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Marijuana Could Prevent Alzheimer's, New Study
Chickan writes "'A puff a day might keep Alzheimer's away, according to marijuana research by professor Gary Wenk and associate professor Yannic Marchalant of the Ohio State Department of Psychology. Wenk's studies show that a low dosage in the morning of a certain canavanoid, a component in marijuana, reversed memory loss in older rats' brains. In his study, an experimental group of old rats received a dosage, and a control group of rats did not. The old rats that received the drugs performed better on memory tests, and the drug slowed and prevented brain cell death.' My fine university's dollars at work!" Maybe it works even better in combination with brain-preserving sips of coffee.
The full text of the research paper is available at-- http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/marchalant/pdf/marchalantetalneurobiolaging2008.pdf on the co-author's Departmental website. Might be helpful since TFA is an article out of the University's student newspaper which tends to be a little light on details (speaking as an alumni).
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I will merely point out that according to the FDA rules for a schedule 1 narcotic, something has to meed all of the following requirements:
(A) The drug or other substance has high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
Does Pot have a medical use: Yup, check out marinol (the THC pill). Bang, struck from schedule 1 right there. It has a currently accepted medical use in treatment for HIV and cancer patients. Not to mention that it could be prescribed off label for a multitude of things (low doses for anxiety, insomnia, etc.) I have in the past smoked and it is a neuro-seditive. Side effects? Yeah, smoke too much, you get paranoid, short term memory lapses, etc. Same with alchohol though, in addition, you can die from alchohol poisoning (and yes it would be possible to OD on THC, but I don't think anyone could stay concious long enough to smoke that much, you'd have to have a high dose IV drip of it or something).
The simple fact of the matter here though is the FDA keeps it illegal not for medical reasons, but political ones. No one wants to be the one who gets smeared for "caving to the drug cartels", despite the fact that the best way to take them out is to take away thier products and sevices. In addition, the DuPont family paid a lot of money back in the day to keep people using wood pulp for paper so they could keep selling thier chemicals. For a good read, check out "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do" by Peter McWilliams. Available for online reading.
I got nuthin
It is often assumed that, in the US at least, marijuana was made illegal to protect alcohol profits. here is one link: http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html
No offense, but wtf are you talking about? Safer? The LD50 of THC is somewhere in the range of 25 POUNDS of crystalline reagent grade product. Its physically impossible to overdose on marijuana - you simple can't fit 25 pounds in your bloodstream. No other pain killer or appetite stimulant has that sort of LD50. It is about as safe as you can get - even safer than sugar.
"Because the burden of proof is on those that believe that it's harmless rather than those that don't believe it to be safe. Which is just the way that it should be."
This is why greasy fast food will never be legal. Which is just the way that it should be.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Cannabis was renamed by white US politicians as "marijuana" to associate it with itinerant Mexican laborers. It was claimed to cause madness and violence in the "daker races". It was claimed that it caused "our" white women to seek relations with "negroes". Criminalizing it was a way to control the Mexicans and the blacks. Thelonius Monk was banned from playing New York clubs because he had a "marijuana" conviction and had his club card pulled.
De minimis is teh suck.
So far the only risk you've identified is lung damage. Please explain how eating marijuana can cause this.
More likely is that it stimulates retrograde signaling pathways, which are implicated in the formation and maintenance of long-term memories.
This is because the chemical receptors of neurons implicated with this process are stimulated by "endo-cannabinoids", or, molecules created by the brain which are chemically similar to THC found in cannabis. Ingesting THC (in one form or another...) will stimulate these receptors, which then triggers neurons to fire.
When you stop to consider that an Alzheimer's afflicted brain has major damage going on, and then also consider the implications of neuroplasticity along with this induced retrograde signal propagation, it could be seen that by stimulating neurons that are failing or near inoperable, their information could be transferred to healthier tissues, and retained, rather than simply "lost."
It's a bit like running FSCK on your brain, in an attempt to recover data from bad sectors.
