of that stress and anxiety, but it isn’t helping their chances of living any longer. New preliminary research suggests that marijuana use in acute MI survivors is associated with a three-fold higher risk of mortality after infarction.

“For all the thousands and thousands of studies we’ve done on people who have had heart attacks, virtually nobody asks them about their marijuana use,” said lead investigator Dr Kenneth Mukamal (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA). “There is an extraordinary lack of data for exposure to something as common as marijuana. Every single study asks people if they smoke, if they drink alcohol, but we never ask about marijuana.”

Speaking… about the study, which is published in the March 2008 issue of the American Heart Journal, Mukamal said that previous research has shown marijuana to have cardiovascular effects that might pose a risk, particularly to older adults and those with coronary disease, such as an increase in resting heart rate. Other studies have shown transient increases in MI risk, possibly due to carbon monoxide exposure and an increase in heart rate, said Mukamal.

Oral cannabinoid therapy, however, has also been shown to stop atherosclerosis in a mouse model and to play other immunologic roles. With these differing effects of marijuana in mind, the group set out to study the relation between marijuana use and coronary heart disease in 1,913 adults hospitalized with MI between 1989 and 1994. Of these, 52 patients reported marijuana use during the previous year, and 317 died during a mean follow-up of 3.8 years.

In an adjusted analysis, marijuana use was associated with a three times greater risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, and noncardiovascular death following acute MI, and there was a greater risk among those who smoked more frequently.

This study sounds a little fishy to me, but I’ll let Dr. Earleywine take a look at this one before I comment on the analysis and conclusions.

However, if I take these headlines at their word, and believe that people who’ve had a major heart attack ought not smoke marijuana, well, then, okay. I imagine there are all sorts of usually harmless activities heart attack victims should avoid.

But this study doesn’t separate the marijuana use from the smoking of marijuana. What about vaporization? Or eating medicated edibles? All questions I’ll present to Dr. Earleywine in next week’s Stash, so stay tuned for his analysis next Wednesday.

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