Casual marijuana use linked with brain abnormalities

does the federal government have any power or authority via the constitution to prohibit a private person from growing and smoking a weed out of their backyard?
 
I am surprised anyone could be surprised by this? How often does it need to be said that pot heads are dopes? Just about every pot head I know or have encountered IRL are idiots when they are stoned. They of course don't think so. Long term users I know also lack any real aspirations. Nothing necessarily wrong with that so long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

You haven't accomplished dick
You hang around dopes with your own achievement level.
 
You can certainly spot the users in a thread like this. Anyone, who thinks regular drug use of any kind, yes alcohol too, hasn't any negative impact on their health and intelligence are likely regular users. It's called addiction and denial people.
 
You can certainly spot the users in a thread like this. Anyone, who thinks regular drug use of any kind, yes alcohol too, hasn't any negative impact on their health and intelligence are likely regular users. It's called addiction and denial people.

So, what about people who take pain medication for chronic pain? Are they addicts? What about anti anxiety medication? What about drugs prescribe for depression? What about Effexor that is prescribed to women for severe hot flashes? Are these people addicts and in denial?
 
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does the federal government have any power or authority via the constitution to prohibit a private person from growing and smoking a weed out of their backyard?

Does the federal government have any power or authority via the Constitution to compel me to subsidize the lives of those who opt lead an idle lifestyle of marijuana abuse, and their dependants?

First things first. Close that hole and we can address the second.
 
I am surprised anyone could be surprised by this? How often does it need to be said that pot heads are dopes? Just about every pot head I know or have encountered IRL are idiots when they are stoned. They of course don't think so. Long term users I know also lack any real aspirations. Nothing necessarily wrong with that so long as it doesn't harm anyone else.


Wait...so you feel people are idiots when they are stoned?

Tell me...are ordinary people intellectual giants while they are three sheets to the wind?

Newsflash...being impaired on ANY substance causes a person to temporarily lose a few IQ points.
 
I am surprised anyone could be surprised by this? How often does it need to be said that pot heads are dopes? Just about every pot head I know or have encountered IRL are idiots when they are stoned. They of course don't think so. Long term users I know also lack any real aspirations. Nothing necessarily wrong with that so long as it doesn't harm anyone else.


Real aspirations? Like ambition, being important, rich and powerful so you can dominate others?

Marijuana actually deprograms people from the satanic value system scourging the earth.
 
Wait...so you feel people are idiots when they are stoned?

Tell me...are ordinary people intellectual giants while they are three sheets to the wind?

Newsflash...being impaired on ANY substance causes a person to temporarily lose a few IQ points.

Actually, there are many brilliant people who claim that while under influence of marijuana they had their most brilliant ideas. The mind alteration can be a positive thing in some individuals.

People are wired different, would we have Poe's brilliant stories or Freud psychoanalysis without their substance use?
 
Does the federal government have any power or authority via the Constitution to compel me to subsidize the lives of those who opt lead an idle lifestyle of marijuana abuse, and their dependants?

First things first. Close that hole and we can address the second.

Please provide statistics of the number subsidized by your tax dollars who opt to lead an idle lifestyle of marijuana abuse and their dependents, thanks.
 
Colorado will fund schools and healthcare with the pot tax.
Common sense will dictate the rest of the flat earth Prohibitionist change.
 
Does the federal government have any power or authority via the Constitution to compel me to subsidize the lives of those who opt lead an idle lifestyle of marijuana abuse, and their dependants?

First things first. Close that hole and we can address the second.

So you wont answer my question?

Do you think Pot should be illegal because it can be bad for you?
 
Striking a Nerve: Bungling the Cannabis Story

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/45290

Correlation does not equal causation, and a single exam cannot show a trend over time. Basic stuff, right?


But judging by coverage of a study just out in the Journal of Neuroscience, these are apparently foreign concepts for many folks in the media.


In the study, researchers at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital and Northwestern University in Chicago performed MRI brain scans on 20 young adult "casual" marijuana users and 20 age- and sex-matched nonusers. They found that, in the users, gray matter densities in the nucleus accumbens were higher than in controls, and the right amygdala and left nucleus accumbens were shaped differently.


Interesting, but remember that these findings only reflected differences between the marijuana users and controls at a single point in time. The researchers did not, could not, demonstrate that the differences resulted from marijuana smoking or even that the "abnormalities" relative to controls reflected changes from some earlier state.


You wouldn't know that from the media coverage. Here's a sampling of headlines:


Marijuana News: Casual Pot Use Impacts Brains of Young Adults, Researchers Find (The Oregonian)
Study Finds Brain Changes in Young Marijuana Users (Boston Globe)
Casual Marijuana Use Linked to Brain Changes (USA Today)
Even Casually Smoking Marijuana Can Change Your Brain, Study Says (Washington Post)
Study Finds Changes in Pot Smokers' Brains (Denver Post)
Recreational Pot Use Harmful to Young People's Brains (TIME)


Sad to say, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), which publishes the Journal of Neuroscience, may have driven these dramatic overinterpretations by promoting the study in a press release headlined "Brain changes are associated with casual marijuana use in young adults."


Also note that the study did not identify any cognitive or behavioral abnormalities in the cannabis users versus controls -- it was strictly an MRI study.


That, however, didn't stop senior author Hans Breiter, MD, of Northwestern from opining in the SfN press release that the study "raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn't associated with bad consequences."


Um, no, it doesn't -- not without before-and-after MRI scans showing brain structure changes in users that differ from nonusers and documentation of functional impairments associated with those changes.


To their credit, the study team's actual paper stuck fairly close to their data, concluding that the users showed "structural abnormalities." They only strayed into over interpretation when they wrote that "the left nucleus accumbens was consistently affected by cannabis use." Nope, it was still just an association, no cause-and-effect shown -- as Breiter and colleagues acknowledged later in their paper.


It might also have been a stretch to call their subjects "casual users." The mean intakes were 3.83 days of use and 11.2 joints per week, and 1.8 smoking occasions per day of use. To me -- and I lived in Ann Arbor in the 1970s -- this sounds more like the profile of a just-short-of-heavy regular user.


I don't want to minimize the paper's genuine importance. The differences in brain structure from controls could well have functional consequences, and could well reflect the effects of marijuana use. Certainly these findings deserve follow-up.


But until we get it, everyone, please dial back the Reefer Madness hype.


So naturally the more gullible posters here bought right into all those misleading headlines.
 
So you wont answer my question?

Do you think Pot should be illegal because it can be bad for you?


Your question was in response to me chastising the Dude for ignoring scientific study, so it was kind of a non-sequitur, wasn't it?

And as such I didn't think it deserved a response.
 
Your question was in response to me chastising the Dude for ignoring scientific study, so it was kind of a non-sequitur, wasn't it?

And as such I didn't think it deserved a response.

Okay, but stop avoiding the question.

Do you think Pot should be illegal because it can be bad for you?
 
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