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:
Marijuana is the third-most used drug after alcohol and tobacco, so it is not surprising you’d find it in car crash victims;
Marijuana is detectable in the blood long after most other drugs, including alcohol, are not; and
Recent studies show that people can test positive for THC in the blood up to a week after ceasing their use of cannabis.
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 5:11 pm | By: Radical Russ
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!”
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.
Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 10:20 am | By: Radical Russ
(Beaver County Times) Benjamin Wilhelm, president of Western Pennsylvania NORML, a Baden-based advocacy group that tries to spread awareness and educate the public about marijuana, said he wholeheartedly supports the bill. He says he has been in contact with people who say medical marijuana would take the edge off and help ease their condition. He said many prescription medications that people take don’t cure patient conditions.
“The medication that they give you for those types of conditions can hold you back in a lot of the way you live your life,” Wilhelm said. “They’re often a lot more dangerous and destructive to your body and your system than marijuana would be.”
For example, Dilaudid — prescribed to patients such as those with multiple sclerosis — is a narcotic pain-relieving drug with adverse side effects that can include withdrawal symptoms, respiratory depression, seizure and cardiac arrest, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Benjamin does a good job with the Dilaudid example to counteract one of the common reefer madness complaints we hear when states take up the medical marijuana issue: “but there are other legal drugs people can use besides marijuana!” The latest High Times magazine has a great table with a list of various conditions along the left side (nausea, pain, seizures, etc.), with columns for the recommended pharmaceutical solution and what side effects it creates, followed by columns for marijuana’s use for that condition and a tongue-in-cheek column describing marijuana’s side effects.
This is a very common misconception that average people with no cannabis experience maintain – the “take a pill” as the default reaction to illness or injury. This weekend I received a reminder call for my Red Cross apheresis treatment (removal of my blood, separating out the platelets, put the red cells and plasma back in). As always, they said, “remember, no aspirin for 48 hours prior to the appointment!” I replied, “I don’t take aspirin ever, so no problem.”
I went in for the treatment on Sunday. I told the intake nurse that just after I got that call, me and a friend played some pickup basketball and my 41-year-old fat white guy left knee didn’t appreciate my efforts. It gets a bit stiff and swollen. He replied, “you didn’t take any aspirin, did you?” No, I told him, I don’t take pills except when extremely necessary. He then said, “well, you can take an Advil if you like, just not aspirin.” I said, no, that’s OK, I just put some ice on it and elevated it (and rubbed some hemp balm on it and smoked a big fat bowl, but I didn’t tell him that part). He then replied, “Good, I’m glad you iced it. You can take some Advil if it gets too painful. I’ve got a couple now if you’d like.” No thanks, I answered, wondering if two interns were going to come in and force some Advil down my throat.
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The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.
They say this is the first set of experiments to show that the compound, Delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), inhibits EGF-induced growth and migration in epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expressing non-small cell lung cancer cell lines. Lung cancers that over-express EGFR are usually highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy.
That’s right stashers, It cut growth in half of cancers that are highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy. When you put good ol’ THC on the case, it steps right up and punches the toughest cancer in the lab in the face. They put THC to the test, and it proved it’s worth.
“The beauty of this study is that we are showing that a substance of abuse, if used prudently, may offer a new road to therapy against lung cancer,” said Anju Preet, Ph.D., a researcher in the Division of Experimental Medicine.
Do I hear a “recognized medicinal value” in that statement? A “new road to therapy” certainly sounds like enough information to me to justify a reclassification of the Schedule 1 drug.
In the present study, the researchers first demonstrated that two different lung cancer cell lines as well as patient lung tumor samples express CB1 and CB2, and that non-toxic doses of THC inhibited growth and spread in the cell lines. “When the cells are pretreated with THC, they have less EGFR stimulated invasion as measured by various in-vitro assays,” Preet said.
Then, for three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression, Preet says.
These kind of results are normally enough to be heralded as a “breakthrough” and the media takes such statements and elevates them to “magic bullet” status. If this were a drug manufactured by Eli-Lilly this study would have been on your local news, but it’s just marijuana. I guess we need more studies…
Preet doesn’t disappoint,
“THC offers some promise, but we have a long way to go before we know what its potential is,” she said.
