What You Aren’t Hearing About Marijuana’s Health Effects

Wall Street Journal ^ | May 10, 2024 | Allysia Finley

[karpov]

Young people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s were seen as part of the counterculture. Now the cannabis culture is mainstream. A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes.

While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last week media outlets reported that the Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug—on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine—which would provide tax benefits and a financial boon to the pot industry.

Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.

Ms. Madras has spent 60 years studying drugs, starting with LSD when she was a graduate student at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, an affiliate of Montreal’s McGill University, in the 1960s. “I was interested in psychoactive drugs because I thought they could not only give us some insight into how the brain works, but also on how the brain undergoes dysfunction and disease states,” she says.

In 2015 the World Health Organization asked her to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.

[ansel12]

The most successful culture on earth, Western Civilization has used alcohol for thousands of years and it made for all sorts of socialization and community through bars, fine dining, restaurants, socializing, large gatherings, celebrations, inns and so on but during those thousands of years they avoided Marijuana as an intoxicant although they knew about it, ancient Greece and Rome and so on never adopted it as an intoxicant, and even during the Crusades it was condemned, not until just in the last 60 years or so has cannabis and the drug culture fully penetrated into the white world in this massive way.

Now look at the regions of the world that did adopt cannabis and hash as an intoxicant thousands of years ago, there is a remarkable resemblance to what we call the stoner’s world, grubby, lazy, introverted, art that they see as complex and detailed but that lacks the richness of Western art, basically the stoner’s world without TV and a couch, and look at the effects within the West during the last 60 years.

[zeestephen]

Re: "You falsely attributed the quote in your post to me."

Skooz, you were directly responding to that quote.

You wrote: "It [marijuana] was definitely the gateway drug for me."

My entire point in writing to you was to find out if you drank alcohol before you moved on to marijuana.

Since you do not want to discuss that, I retract my questions and apologize for disturbing your Sunday afternoon.

[Skooz]

Ok, I see. No big deal.

Yes, pot was definitely my gateway drug to harder drugs like cocaine, meth, acid etc. It was the door I walked through to find all the other substances I later found so enticing. I actually started drinking beer shortly after I started smoking pot, hanging out with my stoner friends on weekend nights.

I suppose we could make the reductio ad absurdum argument that I started on milk then to harder stuff like Hi-C and Mountain Dew before pot.

Like I posted, not every who smokes pot goes on to indulge in harder drugs. But I did.

[Skooz]

Read it again.

I quoted a snippet of the post and made my response to that snippet. As is customary for FR.

[Keyhopper]

Where in south Florida did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Hialeah

[The Great RJ]

The dangers of tobacco smoking have been known for decades and health officials tell us that even secondhand smoke is dangerous. Vaping is portrayed as a major health hazard and flavored vapes are said to lure kids into vaping and smoking. However, these same health experts are strangely silent about the hazards of pot smoking and turn a blind eye to THC lace gummies and seltzers which clearly are enticing to kids. Two drinks can set many people over the legal limit to drive, but laws to prevent driving while high are not on the books in most states. I find it hypocritical that states that spend millions to stop people from smoking are now legalizing marijuana despite it’s known health hazards

[Freest Republican]

Some additional facts:

Big pharma and the government in an effort to maintain prohibition for the sake of big pharma profits did nothing harm studies for 50yrs.
-——but it hasn’t been studied!

-Pfizer just paid $6.2billion to acquire Arena pharma over a weed drug in clinical trials.
-——but there is no redeeming evidence!

-Legalization in the face an epic fail drug war with redeeming facts.

These threads are always a rout in favor of the potheads.

Weed is not addictive but virtue signalling endorphins must be more addictive than heroin.

I once ran all of the replies in one of these virtue signalling climax threads through a whatsmyreadinglevel app and the virtue signalers lost by a grade and half.

[Freest Republican]

Not exactly.

It was as hard or harder than getting a study published on Ivermectin helping covid patients.

It was the same exact battle.

Big pharma/govt and bs science vs anyone else.

It’s almost as if covid didn’t take place.

We just witnessed in a few years, how weed was treated by the same entities for 50yrs.

[DUMBGRUNT]

—”Paracelsus, 1538”

He is discredited due to a lack of melanin and not to be believed.

[Billthedrill]

Yup. Too stale, too pale, too male.

[DUMBGRUNT]

—”Too stale, too pale, too male.”

