Good people don’t smoke marijuana

Abstract

Aims

To examine changes in the evidence on the adverse health effects of cannabis since 1993.
Methods

A comparison of the evidence in 1993 with the evidence and interpretation of the same health outcomes in 2013.
Results

Research in the past 20 years has shown that driving while cannabis-impaired approximately doubles car crash risk and that around one in 10 regular cannabis users develop dependence. Regular cannabis use in adolescence approximately doubles the risks of early school-leaving and of cognitive impairment and psychoses in adulthood. Regular cannabis use in adolescence is also associated strongly with the use of other illicit drugs. These associations persist after controlling for plausible confounding variables in longitudinal studies. This suggests that cannabis use is a contributory cause of these outcomes but some researchers still argue that these relationships are explained by shared causes or risk factors. Cannabis smoking probably increases cardiovascular disease risk in middle-aged adults but its effects on respiratory function and respiratory cancer remain unclear, because most cannabis smokers have smoked or still smoke tobacco.
Conclusions

The epidemiological literature in the past 20 years shows that cannabis use increases the risk of accidents and can produce dependence, and that there are consistent associations between regular cannabis use and poor psychosocial outcomes and mental health in adulthood.

pud, you forgot, or omitted, to also note that numerous studies have shown its deleterious
effect on memory.

The prevalence of both alcohol and cannabis use and the high morbidity associated with motor vehicle crashes has lead to a plethora of research on the link between the two. Drunk drivers are involved in 25% of motor vehicle fatalities, and many accidents involve drivers who test positive for cannabis. Cannabis and alcohol acutely impair several driving-related skills in a dose-related fashion, but the effects of cannabis vary more between individuals than they do with alcohol because of tolerance, differences in smoking technique, and different absorptions of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. Detrimental effects of cannabis use vary in a dose-related fashion, and are more pronounced with highly automatic driving functions than with more complex tasks that require conscious control, whereas with alcohol produces an opposite pattern of impairment. Because of both this and an increased awareness that they are impaired, marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies. Combining marijuana with alcohol eliminates the ability to use such strategies effectively, however, and results in impairment even at doses which would be insignificant were they of either drug alone. Epidemiological studies have been inconclusive regarding whether cannabis use causes an increased risk of accidents; in contrast, unanimity exists that alcohol use increases crash risk. Furthermore, the risk from driving under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis is greater than the risk of driving under the influence of either alone. Future research should focus on resolving contradictions posed by previous studies, and patients who smoke cannabis should be counseled to wait several hours before driving, and avoid combining the two drugs.

*It is burning vegetable matter introduced to your lungs

Yeah...Don't stroke the midget...

Cannabis: intoxication
Plants have always excelled at the science of biochemistry, drawing sustenance by converting the sun's energy into organic compounds, discovering ways of poisoning or sickening their predators, evolving sights, tastes and smells that enlist animals in their reproduction. But a few plants have hit upon an especially ingenious approach to ensuring their survival, producing chemicals that have the power to alter how humans experience the world.

Cannabis—more commonly known as marijuana—seems to have long ago adopted a strategy of tying its fortunes to humans, appealing in particular to our innate desire to alter consciousness, a desire that spans nearly every culture and historical period. In exchange, humans have gone to extraordinary lengths, often at their own peril, to help the plant grow and reproduce.

Just what is the knowledge held out by a plant such as cannabis--and why is it forbidden?
Though marijuana has been in use in one form or another for as long as history has been recorded, the plant has undergone its greatest transformation only in the last few decades. Ironically, that change occurred just at the moment when the future of the plant seemed most in doubt.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government decided to crack down on the growing popularity of marijuana by declaring a war on drugs and launching a fierce assault against it. Border agents stepped up interdiction efforts. Crop dusters sprayed poisonous pesticides wherever the plants were spotted.

But rather than surrender, marijuana did what few people expected: It moved indoors, adopting a new evolutionary strategy that not only seems to have ensured its survival, but also has left it stronger than ever before.

The reason is fairly simple. As marijuana cultivation moved indoors, highly skilled gardeners had to learn how to tend their crops in delicately maintained artificial environments, cross-breeding it with other distant varieties and constantly selecting the strongest strains. Protecting these indoor plants from pests and disease requires constant vigilance, often by expensive, computerized systems that monitor every aspect of the environment and ensure the most optimal growing conditions. But the desire for intoxication is so strong that people will take great risks to satisfy it. So thanks to the efforts of these high-tech gardeners, marijuana has become a much faster-growing, far more potent plant than at any other time in its history—and one of the biggest cash crops in America.

But there is another part of this story that is ultimately even more important: Our long relationship with marijuana has caused scientists to ask what it is about the plant that enables it to affect people the way it does—and in their efforts to answer that question, they stumbled upon a whole new network of brain receptors we otherwise might never have discovered. The main psychoactive molecule in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol, known as THC, binds to these receptors. But so, it turns out, does a molecule our own brain produces—a discovery that is offering new insights into the workings of our memory, emotion and consciousness.

The human desire for intoxication may have transformed a pygmy weed into one of the most valuable crops in the world. But in a kind of co-evolutionary quid pro quo that is as fascinating as it is surprising, the plant has in turn enabled us to unlock some of the deepest secrets of our own brains.