The Doctors disagree.
Having said that, I’ve really lost my ability to give a damn if people want to ruin their lives. Lord knows I’ve made some stupid decisions of my own.
The Doctors disagree.
Having said that, I’ve really lost my ability to give a damn if people want to ruin their lives. Lord knows I’ve made some stupid decisions of my own.
There is a very good point to be made that if a person is old enough to buy and sell real property, fly aircraft, get married, have children, or get volunteer to killed in a war they are old enough to choose which mood altering drugs to ingest.
It seems reasonable to enforce some regulatory controls on the people who will be producing and selling these products, just the same as we enforce regulatory controls on people who sell corn flakes. But criminalizing the possession and use of this substance is not consistent with a belief in personal freedom to make choices and live with the consequences.
It is getting harder and harder to find a doctor willing to come out -against- medical weed for adults. The benefits for some types of injuries and conditions are too obvious and too fast.
It is also getting hard to find a doctor willing to come out against the benefits of weed for seizure disorders in the young. One study of a particular disorder found 20 0ut of 20 had a major reduction in seizures in kids under 18.
It also found, interestingly, that one batch of the treatment drug made 8 kids extremely agitated, when then stopped when the switched back to the original batch. They lab tested the suspect “flip out” batch and found it was a different weed cultivar with different turpeins present. So it is possible that the beneficial effect had nothing to do with THC or CBD, and was a turpein instead. Or, even more fun, it was a combination of a particular set of turpeins, THC, CBD, other banabinoids, and possible Mystery Ingredients that nobody even knows about yet.
So, while there are -correlative- studies which seem to indicate a connection between weed at a young age and being a loser as an adult, we also see lots of studies that correlate video games with being a loser, alcohol use at a young age is -certainly- shown to be damaging, and I’m sure there’s plenty of guys out there claiming rock music makes you stupid.
My view, FWIW, is that the more dumb sh1t you do at a young age, the more likely you are to be a loser generally. Whether its the booze/weed/etc. that messed you up or you’re just a loser, its hard to tell. Maybe er on the side of safety and lay off the dumb stuff until you’re 25 or so, eh?
CANABINOIDS, not “banabinoids”, stupid fingers.
It’s hard to imagine a society dumbed-down beyond one that elects the likes of the Spawn.
Simple solution, for both Canada and the U.S.: You can smoke all the marijuana you want, legally, after you sign a registry surrendering your right to vote.
Everyone’s happy!
*
the indisputable medical argument is that developing brains have a
plasticity that can be adversely affected by the active ingredients in cannabis…
“Simply put, cannabis should not be used by young people. It is
toxic to their cortical neuronal networks, with both functional and
structural changes seen in the brains of youth who use cannabis regularly.”
you wanna get high.. knock yourself out… just don’t hide behind the
“medical” b@llshit.
*
I haven’t decided yet whether “Pothead Nation” is a tragedy or a comedy.
Truth be told, both I suppose.
The Canadian Medical Association was invited to make this information available to the public during the Harper tenure and they chose not to. If we next have an epidemic of teens destroying their brains, I hold the CMA somewhat responsible. They do not have to take a political side — but they need to be up front and honest about current research. Their warnings at this stage are too little, too late.
I doubt this study will persuade anyone who has known pot users in high school. Most of the pot users we knew didn’t go on to be addicts. They grew up, went to school, got a job, got married and raised families. From my observations those that did become addicts were a little off even before they started drugs and drinking.
Maybe having discussions with kids about recognizing addiction, the dangers of self medicating, the buddy system/no one left behind when partying, talking about moderation instead of getting stupid drunk or high and, of course, no driving might be more useful.
“Young adults’ brains are developing until the age of 25.”
Really? Have you paid attention to what passes for college students these days?