Pale Male ruled the sky over NYC for many years.
Never stale.

[AppyPappy]

“Weed is not addictive “

If I didn’t know so many people addicted to Weed, I would believe you. I know people who would not work because of Weed. I know people who cannot start their day without Weed. They are high from dawn to bedtime. Wake and Bake. If that were alcohol, what would we call them?

I grow cannabis. I have 3 plants ready to go now but I don’t get high. It’s easy to grow, it has no natural predators and it repels deer. I keep it around just in case.

[Thomas Jerome]

Studies show that 100% of people that use hard drugs started off with milk. Maybe we should ban milk.

[ansel12]

As far as addiction, look at how many of us have known people who risked everything to smoke pot during the last 50 years, the loss of careers, pensions, and the resulting loss of homes, jail, knowing they were supporting a murderous drug trade and pot farms and border smuggling, even drug testing couldn’t stop them.

[Skooz]

Who said anything about banning anything? Certainly not me.

[Colinsky]

According to your link,

---

“We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively,” Humphreys told Fox5. “So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.”

In response to the reports of the Louisiana woman’s death, the executive director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative told Insider “there is a theoretical THC limit that could lead to an overdose...but it’s basically impossible to consume a level that high.”

“[A] fatal dose of marijuana would require ingestion of fifteen hundred pounds in fifteen minutes — a physical impossibility for any human, even Snoop Dogg,” wrote David Schmader, author of a book about marijuana.

---

The dead baby you cite had THC in his system but was a victim of neglect.

As the article says, “If the child did indeed die of a THC overdose, it would be one of the first-ever recorded cases. Despite being used by nearly 50 million Americans at least once in 2019, there are no deaths recorded from the overdose of marijuana, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s website.

“The National Institute on Drug Abuse echoes this finding, saying there have been no recorded instances of death from marijuana alone.”

As for your other point, smoking fentanyl-laced marijuana is equally lethal as eating fentanyl-laced Rice Krispies. Therefore, we must ban breakfast cereal.

[minnesota_bound]

The word pothead comes to mind.

Dragnet - pot will kill you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy_lCjA6poo

[fireman15]

As for your other point, smoking fentanyl-laced marijuana is equally lethal as eating fentanyl-laced Rice Krispies. Therefore, we must ban breakfast cereal.

The lethal half dose (LD50) for THC in humans is approximately 30 mg/kg. This means that approximately 2 grams (.07 ounces) of pure THC has a 50% chance of killing a 150 pound man.

Repeating the false claim that there have never been any deaths from THC overdoses is irresponsible and largely to blame for the increase in deaths from eating substances which contain the drug.

The fact that in most cases the victims had other drugs in their system in addition to THC has more to do with the habits of the typical THC user than safety of using the drug.

You are living in false paradise... the exploding rates of marijuana/THC consumption is a huge factor in the current break down in our society. How many people who have died from fentanyl overdoses were not also THC users. I would guess that the number is so small as to be statistically insignificant.

Marijuana has been easily available in the where I reside with few legal consequences for at least the past 60 years. However, when I first became a firefighter the drug of choice for people living on the street was alcohol. This changed to marijuana during my career and most people would assume from the media coverage and advocates such as yourself that this would be a good thing.

On the contrary "homelessness" along with associated criminal behavior has skyrocketed here and in many other parts of the country. The individuals involved typically have much more serious mental illness problems and are far more violent than we dealt with in the earlier years of my career. This is because marijuana use has a strong correlation with mental illness. The more you use, the more likely it is that you are suffering from serious mental illness.

https://rehabs.com/pro-talk/fatal-marijuana-overdose-is-not-a-myth/

It also has other serious negative consequences on the brain especially in younger users. A "Duke University study showed that people who started smoking marijuana heavily in their teens and had an ongoing marijuana use disorder lost an average of 8 IQ points between ages 13 and 38. The lost mental abilities didn't fully return in those who quit marijuana as adults."

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/cannabis-marijuana

You are spending your time here advocating for a substance that is speeding the decline of our country and causing massive damage to our civilization and especially young people. Unfortunately, the same people who are convinced that it is harmless have been convinced by other bad actors that the real threat is global warming and other idiotic pseudo-science nonsense. It is a topsy turvy world. But regardless, Marijuana has no positive benefit in our society and efforts to promote its use are misguided.