New research on marijuana confirms that it damages cognitive functioning. Pot legalization would spread this disability.
The first sentence sounds scientific the second one sounds like propaganda.
The user's past psychological history, his experience with marijuana, and the social setting all play a role in marijuana's influence,
Thats a lot of factors.
Later they are released into the bloodstream. There is substantial human variability in the metabolism of cannabis, but it is now proven that individuals who use cannabis daily are more at risk than infrequent users, because of the slow release of THC.
I couldn't find in this section what they are at more risk of other than getting high? But maybe I missed it?
It impairs the brain's functioning, particularly with regard to chronic use. Numerous investigations have found that the most pronounced impairments are reduced short-term memory, locomotion disorders, altered time sense, paranoia, fragmentation of thought, and lethargy.
These are the most pronounced impairments? Pretty much just says getting high gets you high.
Yes, unquestionably there are modifications (I do not dare use the word lesion) in the organ that is in charge of mental functions, but these modifications are not those one would generally expect. They will always escape the investigations of the researchers seeking alleged or imagined structural changes.
They are invisible changes then?
Lisa Matsuda provided conclusive evidence documenting the damage of marijuana on the cognitive faculties, after cloning a gene for the cannabinoid receptor in the rat brain which, in collaboration with M. Herkenham, was found to be 97 percent identical with the human receptor.
But animals can't not learn in the way we can, we are separate from them in these ways.
Naturally, the rodent brain, or that of any animal, for that matter, cannot be compared to the human brain.
Exactly???
Does this mean that the naturally produced cannabis, the anandamide, is different from smoked cannabis? And if so, why? What, then, is the purpose of anandamide? Under what conditions is anandamide released? Scientists are now trying to figure out the actual function of this system.'3 Surely it does not exist in the body so that humans could smoke marijuana.
The bolded is the beginning of a slide towards bias and opinion in this 'study'.
However, this also means that continued use of the drug requires higher and higher doses before the euphoric or high state is achieved. Hence, even though memory is not impaired at the same dose as before, it will be impaired just as much because the individual will take more drugs to obtain the original euphoric state. What this means is that chronic use will eventually produce permanent effect on memory since the hippocampus will adjust its memory storage mechanisms to handle the lower capacity or volume of information flow produced by the drug.
If this were true I'd be smoking an insane amount of weed by now. In fact I smoke less than I used to, and I know people who hardly smoke at all, and some who smoke more at a consistent level. My memory is fine, although if I just smoked a doobie I might forget what I was talking about. This paragragh also suggests that as you build a tolerance your memory is a effected less and less. Also its telling me how I would get high, and its wrong?! A lot of this memory talk has no long term correlation in it.
I play 20ish tables at a time when I grind, I have to out level almost 160 players at a time, decision after decision for upwards of 10+ hours at a time. I need to remember what they saw me do. I chat on a few forums, facebook, hotmail, listen to music and watch documentary, and talk on skype at the same time. Sometimes I chit chat on the headset. I smoke a doobie an hour usually.
Weed helps me do it. That ability refutes the assumptions in this article.
Higher intellectual functions, such as memory and learning, require controlled attention.
Weed helps you control the attention. And I take offense to any sort of academic that thinks they understand the concept of learning. Learning comes from free thinking, few academics are truly free thinkers, they are analyzers. This goes back to why (at 17) I can progress a teenage dyslexic girl in math 1.5 levels+ when a collective of parents, teachers, and special teaching aids could not. They always think in terms of dyslexia, never think they are just bad teachers.
The cognitive drawbacks of cannabis-caused impairment are not inconsequential. They affect driving a car, operating a plane, or employing a complicated piece of machinery. In such skilled activities, one's undivided attention, recall, quick visual-spatial mapping, and split-second timing, are required at every second.'
I know many people who are amazing operators and work completely high casually. I'd trust them with my life and so would anyone who worked with them (underground mining). I also know many people how do extreme type sports and always do it high. Snowboarding, biking, mma everything...many people here do it high.
Or to take a simpler example, what about the young adult who is attempting to learn how to play the trumpet. How can the student who has smoked too much marijuana simultaneously have command over the complex processes required to perform a piece of music— memory, coordination of hands and mouth, emotion, and interpretation?
Some of the most technical musicians in the world are chronics. This paragraph is actually outrageous.
Studies indicate that chronic and acute use of marijuana may have an effect on the reproductive system and the individual's ability to respond to different metabolic changes and stress.
may?
Some researchers also believe that too little stress is unhealthful for the brain, for then the brain is not in gear.
Some believe? And too little stress is unhealthful for the brain? Thats like being afraid of the edge of the earth. No scientist is going to tell me that I have to have stress, thats overstepping boundaries and its talking about religious views. If you have a religious view that everything is meant to be, then you don't have stress, and a doctor cannot suggest you then have to add stress to be healthy. Let us not fear a secure psyche.