Predicting the future out of the almost infinite range of micro/macro possible futures is an exercise in futility, the Tofflers were considered the best futurists in the world (“Future Shock”, “The Third Wave”), but if there’s one fairly clear trend it’s towards greater poverty and unemployment and a lower standard of living. Being high on pot will probably take the edge off the stress and misery, the hopelessness, keep a large portion of the population docile. As one wise man wrote “people will have to find satisfaction in non-material ways”…
Here’s my own personal experience on the topic. My middle son was a heavy pot smoker through most of his high school years … try as his mom and I did to limit his opportunities to use dope. He performed well-enough in HS (mostly by cheating, I suspect) to be admitted to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (tough admission standards). However, his first semester he received 3 “F’s” and 1 incomplete. Unbelievably, the Univ. gave him a second chance for another semester. He threatened suicide when his mom and I cut off his “allowance” … and he could no longer afford to buy pot. One more semester of “F’s” followed … and we pulled the plug on his college career.
He came home and soon threatened suicide to my wife … she called 911 and he was arrested on a 5150 (a deranged nutjob, who is a danger to himself or others). From there, he was diagnosed as Bi-Polar with Schitzophrenia … he was hearing voices in his head telling him to do “bad” things. Another 5-6 years of ups and downs on and off meds (lithium and anti-psychotics). He was an “adult” … and we had -0- control of his medical situation. He is relatively stable now … when properly taking his meds … and NOT smoking DOPE.
I remain 100% convinced that his early DOPE use screwed-up his brain chemistry. DOPE completely destroyed his developing brain. He was literally a STRAIGHT-A student in 8th grade, then went off the rails in HS. Trust me the Dope today, isn’t the dope of our youth in the 1960’s and 70’s. It is much more potent, and different strains impact the brain and body differently. And for all I know, he smoked weed laced with PCP or something else equally horrifying … who knows what a HS kid gets ? In hindsight, I would have locked him in a room and kept him from every BAD influence in the world. Thank God his brother and sister turned-out spectacularly well … otherwise, I’d be hitting the bong myself !
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be DOPERS ! Be a roper, not a doper !
A perfect, perceptive, comment.
I have read about the connection between pot and schizophrenia. I think it would be a nightmare for the parents. In an ideal world, science would find the genetic marker(s) for schizophrenia and earlier treatment. And, definitely no pot for them.
It would also be nice if there was milder forms of pot available. Not everyone wants to guzzle the equivalent of straight tequila every time they drink. I suspect that, like alcohol, there will end up being more choices of strength, etc. for pot. Most adults prefer a mild buzz instead of getting stupid high/drunk.
There are certainly those studies out there, Neo, which do say that weed under 25 is a bad idea.
The two problems with that argument are as follows. One, weed being illegal isn’t slowing down weed use in the under-25 set. At all. Any high school in Canada, you can score weed before lunch time any day of the week.
Two, and this is where I start to get angry with government, CMAJ is the same rag where I can read all about the harmful effects of guns and video games. So if I know everything I read in CMAJ about guns is a lie, and I know everything I read in CMAJ about video games is a lie… what are the chances that everything they say about weed is a lie? Pretty good, right?
Should kids be smoking up and getting high all the time? Absolutely not. Are they? Some certainly are. Will changing the legal age from 18 to 25 make a difference? Extremely doubtful.
What the weed thing is turning into for me, is a litmus test for people’s intentions about governance. This is the -only- issue right now where government is talking about REDUCING restrictions on anything. Hilariously it is the Liberals reducing regulation in one tiny area.
Where is the CMA? Screaming YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!! What about the children?!!! People are too stupid to manage, they have to be controlled!
So if you are a Conservative, and you profess to want smaller, less intrusive government, this is your chance to reduce intrusion in your life. What are some people here screaming for? More intrusion.
Make up your minds, eh?
LC Bennett said: “It would also be nice if there was milder forms of pot available.”
There are plenty of kinds available IF you have a medical prescription. High THC, low THC, different strains with different turpeins, different ratios, different taste, all kinds of things. There are whole websites dedicated to reviews of the diferent grower’s strains, where users rate the weed for its properties.
