I'm going to do everything possible after my next stroke to get some.
13 reasons to use it post-stroke.
http://news.yahoo.com/real-marijuana-story-201000940--politics.html
The narrative has been firmly
established: Marijuana use is innocent, a pleasurable pastime with few
if any harmful effects. Those who caution that making pot legal might
create significant problems have been laughed off as alarmists or old
fuddy-duddies.
A sobering new article in today’s New England Journal of Medicine may startle some people out of this hazy-dazy reverie.
A report titled “Adverse Health Effects of Marijuana Use” from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the federal government’s National Institutes of Health, summarizes the latest research into marijuana use.
RECOMMENDED: 7 big myths about marijuana
Marijuana, it says:
•
Is particularly harmful to children and youths under 21 years of age.
For example, youths who use marijuana are more likely to drop out of
school.
• Can affect short-term memory “making it difficult to learn and to retain information.”
• Is associated with “significant declines in IQ” if used frequently when one is an adolescent or a young adult.
•
Impairs a person’s “motor coordination, interfering with driving skills
and increasing the risk of injuries” while operating a vehicle.
•
Is addictive. About 9 percent of users overall become addicted, but
that number rises to 17 percent of those who start as adolescents and
shoots up to as much as 50 percent among those who use pot daily.
•
Is related to social ills. “Heavy marijuana use has been linked to
lower income, greater need for socioeconomic assistance, unemployment,
criminal behavior, and lower satisfaction with life,” the article notes.
What’s
more, evidence exists that marijuana is a “gateway drug” to other, even
more powerful, illegal drugs (as are alcohol and nicotine).
“[M]arijuana addiction ... predicts an increased risk of the use of
other illicit drugs,” the article concludes.
More
research is needed to fully understand all the possible ramifications
of widespread marijuana use, the article adds. Older studies, it points
out, may underestimate the effects: Marijuana being sold today contains
about four times as much THC, the ingredient that produces the “high,”
than it did in the 1980s, the report says.
While
medical use of marijuana was not the subject of the analysis, it did
note that there also is “limited evidence” in the data to suggest a
medical benefit,(bullshit, read some damned research you idiots) despite some physicians who “continue to prescribe
marijuana for medicinal purposes.”
The early months of Colorado’s experiment to legalize marijuana show little to contradict these findings – and little to encourage other states to join in.
As
one opponent in Colorado told The New York Times: “I think, by any
measure, the experience of Colorado has not been a good one unless
you’re in the marijuana business. We’ve seen lives damaged. We’ve seen
deaths directly attributed to marijuana legalization. We’ve seen
marijuana slipping through Colorado’s borders. We’ve seen marijuana
getting into the hands of kids.”
RECOMMENDED: 7 big myths about marijuana
Concerns
over possible physical harm from marijuana use should be taken
seriously. But perhaps the most heart-rending conclusion in the study
associates marijuana with “lower satisfaction with life.” A life not
dependent on a drug such as marijuana that clouds thinking is a life
that is freer and fuller.
As with alcohol and tobacco, the two
most popular legal drugs, the supposed pleasures of marijuana are
ephemeral, the lasting effects most often dissatisfying and destructive.Alcohol and tobacco have been trying to take hold of their users for centuries, long before the kind of studies now beginning to be made on marijuana were possible.
The fact that
both alcohol and tobacco are still legal – and still harming society –
does nothing to enhance the case for adding a third ruinous partner in
marijuana.
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