Teenagers and marijuana | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal
If you’re a baby boomer, don’t lull yourself into thinking that marijuana is a fading fad that represents a modest threat to today’s youth.

You’d be wrong.

Nearly half of today’s teenagers try marijuana before graduating from high school, and by their senior year more than 20 percent are regular users, Science Daily reported in May.

But according to the same figures that describe 19.8% (not over 20%) of the Class of 2005 used marijuana last month, for the Class of 1975 (baby boomers), that figure was 27.1%.  In fact, in 1979, lifetime use peaked at 60.4% and in 1978, monthly use peaked at 37.1%

More teens use marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined, and they are at greater risk than teens who smoked pot a couple of decades ago.

“It’s much more potent than what they smoked at Woodstock,” echoed Jim Cowser, a chemical dependency therapist in the Center for Behavioral Health at Baptist Hospital East.

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Yeah, a policeman or a drug dealer might shoot you over it!  :-(  This bit of Reefer Madness brought to you by Dr. Paul Saville, writing in the Sunday Gazette - Mail of Charleston, W.V.

Marijuana is Dangerous, but Maybe Not the Way You Think - Health - redOrbit
Inhaling the smoke of burning coal, wood or leaves is bad for you. Acrid smoke injures the lungs and leads to chronic obstructive lung disease. Smoke contains chemicals such as benzpyrene, which causes cancer. Slow-burning cigarettes release carbon monoxide as well as carbon dioxide.

The body senses a lack of oxygen in the blood and increases the red blood count. The blood is now thicker and flows more slowly through narrowed arteries increasing symptoms of angina and a leg artery disease called claudication.

…Marijuana smoke has the same effect as tobacco - lung disease and cancer. The object of smoking it is to obtain the effect of the drug cannabis in marijuana, nicotine from tobacco, which is driven off by the heat of burning leaves.

Liar. Sorry to be rude about it, but that’s a flat-out lie. While cannabis and tobacco both produce some of the same carcinogens, cannabis also produces THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol), which don’t cause cancer and have anti-tumoral properties.

Dr. Donald Tashkin thought the same thing as you and set out to prove it at the UCLA Medical Center. He found quite the opposite - that even long-term cannabis smoking (absent any tobacco smoking) didn’t lead to lung cancer, and even some moderate users had less incidence of lung cancer than non-smokers.

Marijuana smoking, heavy and long-term, can lead to some milder respiratory problems. Anyone concerned about those risks should switch to vaporization. Burning bud is way hotter than the point where THC vaporizes, so you get harmful smoke and you waste a lot of the THC. Vaporizing bud happens at the temperature where THC turns to vapor (pot “steam”), which gives you almost all the THC and no harmful smoke.

There is now strong evidence that cannabis turns on a gene that codes for schizophrenia.

I’d like to see a citation for that, because to the best of my knowledge, nothing “turns on” genes like they were light switches.

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This column was forwarded to me from Canada’s Globe & Mail.  It’s from an advice column where a woman complains about her husband who won’t stop smoking pot in the home.  She’s tried showing him all the (reefer madness) health reports on cannabis, but he just won’t stop.  This paragraph is the one that made me laugh:

globeandmail.com: My husband won’t stop smoking pot in our home
When it comes to the health detriments and/or benefits of marijuana, there’s always been a thick wall of smoke dividing those on the pro side and those on the con. Pamela Stewart, a psychiatrist who works at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, says your concerns about your chronic condition and your children’s pink lungs are founded. “The problem is the tar,” she explains. “It’s a respiratory contaminant, and raises your risk for a respiratory disorder.”

She adds that cannabis these days is 20 to 400 times more potent than it was back in the day and is therefore more addictive and the withdrawal is worse. If that weren’t enough, she says that kids whose parents smoke are more likely to take it up themselves and that “cannabis introduced early in adolescence is a risk factor for schizophrenia.” How’s that for a good whack of ammo against your hubby?

Congratulations, Ms. Stewart!  You’ve just discovered a cannabis strain that is 1600% THC!  (Now where can I get some?)  As we’ve debunked many times before, marijuana today may be at best twice as potent.  Seizures of marijuana in the past were around 4% THC and now they can get as good as 8% THC.  Marijuana is not addictive in any serious gotta-go-to-detox meaning of the word.  THC helps combat the effects of tar on the lungs, and marijuana can be vaporized or eaten to avoid even that effect.  Finally, the cannabis / schizophrenia link in young teens is more pseudoscience that has yet to be proven.