I know a ton of people who use marijuana on a regular basis who also show up for work consistently, do an excellent job, work overtime and then some. So, um, wanna come up with an argument against that?
I've seen people sling around the same old tired arguments against pot since was 16 and first learning about it and trying it, back in the mid '70s. Problem is, not enough people have tried it. Most people who are against pot talk out of their asses without a lick of experience.
Yet actual studies have found Marijuana reduces rates of all cancers - including lung cancer. Smokers who also smoke marijuana have a lower rate of lung cancer than smokers who only smoke cigarettes.
http://current.com/items/89590938/study_finds_marijuana_smokers_have_lower_cancer_risk_than_tobacco_smokers_norml.htm
Care to try again?
If you want actual human studies - there are 4 grandfathered medical marijuana patients in the United States who have been smoking daily for 25 years now. Not one has shown any adverse health affects.
Perhaps, but is growing /good/ pot as easy as throwing seeds out in the backyard? I mean, you can make hooch in the bathtub - you can even make it in prison. But it's not very good. For that matter, you really can grow tomatoes by throwing seeds in your back yard, but how many people do that instead of buying them for $excessive at the supermarket?
Growing good, potent cannabis takes time and effort the same way making good wine does, which means there's easily potential for corporate commoditization. Never underestimate people's willingness to buy things they don't need to.
As someone who has both grown dope and made homemade hooch (and grown tomatoes, for that matter), I can attest that growing good dope is *much* easier than than making good booze. This is not taking into account the risks of legal issues.
Making truly good beer or wine requires a lot of equipment as well as broad knowledge of fermentatation, sanitation, transferring liquids with minimal oxygen exposure, and a thousand other factors that can produce "off flavors". Distillation is even more intensive to do truly well. You can make bad booze without much trouble, but making something comparable to (or possibly even better than) commercial products takes a serious amount of will.
The difference between growing good pot and bad pot, all growing conditions being equal, is simply genetics. No, it's not as simple as "throwing seeds in your back yard" but then neither is growing good tomatoes really either. But if you can provide the necessary light and nutrients to bring a female cannabis plant to mature flowering, whether indoors or outdoors, the potency of your product will virtually entirely depend on the plant's genetics. A novice grower can likely grow better pot than he/she can buy with good seed, but the most experienced grower in the world can't make Sour Diesel from ditchweed seeds.
The real skill in growing pot is how to achieve good yield, and of course, navigating the the minefield of legality. While not *everyone* who smokes bud would grow it if it were legal, people like me who know how to grow it already could grow lots and give it away to friends just like people do now with their tomatoes and zucchini.
I've always felt that a main reason why such a stupid law persists is that there is simply far more money in it being illegal than could ever be profited or taxed out of it in a legal market.
Because America is divided between people who hate risk more than they love freedom and people who hate hippies more than they love freedom.
WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The REASONS are DuPont and other companies that hemp was a major threat to, like the cotton industry, paper industry, oils industry, and more. Hemp had a virtual monopoly because it's so damned useful. In fact hemp oil was still the STANDARD recommended machine lubricant during the WWII era.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Here you go...
Gee, wonder why the fucking Constitution was written on HEMP paper...
The US Government has such bullshit hypocrisy on this "War On Drugs": Hemp For Victory
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ALL Law is based on Contract Law.
the first and third presidents of the USA, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp on their farms. The second president John Adams wanted to use hemp as a cash crop.
Yeah but they weren't smoking it. Marijuana generally refers to dope not rope
When hemp was outlawed drug warriors called it marijuana to confuse people. In testimony before congress Dr. James Woodward speaking for the AMA said the AMA did not know that the "killer weed from Mexico" that was called marijuana was hemp. The AMA only learned what was being talked about was in fact hemp 2 days before the hearing. He further stated "We cannot understand yet, Mr Chairman, why this bill had been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation, even to the profession" that it was being prepared.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?