And researchers have admitted that chronic cannabis users may have symptoms even in the long-term and non-intoxicated state, long after cannabis is no longer detectable in the blood or fat.
have admitted users may?
The psychiatrist Moreau tested cannabis not only on his patients, but also on himself and his colleagues in the literary circle, Le Club des Hachichins.
This guy smoked it himself and was too baked to realize he tainted his works. Now this is strange because its not the weed that did that to him, its the academics. Notice the author of your original link missed this fact too. You can't be your own test subject when dealing with psychosis, it helps
him understand it, but the academic world can't know if hes psychotic or correct.
If the dose was high enough and the use chronic, Moreau observed that his subjects often became insane.
Ya? ......No.
With the administration of lower doses, Moreau identified long-term personality changes that were more subtle, including shortened attention span, distractability, and a progressive loss of mental powers.
Internet is suggesting distractability is spelled wrong?
See this shortened attention span comes from societies lack of ability to learn, teach, teach learning, and learn teaching. Many people use weed to concentrate.
Moreau wrote, based on his observations and scientific knowledge, that by destroying the unity of thought in the individual, that individual was mentally ill, even if he did not look like, or act like, a psychotic.
So he doesn't look or act like a duck, but he is a duck (duck meaning psychotic)?
Moreau identified how the mind is destroyed from marijuana smoking, notably through distractability:
One of the first measurable effects of hashish is the gradual weakening of the power to direct thoughts at will. We feel slowly overwhelmed by strange ideas unrelated to the subject on which we are trying to focus our attention. These ideas, which we have not willfully summoned in our mind, appear at random and become more and more numerous, lively, and keen. Soon they command more attention and generate bizarre associations and fantastic creations. If by an effort of will we resume the sequence of our ideas, the ones we have rejected still echo in our mind, but as if from a faraway distance muffled like dreams of a restless night. . . . |T]hese ideas, or rather this series of ideas, are actually dreams, "true dreams" in the strictest sense. One cannot distinguish them from those created by natural sleep. . . . You forget those things which at present most excite your interest and stir your passions, which absorb all your attention,
This is just a guy being high and not handling his weed well.
Nadaia Solowij, a cognitive scientist in Australia, recorded such memory intrusions, among other observations. She postulated that chronic use of cannabis might account for this, by creating long-term changes at the cannabinoid receptor
Postulated
Chronic use allowed these youngsters to withdraw from conflicts about achievement and competition. It was used to encourage grandiose expectations, feelings of invulnerability, and a sense that a magical transformation of their life was possible.
Yes this is the message of Buddhism. This paragraph is written by someone who fears an enlightened idea. And I do believe weed causes one to think freer, or outside the box.
We live in a society where the popular culture advertises that marijuana is relatively harmless. Because of the breakup of the family, the destruction of traditional institutions and values, and the ordinary pressures of adolescence, teenagers have their attention easily drawn to drugs as an easy and pleasurable way out of conflict, or any difficulty. Marijuana is also America's number one cash crop, so it is certainly easy enough to find. Given this situation, it is all the more reason to keep marijuana illegal.
Hmmm defending the idea of 'family' and 'traditional institutions' and 'values'? I guess we are talking about religion and church. I wonder what church, I wonder what values? Same sex marriage I read this as.
I guess I'm just paranoid though. But the former and the cash crop talk are not reasons to keep weed illegal like the author states. As a matter of fact legalizing it (so we can grow our own) would fix the number 1 cash crop thing, the author has that backwards.
In his tightly controlled study, children of 120 marijuana-smoking mothers were evaluated on a regular basis from birth.
120 people? that sample size is ridiculous. Were these mothers all alcoholics? Were they from the same neighborhood? Class? Country? Educational background? That study is not valid.
[Tlhere is a lot of evidence to suggest that marijuana has a tremendous impact on the prefrontal lobe and functioning associated with that part of the brain in marijuana users. In addition, the prefrontal area in animals is one of the areas of the brain where there is a high concentration of cannabinoid receptors.
This evidence doesn't decipher whether or not that impact comes from the thc or the activity the person does irl. Does this person smoke and then just veg out? Or do they challenge their mind? The 2nd part about animals was already shown to be irrelevant earlier in the article.
Is the children's diminished learning ability in adulthood based on prenatal and perinatal exposure to delta-9-THC?
You see the doctors out here tell all my peers the mother can smoke all through the pregnancy. They are indifferent to it.
If the findings of Professor Fried and others are accurate, then society is confronted with the reality of an inter-generational incompetency caused by smoked marijuana.
If they are accurate? Inter-generational incompetency? This person is unable at looking at the technology and science surrounding them. This generation is unimaginably intelligent compared to previous ones.
