Marijuana is good or bad for you?
This is a complicated question and I do not want to answer it unequivocally, because that's actually probably impossible at this point. I am not going to talk about its social economics, about the legal issues, I going to talk about health wise what studies have found. For decades marijuana has become more popular it's more popular recreationally and also in the medical field, but there's a debate especially online and kind of everywhere in the United States especially about whether it's good or bad for you when it comes to your health. In this Post i want to be transparent I did not use any truth campaign, anti-drug campaigns as our sources, I looked exclusively at medical studies and international groups not advocacy organizations just throwing that out there. I just looked at studies because I want to give you the information from the researchers not from the people representing them.
So the very least what we can say when you put smoke in your lungs that's bad. Smoking cigarettes for example Irritates your lungs, It messes with the lungs ability to filter the air and it causes diseases like cancer and asthma and bronchitis and that mostly has to do with the chemicals in the cigarettes and how they get them transferred into the alveoli of your lungs. It's not necessarily the actual smoke itself, It's the particulates though in there but when you smoke marijuana the chemicals are different. It's a different plant it's made in a different way or grown and then processed in a different way, but it does contain some chemicals. In 2007 some canadian researchers found when they compared cigarette smoke to marijuana smoke, Marijuana had 20 times the levels of ammonia, which is very bad and also had higher levels of hydrogen cyanide bad and nitric oxide all those not great.
So before we move on I just want to introduce you to moderation. Moderation means different things to everybody, if I'm used to drinking a gallon of milk every week then moderation is probably drinking half a gallon but if I never drink milk half a gallon of milk a week is a lot right. So how I personally think about it and again this is my personal opinion is if I wake up and I need to eat a cupcake and then in the afternoon I'd like to have a cupcake to get through my afternoon and then before I go to bed I want to eat a cupcake that's probably not moderation that's three cupcakes a day is a lot of cupcakes like regardless of how you look at it. That's again my opinion but I'm just saying try and think about it outside of just your experience and understand that moderation does have meaning in the scientific community. Moderation that's important when it comes to anything especially when it comes to drug use obviously we're not endorsing when are also not deriving but we're talking about it in moderation.
In 2012 study published in the Journal of Medicine looked at cigarette and marijuana smokers over 20 years and tobacco smoking was always found bad like it always has been. But they found that occasional marijuana smoking like one joint per week not only did not harm lung function they found slight increases in lung air flow and lung volume not much just a little bit. Again moderation though because think about it this is one joint per week, people don't tend to smoke that little when they get into something after a certain point. I mean you don't really see smokers doing one cigarette a day let alone one cigarette week. One UK study found men in 2014 were smoking 12.2 cigarettes every day and women 10 and a half per day definitely not moderation.
A recent long-term study from New Zealand followed a thousand people from ages 0 to 38 and found for people that were smoking marijuana regularly multiple times like four times a week for 20 years, they found no real negative changes in their physical health. And they looked at a lot of stuff including lung function, metabolism, waist size, cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose control, chronic inflammation, they'll get a lot of stuff. But it did show an increase in gum disease interesting. Another study found an increased likelihood of symptoms of bronchitis which seems kind of like a reach but still interesting. And a new england journal of medicine study says smoking marijuana could increase risk of an pneumonia which is interesting as well also they said an increased risk of heart attack or stroke. But other researchers have found kind of the opposite in that it's not a risk factor for heart attacks but in rare cases could trigger them but wasn't a risk factor. Another 2014 study out of France found a connection between marijuana and heart problems but researchers admitted that it was a small study of only 35 people.
All of these things kind of shed light on a center point aside from moderation that the questionable legality of marijuana makes it very difficult to study. Its legally a very difficult thing to get around when it comes to finding out what this drug is actually doing to humans who are using it. In the brain we know a little bit more than out here in the body, Some studies have shown that using marijuana at a young age prior to say 18 could stunt intelligence and that it could make you not reach your IQ potential whatever that means. But it does say in these studies that it's safe for those over 18 which is interesting because brain development doesn't end until age 25. One study out of Washington University School of medicine in st. Louis showed that we does not shrink our brain which is a big deal shrinking brains usually bad thing this they specifically looked by the way at the amygdala which is the emotion and fear center of your brain. But the lead researcher in the study said a smaller amygdala which existed in weed smokers could result from something else and make someone more likely to try drugs like pot kind of interesting.
There's also been ties between marijuana use and schizophrenia, very well documented highly highly studied. In fact because schizophrenia is so interesting but it's usually something that's found in people who already have a genetic risk high risk for schizophrenia. It also may slow down Alzheimer's in adults which are the basis for some of its medical prescription use. The problem with all of this and I think again we're dancing around this questionable legality issue. There's no consistency in marijuana studies because they're approved kind of willy-nilly doing research you will find if you go out there and you actually do the research on your own you'll find studies saying that it hurts your brain, studies saying that it doesn't hurt your brain, studies saying that it helps your brain, studies saying that its long-term use could damage your brain forever, and there are people out there who want to study this but they can't because it's often banned or by studying it they won't get funding from certain groups. And people are hoping that that will change in the future and allow more study because what we do know is that marijuana can mess with the brain it can impair memory and attention but it might be harmful and there are studies that say Twilight memory might be a thing and it might be permanent the brain could recover.
But it seems to come down to is in a lot of ways is that people are afraid that marijuana is called a gateway drug. This is a contested part of the cannabis experiment right. A news weak headline came out that said marijuana not a gateway drug, Time headline called it the myth that would not die and then the New York Times came out and said marijuana has proven to be a gateway drug. So what it seems to come down to is a large portion of studies show that people who smoke marijuana are likely to use other drugs but that's not really the whole story because that's talking about correlation not causation right. When you say gateway drug you assume you walk through the Gateway and thus are in a new place where you try all these other drugs but there's not a scientific fact that marijuana is that gateway. A 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine said that marijuana is a gateway drug in that people tend to use it first, not because it directly causes people to try heroin or cocaine. They tend to do marijuana first and then later may go on to use those things not a cause but a correlation.
There have been studies done with rats that show early exposure to THC led to quote increased vulnerability to drug relapse later in life. But similar things have happened with alcohol as well and also with nicotine and I'm imagining their studies connecting caffeine to some of these things to. Other factors point to the fact that marijuana is an easy drug to obtain when you're young and if you were going to try a drug marijuana is because it's more easily obtainable more easy to be exposed to. And of course studies have shown that less than 2% of people try harder drugs before they try marijuana because I doubt you just walk into a place and be like that's right i need some heroin between my toes right now no I've never done it before it probably doesn't happen but something that might seem more accessible like marijuana similar to smoking a cigarette. There's no scientific fact that it is or is not a gateway drug but whether you believe it's good or bad for you just make sure to remember the moderation.
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