Roy-
A good steak with a glass of merlot, awesome. Some pasta with a glass of chanti, great combo. Wine, like any other food, can be enjoyed in moderation without any harmful side-effects. The same can't be said about smoking mj. Obviously is you smoke mj every once in a great while the negative effects won't be as great as the person who smokes a pound a day .
It can be said about mj. The thing is the "in moderation" part. And LOL- if someone got up at 5 a.m. and started smoking mj continuously until the next morning at 5 they wouldn't be able to smoke a pound.
A friend of mine is the owner of a large engineering business. He says he smokes pot once a year when he's on his annual fishing trip. I wouldn't have guessed. Now, there's a kid who works for him who smokes pot every weekend. His brain is mush and he has the memory of a bucket with a hole in it. But, in both cases smoking pot killed brain cells.
How do you know this to be a fact? Were there brain functioning tests done on this kid before he started smoking mj? Were they done on your friend? How do you know that this kid's brain wouldn't have been mush (and his memory off because of it), without mj? Do you really know this for a fact or are you speculating? Could it be that the kid is just below average in intelligence to begin with? It's just a little too easy to attribute some of these things to marijuana.
This is from your webmd article:
A study published in the March 6 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association is the first to look at long-term, entrenched cannabis users who were seeking treatment for their habit -- largely because they were having trouble functioning in everyday life. Previous research looking at this issue has shown altered brain function and thinking among cannabis users -- even in the unintoxicated state.
This looks at those who are having trouble functioning in everyday life. There are other problems going on with these people and they have been abusing marijuana. I would be interested to read this study to see where they got their "base" on these folks. There is no way for them to have done it. If you are testing people who are already that far "entrenched" how is one to know from whence they came and what level of brain capability they lost as a result of their abusing of mj?
This study -- the first to look at marijuana's long-lasting effects --
So, in 2002 this study was the first one? Where is all this evidence-facts about mj killing brain cells? This is it? They took some people who were hard cases and tested them and determined -yep their brain is messed up because of the pot! How do they know what kind "functioning" their brains would have been capable of without ever having smoked at all? Altered brain function? Altered from where?
But then they go on to say :
It confirms what many have suspected: "that long-term heavy cannabis users show impairments in memory and attention that endure beyond the period of intoxication and worsen with increasing years of regular cannabis use," researcher Nadia Solowij, PhD, writes in the study.
Propaganda. "See, we did this study and now it's FACT. It confirms what we have suspected all along" Sounds like the kind of propagandistic writing found in some religious organization's literature.
Solowij's study focused on 102 people who used cannabis nearly every day, 65 of whom were in a marijuana treatment program. After giving them a series of nine tests, researchers found that long-term users performed "significantly less well" than short-term users and nonusers.
Cannabis users made more errors on the tests and were significantly less able to recall newly learned words. They also had more difficulty performing increasingly complex tasks. Both long-term and short-term users performed poorly in estimating time intervals.
Overall, long-term users had widespread memory difficulties with learning, retention, and retrieval skills, according to Solowij. Shorter-term cannabis users are not impaired to an extent that would interfere with memory and thinking abilities in daily life, she writes
Again, there is NO WAY for them to know how well these people "would have" performed on these tests against the others sans the mj!! How do they know that these same test subjects wouldn't have performed "significantly less well" than short-term users and nonusers anyway? Did they develop a means to study brain functionality retroactively on these test subjects?
and then this-
These results do not indicate a severe memory problem but could nevertheless mean an impairment in memory and thinking that could impact functioning in daily life, she says. The impairments develop gradually and probably become evident on tests after one or two decades of use.
She negates her whole theory ! And she is quick to add the "mights" and the "coulds" and the "probably's" This is the opening statement in that article:
March 5, 2002 -- Call it what you want -- pot, marijuana, wacky tobacky. But there's strong evidence that long-term, heavy smoking of cannabis can cause serious memory and attention impairments.
Which is it? The writer took journalistic license with the whole thing and stated something as a fact that is simply not there.
There are so many studies out there about how it is necessary to work our brains as we age. Work it or lose it. Memory is part of that and needs to be worked consistently as well. If someone is getting stoned every day they may not doing the things that others are to work their brains and keep them functioning well. I don't know very many people who smoke every day but the couple that I do know also exercise their brains in various ways.
The other thing that is missing is the "amount" smoked. It says "daily" use but just what does that mean? 1 johnnie a day? 4? 12? A pound?
I think that one of the things that gets confused in this whole discussion because of the polarization of beliefs is recreational use vs. abuse. There are people who abuse pot and their lives are a shambles. There are people who abuse other substances. They are troubled people. They shouldn't be smoking pot or drinking etal. (IMO) They are abusing it because they have problems and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that is then all attributed to the marijuana. Find out what ails these people emotionally and mentally and help them fix it and they won't have a need to abuse any substances.
In the meantime, the fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are highly functioning, responsible, successful and intelligent and their brains are working just fine. They also happen to enjoy a little marijuana now and then.
Hey Roy- can I stop by for a steak and some merlot? I'll be heading down there for the Blues fest this weekend !! J/K-
And jesus says.........................................................
It's all good !!
XW