Study: Casually smoking pot can change your brain
By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
The days when people thought only heavy Cheech-and-Chong pot smokers suffered cognitive consequences may be over. A study in the Journal of Neuroscience says even casual marijuana smokers showed significant abnormalities in two vital brain regions important in motivation and emotion.
“Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week,” said co-author Hans Breiter, quoted in Northwestern University’s Science Newsline. Breiter hailed the study as the first to analyze the effects of light marijuana use. “People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school,” he said. “Our data directly says this is not the case.
“This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences,” he added.
huh? I would comment more…but, like whatever.
“I think I saw one headline that was ‘Marijuana reshapes the brain’ and I groaned — that’s not what we did,” said Dr. Jodi Gilman, 31, author of the now-famous Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital study on marijuana’s effects told PolicyMic.
“The conclusions were modest in the paper — we never say marijuana causes these changes,” Gilman said, who’s a neuroscientist with a Ph.D. from Brown University. “The media may have given that impression in headlines, but the study doesn’t show causation.”
http://www.policymic.com/articles/87875/here-s-the…
Thank you for the link above…here are a few more quotes from that article:
“The reality, for even pro-legalization people like myself, is that there’s a dearth of research on the effects of marijuana — a psychoactive substance that many states are considering legalizing. It’d be illogical to think that a psychoactive substance that gets you high doesn’t affect the brain. By definition, it does and we should be honest about that.”
“It took us 40 years to convince people that smoking cigarettes was bad for them and by then, people had all these negative effects. I don’t want it to take 40 years to figure out the effects of marijuana,” Gilman said.
I guess my response is… so what. Not everyone in society has to be the most motivated, those most aspiring, the most anything. They even said these folks were doing fine in society. Not my place to tell others what they can do with their own body as long as no one is getting hurt.
well I am sure there could be some potential harm here but a few comments – I would not really call 1-2x a week “light use” and harmful and criminalized have a lot of space in between. One thing about legalization is it will be easier to study – it has actually been difficult to study the effects of certain substances…I am sure reason will tell us it has both positive and negative effects (as most things do), interacts with other variables, and true moderation will be the key for most people. What I think is the biggest challenge is the changes to the plant through breeding for potency – to paraphrase an old car commercial, what is smoked today is “clearly not your father’s marijuana”
So what else changes your brain? Let’s start the long list.
Fundamentalist religion seems to be related to irrational thinking, perhaps there are changes in the brain that explains this.
Steve K. The French seem to have the best study of using MJ while driving and the results were not good.