A population with widespread addiction to hashish, even without the spread of addiction from heroin or cocaine, or alcohol, is a disabled population.
Is this supposed to be a supported point? A disabled population? The population here smokes hashish, and they are doctors, lawyers, athletes, businessmen, priests, mothers, police, firemen, health care workers. By now this argument has gone quite far towards a biased opinion.
In any society where the children and teenagers cannot focus their attention, they might be able to perform boring or low-skilled jobs, such as fast-food service, or running a microchip computer. But their "will," that is, their energies and curiosity to look outside their infantilism, is sapped.
Many ultra successful people smoke weed, this is a verifiably wrong statement. And its silly crazy talk.
These young adults will not have the interest, or the attention span, to develop the economic and cultural well-being of the country in which they are citizens.
These young adults? These young adults are going to have to sort out the shit miss that the older adults left them. The mess was created strictly on ignorance. These young adults will not be thinking about the cultural and economic well being of
their country-they will be thinking about the well being
of the entire world.
But this egregious outcome is exactly what motivates the pro-pot lobby that is pushing the legalization of marijuana today. Their legalization agenda is based on the "India model," an elaborate tax system that the British imposed on the population of India in 1895, in the height of the era when "the Sun never set on the British Empire."
Wait now we are talking about the British invasion of India?
A brief look at the history of how the British Empire used drugs to subjugate populations, and at the same time make easy fortunes, makes it clear that while the colonialists wanted to destroy development and progress, their opponents fought to prohibit psychotropic drugs because of their desire for progress.
So people fought for an authoritative control over their own ability to choose was to consume? If thats even true thats simply just a population that lacks intelligence. What we do know is true though is that Britain didn't just use weed to suppress India, they also destroyed India's ancient history texts and forced Christianic teachings on the native population. That we know happened for sure and the author has somehow for some reason strangely sliced that out.
Progress and drugs are incompatible.
This is not a scientific statement and totally untrue. There are many instances of success and cannabis. Many successful famous people smoke weed.
It's easy to see why NORML is pushing this report, if we look at some of the testimony in the 1893 report, taken from pro-marijuana witnesses at the time
I cannot see any harm in the use of the drug. All of those who appear to use it are good, quiet, and willing coolies . . . with no deleterious effects
If prohibited, the health of our coolies would suffer, their lives would be sacrificed, and of course, discontent would ensue."
"I have heard of men giving a few pence to buy ganja for boatmen and others where they require a little extra work from them."
Wootton's top assistant on the committee, Michael Schofield, a Cambridge University social scientist, filed a "dissenting opinion" on the committee, calling for full cannabis legalization. Later, he sat on the governing board of the Legalize Cannabis Campaign in London. In the words of Schofield himself,
the choice is between a moral society dedicated to industrial progress, and a brave new world.
Soma, the fictional drug in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World gave great pleasure harmlessly.. . . We have not (yet) come to terms with the idea of recreational drugs and so we cannot start to think out attitudes towards chemical aids to pleasure. Until we have developed a social philosophy, we are unable to make intelligent judgments about their use and abuse.
Author is suggesting these people are propagandists.
while the pro-pot lobby, and its political and financial backers, try to engineer more "soft" drug use as a method of controlling the "coolies" of the 20th and 21 st centuries.
huh?! ha!
The pot legalizers propagandize that marijuana relieves pain and stress, and has no harmful effects. What they don't tell you, is that when your brain goes up in smoke, you become a good coolie in their Brave New World.
OH NO!!! coolies!!!!
Kempfer attacked both the anti-industrial Green party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany for eliminating nuclear energy in their states and hence lowering the living standard and creating unemployment.
Social Democratic party? Germany?
Social Minister Heide Moser was abusing her position as Minister for Health by leading the so-called hash initiative, stating:
Maybe the hash experiment is the . . . solution for our actual problems. When we are filled with dope, unemployment seems much less, the Euro Icurrency designed by the European Union's Maastricht Treaty to replace the deutschemark) seems more valuable, our pensions are safer, and the taxes appear less.
My friends who smoke weed are generally more concerned about the worlds affairs than those that aren't. I guess we are just being paranoid discussing the worlds problems. Perhaps we should go to school, go to work, get paid, have a family, covet the family, taxes, die.
The challenge worldwide is whether those citizens whose brains have not yet gone up in marijuana smoke, will fight to defeat NORML, financier-speculator George Soros, and the other organizations and individuals who are propagandizing for the legalization of "soft" marijuana for the coolies of the 21st century.
Haha author is accusing NORML of propagandizing in order to make people drones? Thats the most hypocritical conclusion I've ever read.
Author is suggesting weed creates lethargy in the general population. But I've been temp banned twice now for my active disagreement with the authority of this world. We can see clear evidence that suggests the author is not only biased but bad at putting together coherent and correct information.