Just when you think the reefer madness couldn’t get any sillier - the latest salvo from the prohibitionists is a new study that claims that heavy marijuana use shrinks your brain.

Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain parts: study | Lifestyle | Living | Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause two important brain structures to shrink, Australian researchers said on Monday.

Brain scans showed the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to nonusers, the researchers said. The men had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for an average 20 years.

Wait a minute.  Five joints a day?  Let’s do the math - a joint (by US Government standards) is ¾ gram, so that’s a little less than four ounces a month.  Where are they finding these guys who smoke a quarter-pound of weed every month, and how is this relevant to the 99% of cannabis users who might smoke a joint now and then on the weekend?

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Since it has been shown that Canada has the world’s highest rate of cannabis use, the reefer madness has expanded to epidemic proportions.  First we had Barbara Kay and her illogical anti-cannabis ravings in the National Post, now we get Margret Kopala writing in The Ottawa Citizen:

What we know about marijuana
Leading the recent National Post debate on cannabis, columnist Barbara Kay can’t have anticipated Vancouver’s safe injection site, rather than legalized cannabis, would be the Trojan Horse for the legalization of all addictive drugs.

This week, the right of addicts to continue use of illicit drugs was upheld by the B.C. Supreme Court even though no treatment of which I am aware uses the substance that caused the problem to cure it. Smokers use nicotine gum, not more cigarettes, to kick the habit, don’t steal to feed their habit and if heroine [sic] and cocaine are so helpful, why aren’t doctors prescribing them in pill form?

(I agree the heroines are very helpful.  Like Wonder Woman.  I don’t know how you out a heroine into a pill form, though.  I think she’d be quite upset.)

First of all, doctors are prescribing cocaine every time you get that numbing shot in your gums at the dentist, and other opium derivatives, like morphine, are routinely prescribed.

Second, addicts wouldn’t steal to feed their habit if they could buy their drug or a patch-type alternative cheaply and legally, like cigarette smokers can.

And finally, there is a very common medical treatment that uses the dangerous substance to cure or prevent the damages from that substance; they are called vaccines.  A disabled version of a virus is injected into the bloodstream to promote the growth of natural antibodies.

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Looks like the UK reefer madness has now spread to Canada - this is an editorial from Canada’s National Post:

Barbara Kay on the new marijuana: Not your mother’s reefer - Full Comment
The words “intoxicate the brain” bring to mind the Post’s 2007 editorial on marijuana, enunciated in response to evidence that Canada’s marijuana consumption was the highest in the industrialized world: “What is really remarkable about Canada’s status as a cannabis capital is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it … you would have an awfully hard time finding them. Legalizing pot makes sense.”

What was the editorial board smoking when these words were written? In fact, one would not “have an awfully hard time” finding reasons to worry if one were actually open to finding them.

In 1997, the liberal U.K. newspaper The Independent launched a campaign to decriminalize marijuana. …Since then, “skunk,” as Britons call the hybrid form of cannabis in current usage, has offered users a 25-fold increase in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient. The mental and physical effects of this chemical change have been dramatic.

In March, 2007, The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, declared cannabis to be more dangerous and addictive than LSD and Ecstasy. About the same time, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief of the Medical Research Council (and in 1997, the moral authority behind The Independent’s liberalization campaign) unequivocally reversed his cannabis-friendliness: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

As a result, The Independent last year offered its readership a fulsome apology: “If only we had known then what we can reveal today…”

Psychiatry professor Robin Murray of London’s Institute of Psychiatry estimates that cannabis usage is causally linked to a full 10% of the U. K.’s 250,000 bipolar patients.

Indeed, just this past February, the European Respiratory Journal reported on a New Zealand study indicating that long term cannabis use increases the annual risk of lung cancer in young adults by 8% for every year of use.

In 1970, pot contained 1% THC. Bud contains 20% THC. Imagine a glass of wine or beer with a similarly proportioned alcohol content and consider the “rush” it would provide.

Two weeks ago, the Home Office in the U.K. announced: “Cannabis will be reclassified as a Class B drug, sending a strong message that the drug is harmful.”