If you do not have a prescription, you get black market weed. Some of that is pretty good, some is pretty bad, some is actively poisonous and mixed with fun things like Ecstasy, man-made cocaine, meth, or some other random thing that will give a tweaker a buzz. Black market weed also tends to have mold on it, they’re not real careful when they grow it.
So, when the CMAJ comes out and says WEED CAUSES BI-POLAR DISORDER!!! you have to get down into the numbers and discover, “well, what we really mean was 10 out of 1000 kids got real sick, and they told us they smoked a ton of weed, but we don’t actually know a damn thing about what was in it, what kind it was, or if they were doing a bunch of LSD too and didn’t tell us. Oh, and the other 990 were fine on their ton of weed.”
Would I let -my- kid smoke weed? Hell no. But then I wouldn’t let them drink or sleep around either. It doesn’t mean I believe those CMAJ wieners.
Ooohhh…something is dangerous! Let’s ban it! So all the snowflakes can again cry to the state to protect them!
The pussywillows on the right have spoken!
My experience with pot heads is that they are really stupid. I don’t know if stupid people smoke a lot of pot or whether pot makes them stupid.
“if people want to ruin their lives”: The costs get borne by the rest of us in a welfare state.
That’s a specious argument though. People get hit by cars, have horse or motorcycle accidents, fall down the stairs or in the bath-tub all the time. We don’t bat an eye-lid even thought a large percentage of those accidents are preventable too.
I’m just waiting for Vancouver to make toking mandatory.
So nice to see that fellow Conservatives can be as ignorant, reactionary and fascist as your typical government -sucking Liberal.
Just requires the right topic.
Here’s hoping the government helps you deficient folk get home from work everyday.
Agree. This brought a very personal experience home to me. You are lucky that your son is still with you. Mine isn’t.
Phantom, completely agree that the CMA totally destroyed its credibility when it provided “scientific” evidence that firearms were too risky for people to own. The CMAJ published one of the worst papers I’ve ever read; the Killias paper in about 1993 on the correlation between number of firearms in a country and homicide rate. Not only was the data cherry picked (Switzerland for some reason wasn’t included as it didn’t fit with the countries that did), tiny countries were given equal weighting to the US and this was some of the ammunition used to support C-68. Since that time, the number of firearms in the US has likely doubled and the homicide rate has gone down – completely contrary to the “scientific” findings of the CMAJ paper. Likely the “public health” physicians supporting making firearms very difficult to own have no personal experience with firearms and I’m sure that those physicians wringing their hands about the “brain damage” that cannabis can cause have little personal experience with cannabis themselves.
From a Libertarian perspective, the state should have no say in what drugs one chooses to ingest although this would require a legal system in which people were completely responsible for their actions. In medical circles, stating that one believes that people have free will and thus are responsible for their actions is considered heretical thinking. Patients are viewed more often as “victims” with the set of “victimizers” growing larger every passing year.
The statement that brain development stops at age 25 is absolute BS and the human brain is plastic throughout life (actually after about age 90 plasticity seems to be reduced as recovery from strokes is much less likely after this age). There is rapid brain development during the younger years but the work of Jeffrey Schwartz has shown that OCD can be successfully treated without drugs using mindfullness cognitive behavioral therapy. I read his book The Brain and the Mind a few months ago, looked up some of the studies and wondered why such techniques weren’t being utilized more. Schwartz himself noted in his book that his hypothesis of the mind as an independent entity as well as people having free will to stop making pathologic life choices made him a bit of a pariah among his medical colleagues. Also, such non-drug based therapies would ruin the profitability of pharmaceutical companies who are constantly discovering new diseases that they have just the drug to treat.
