Dr. Sushrut Jangi reports at The Boston Globe that Jodi Gilman, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School with the Center for Addiction Medicine has been doing lots of research on the harmful effects of marijuana.
Last year, Gilman published research on 18-to-25-year-olds that showed differences in the brain’s reward system between users and non-users. (“I got a lot of hate mail after that,” Gilman says.) And data supporting the hazards keep accumulating. Recently Gilman found that in a group of college students, smokers had impaired working memory even when not acutely high.Read more here.
...Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana attaches to receptors in the brain that subtly modulate systems ordinarily involved in healthy behaviors like eating, learning, and forming relationships. But THC — which has been increasing in potency in legal products being sold in places like Colorado — throws the finely tuned system off balance.
...Each hit of THC rewires the function of this critical cognitive system: Early evidence in mice has shown that repeated exposure to THC causes these receptors to disappear altogether, blunting the natural response to positive behaviors and requiring higher doses to achieve the same effect. Marijuana exploits essential pathways we’ve evolved to retrieve a memory, to delicately regulate our metabolism, and to derive happiness from everyday life.
Medical science at its best operates independently of forces that drive the market and its associated politics. It was science that eventually curtailed the power of Big Tobacco and prevented nearly 800,000 cancer deaths in the United States between 1975 and 2000. As marijuana marches toward the same legal status as cigarettes, its potential hazards will require equal attention by science.
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