The verdict on the new marijuana is in, and it’s “guilty.” I would therefore respectfully ask the Post to reconsider its editorial stance on the legalization of “pot,” clearly a superannuated description of cannabis today, and in future commentary on this issue, so critical to our youth’s health, exercise a little more intellectual — ahem — sobriety.

Intellectual sobriety? How about instead, a few facts, please:

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If you haven’t followed the War On (Certain British Subjects Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs going on “across the pond”, then you’re missing some Reefer Madness reminiscent of the days of Harry J. Anslinger and warnings of marijuana being more frightening than Frankenstein and the devil’s tool to make Negroes kill white men and rape white women.

The tactics are familiar. Anslinger took “cannabis” and “hemp”, which almost every early-20th Century American knew to be a common medication and a source of rope and canvas, and re-branded it “marijuana”. That way he and his buddy, William Randolph Hearst, could spread sensationalist lies about cannabis in Hearst’s newspapers, and the scary, Mexican-sounding word helped frighten people about weed in a way that scaremongering on “cannabis” and “hemp” would not.

But the British version of this, happening right now in the 21st Century, is to re-brand the popular herb as “skunk”, with the addition of the scaremongering “this ain’t your father’s pot” rhetoric (”’skunk’ is fifty times more potent than the ganja of the 1960s!”). And this time, it’s not the Negroes coming to hurt whitey, but rather the patently false claim that ’skunk’ triggers psychosis and schizophrenia.

Here is a typical article, from The Argus in the UK…

A mother driven insane by cannabis stabbed herself repeatedly through the chest with a carving knife after claiming she was spoken to by a dog.

Julie Cross told friends the animal was “trying to tell her something” before picking up the 5in blade and ramming it at least five times into her chest and abdomen.

An inquest was told the former receptionist, from Goring, used speed and cannabis on a daily basis and in the weeks running up to her death had slashed her wrists and smeared her blood across a crucifix and also hung a noose from her attic.

Cannabis and speed! Do ya think, perhaps, the speed had more to do with the psychosis? That’s a link that has substantial basis in research and plenty of anecdotal evidence that I’ll testify to as a former club musician who’s seen his share of tweekers.

And yet the headline is “Cannabis-smoking mum stabbed herself to death”.

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TheStar.com | GTA | Marijuana use prompted attack, trial told

A man who has admitted killing his stripper girlfriend was suffering from a “major mental illness” at the time of the deadly beating, a forensic psychiatrist has told the jury at a murder trial in Brampton.

Dr. Stephen Hucker said it was “highly likely” Ryan Bucknor was in a “psychotic state” when be brutally beat Audrey Cote to death, and then ran down the street stark naked, throwing money to people, and later telling police he was “God.”

Although Hucker believed Bucknor was “completely normal” when he interviewed him two years later, he was convinced the accused man was suffering from a mental illness when he killed his girlfriend on July 31, 2005.

Huckner, the first witness called by defence attorney Aston Hall, also believed Bucknor’s mental illness had been induced by chronic marijuana use.

Hucker also told the court he didn’t think Bucknor’s mental illness was “an act” because he wasn’t sophisticated enough to pretend to be delusional or schizophrenic.

Bucknor was a daily user of marijuana. Hucker said studies have determined that frequent users of cannabis have double the risk of developing mental illness or schizophrenia.

Apparently Dr. Hucker doesn’t keep up on his marijuana studies. According to Schizophrenia Research, in a study published last May:

London, United Kingdom: Marijuana use is not associated with heightened symptoms of schizophrenia, according to data to be published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

Investigators at London’s Institute of Psychiatry assessed whether the prior use of cannabis in patients with schizophrenia was associated with appreciable changes in schizophrenic symptoms compared with patients who had no history of marijuana use.

Investigators reported no statistically significant “differences in syptomatology between schizophrenic patients who were or were not cannabis users” after controlling for patients’ age, sex, and ethnicity.

Researchers also failed to find “any evidence that cannabis users with schizophrenia were more likely to have a family member with the disorder.”

These findings “argue against a distinct schizophrenic-like psychosis caused by cannabis,” authors concluded.

Bucknor may indeed be mentally ill — seems pretty obvious he was — but his marijuana use was probably in response to his illness, not the cause of his illness. If you had voices in your head screaming at you that your girlfriend is a demon and you need to brutally kill her and run down the street naked, you might just try to quiet that voice with a little weed.