Opiates are very profitable for pharmaceutical industries and making cannabis available to people for treatment of chronic pain would adversely affect their bottom line. Psychotic reactions to cannabis are much more likely when one is dealing with a strain that contains close to 100% THC. Normally cannabidiol (CBD) is a significant constituent but the decades of genetically modifying cannabis have yielded strains almost devoid of CBD which have the same effect in people unused to them as someone who wasn’t prepared to take LSD getting some. CBD is a very promising antipsychotic drug which doesn’t share the side effects of the current agents and preliminary studies suggest it might be an ideal agent for treating delirium in hospitalized elderly patients. 1:1 THC/CBD strains are ideal for people who use cannabis for pain as they don’t get high and just have relief of pain.
I’ve always been sceptical of the connection between cannabis use and schizophrenia. Cannabis might identify people who will go on to develop schizophrenia but to be causative is going way too far. Also, one question that has never been answered is why cannabis hyperemesis syndrome is suddenly widely diagnoses whereas it didn’t exist in the 1970’s. The argument that weed was weaker then doesn’t hold as people smoked hash until the really potent SE Asian weed started showing up in the mid 1970’s. It’s convenient for ER docs when they have a patient who comes in with vomiting, has a positive urine drug test for THC and admits to smoking weed a lot. If one digs deeper one finds things like marked hypoadrenalism in a patient who had been labelled with “cannabis hyperemesis syndrome” who got immediately better on cortisol replacement, complex migraines and weird autonomic disturbances but figuring out what’s really going on takes work.
For those who think medicine is “scientific”, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s a lot of scientism in medicine which has a strong relationship to Richard Feynman’s disparaging of a study by calling it “cargo cult science”. Any discipline that highly values consensus of its practitioners is not a science. Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the word consensus creep in more and more in dictums from the BC College of physicians. I think its fair to say that a modern day Semmelweis would receive the same treatment from modern “enlightened” medical regulatory bodies as he got when he discovered how to slash deaths from puerperal fever before bacteria had been discovered.
The majority of pathology I see in the hospital now is alcohol related and the youngest patient I’ve seen die from alcoholic liver disease was 25. I’m quite happy when some of my patients tell me that they’ve starting smoking weed as that means they’ve given up smoking cocaine or shooting methamphetamine. The CMA is all for methadone maintenance, but the best results I’ve seen in opiate addicts are in those people who refused methadone and decided it was time for them to stop using opiates. I was all but accused of malpractice by a colleague who works in addictions because of my dim view of methadone maintenance (again, denial of free will seems to underlie a lot of “modern” medical thinking). Surprisingly, the largest number of patients that ask me about cannabis are in their 70’s or older and are looking for better treatments for their arthritis or spinal stenosis. Cannabis probably has the best benefit/risk of any pharmacologic treatment I could prescribe for them. Being able to grow their own would mean they wouldn’t have to waste money on ineffective or dangerous drugs.
Actually, the snowflakes are demanding that the State make it easier for them to become even dumber than they are now. You seem to be one of them.
Patients grow their own?
But then they wouldn’t have to pay! That’s CRAZY talk!!!
Consequently the “authorities” are proposing they’ll come in with a ruler and make sure none of your four pot plants is taller than one meter. Kind of like how they said they’d come and inspect your house for safe storage of that dangerous firearm.
Watching the regulatory body of the government have conniptions over this whole pot thing is verrrry instructive. These people do not give a single d@mn about Canada or Canadians.
“Simple solution, for both Canada and the U.S.: You can smoke all the marijuana you want, legally, after you sign a registry surrendering your right to vote.” Alyric
Don’t have to sign, how many drug addicts worry about voting. The self elimination plan…Maybe the Left won’t even run candidates…A slow draining of the swamp, but effective…
You are evidently retarded, even without smoking pot.
“Watching the regulatory body of the government have conniptions over this whole pot thing is verrrry instructive. These people do not give a single d@mn about Canada or Canadians.”
We are only slaves to them, any way you slice it.
“My experience with pot heads is that they are really stupid. I don’t know if stupid people smoke a lot of pot or whether pot makes them stupid.”
They were already stupid, for the most part. Pot just makes them think they’re smart.
Seat belt laws, mandatory helmets for motorcyclists: none of these bother progrssives.