If my job was testing pot, I’d call for more testing every time. But that’s just me…
Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 9:47 am | By: Radical Russ
The marijuana potency myth is like a zombie in a George Romero film – it. just. won’t. die!
Marijuana more potent than it used to be | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star
Think marijuana is the drug of yesterday? Think again. According to a recent article in Good Housekeeping magazine, not only does the intoxicating weed remain a drug of choice, it’s a lot stronger than it used to be. In 1970, the average level of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) was less than 1 percent. By 2006, it had risen to 7 percent. In addition, research shows that one joint can harm airways as much as five cigarettes. The reason: Marijuana cigarettes don’t have filters and the smoke is inhaled deeply.
Well, Good Housekeeping said so, so it must be true!
At least they do us the courtesy of only claiming a greater than 7x increase, instead of the “25-fold increase” Barbara Kay likes to throw around.
The lowest THC average in a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies of marijuana seizures in America and abroad, we find the lowest averages to be 2% and the highest averages to be 4% for marijuana seized from 1975-1983. Marijuana with 1% THC is otherwise known as “industrial hemp”, and smoking that will give you more headache than high.
THC levels have risen, to averages of 5% to 8½%. Some of the highest quality (and rarest) marijuana seized has THC levels of 33%. (Of course, these pale in comparison to synthetic THC in Marinol, which is 100% pure, but for some reason, considered a safe medicine.)
But with THC, an increase in potency is not an increase in harm. It is non-toxic, no matter how pure it is. You do not get any less or more high depending on potency, you just need more or less cannabis to get high.
Which leads to the point about “one joint = five cigarettes” (at least this time it’s not “twenty”) — if the smoking is so harmful, wouldn’t you want someone to have a joint with the 8% THC rather than the 2% THC? They’re going to only have to take a couple of puffs on the 8% joint, but they’ll probably have to finish the entire 2% joint for the same effect. Don’t you want less smoking?
But even that theory is bunk – one joint doesn’t equal any number of cigarettes, and in fact, may have helpful anti-tumoral properties. Or you could just take the commonsense approach and consider the hundreds of nasty chemicals pumped into the highly addictive legal cigarettes vs. the non-addictive dried flowers of an organic herb and note the millions who have died from lung cancer and cigarettes vs. the zero that have died from lung cancer and cannabis.
Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:37 am | By: Radical Russ
NORML.ORG US OH: Depending On Whom You Ask, Pot’s Harmless Or Hazardous
Nearly a third of students at Ohio University report using marijuana at some level, and many see it as less harmful than other recreational drugs, despite contradictory medical evidence, according to the OU Department of Health Promotion.Terry Koons, associate director of Health Promotion, said that marijuana, like alcohol ( and increasingly unlike tobacco ), is viewed by many as socially acceptable, despite its health risks. Despite popular opinion, however, smoking marijuana is more physically harmful than smoking cigarettes, he said. Marijuana smokers tend to hold the smoke in their lungs longer, exposing them to more carcinogens, and marijuana is also generally unfiltered when smoked, again increasing the carcinogen exposure.
On the other hand, pot smokers these days often only take a few puffs or “hits,” unlike cigarette smokers, who puff away until the cigarette is burned down to the filter.
Part of the reason marijuana gets a free pass with regard to lung cancer, emphysema and other ailments related to smoking, is that people don’t believe marijuana is comparably harmful, and there is a lack of scientific research, compared to tobacco, to conclusively show that it is.
“No one knows anyone who has died of cancer ( from smoking marijuana ),” Koons said.
It’s so sad to see an associate director of Health Promotion at a university spewing the debunked threats about cannabis and cancer. As our Deputy Director, Paul Armentano, has so meticulously documented, and Dr. Donald Tashkin at UCLA has found, there is no link between even heavy marijuana smoking and lung cancer. Many researchers are finding that cannabinoids have anti-tumoral properties.
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
Health Risks of Marijuana Still Not Nailed Down… really?
A new article on MedPage today claims that we still don’t fully understand the health risks of cannabis use:
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