Mageth

Gee, I don't know... maybe the damage referenced in the OP?

Corwin, I did "read the fucking article." And reread it. And I fail to see in the article where it claims that marijuana causes brain damage. Quite the contrary, actually. Especially not the "common" damage you claim, more common than that caused by alcohol, and for sure not the kind that you alluded would show up in tissue samples. Recoverable memory and perception problems, but not "brain damage" (as I think of it, anyway). Perhaps we're just working with two different preceptions of what "brain damage" is.

Alcohol arguably DOES actually kill the cells, cannaboids apparently just impair them. The impairment eventually wears off.

Then they're hardly "equivalent" as you claimed, are they? Impairment is not damage, in my book. Much of your brain is "impaired" when you sleep, after all. Is sleep "brain damage" as well?

By the way.... not ALL nerve damage is 'irreparable.' Just ask Christopher Reeve. Yes, I know conventional wisdom says that nerves never heal.... conventional wisdom has had to reevalutate that position, since some people have seen nerves heal.

Those nerve cells are in Reeve's spinal cord, not brain neurons. And what sometimes heals are the interconnections between nerve cells; nerve cells (specifically brain cells) are not replaced when destroyed (not to my knowledge, anyways). New interconnections may sometimes form when damaged, but dead cells are not replaced.

Corwin

Marijuana users suffer from lack of energy, memory impairment, and cognative function. These are all well established in medical literature. The actual CAUSE is different, (blockage of neurotransmitters rather than cell death) but the effect is the same.

Someone who smokes marijuana regularly gets these side effects. Someone who has a glass of wine with dinner does not.

Someone who quits smoking marijuana notices the side effects disappearing. Someone who has been a hardcore enough drinker to impair them even when they haven't been drinking, does not.

And blocking dopamine receptors has the same effect as killing off the cells that would use that dopamine. The difference is that the blockage is eventually flushed out of the system.

There's actually some difference of opinion on that these days, not really enough evidence yet to be sure either way. If such cells are replaced, then clearly not all of them are. (Generally not enough of them for there to be any dramatic improvement, and most of the time not even a noticeable one.)

sweep

you're telling me, and everyone else who wants to learn something, that thc is an antagonist: that it blocks receptor sites on unspecified neurones without activating them, thereby inhibiting conduction across those pathways affected.

Please show me relevant material indicating that thc is an antagonist. Show me which documented neurotransmitter thc mimicks. Show me that thc does not attach the the cell walls of the neurone as opposed to receptor sites on the post synaptic membrane.

Corwin

http://www.nida.nih.gov/pubs/teaching/Teaching5.html

There's some good basic information regarding THC and its interference with dopamine in the brain.

Again, this isn't permanent, but it's there.

Koyaanisqatsi

Unfortunately I can't remember my Professor's name from my abnormal psych courses back at Boston University (not because of pot, though, ironically ), but she had told us something I'm hoping others might be able to corroborate.

Our final was coming up on "illicit" drugs and she said that if any of us studied while on those drugs (in particular pot) then we should take the test on those drugs, too. This, naturally caused a flurry of questions, to which she responded that the clinical research on memory retention/loss did not factor in information that was learned or otherwise acquired while on psychoactive drugs; that a pot smoker, for example, might not remember something while off the drug something that was learned while on it and vice versa, but that clinical research had shown (and she didn't cite) that something learned (and she was referring to rote or repetitive information learning, such as studying for a test) while on a particular drug would be retained if on that drug again.

She mentioned (I think, it's a bit hazy since it was over fifteen years ago) something about how the memory functions in a compartmentalizing state, including a sort of "referrence" to the chemical stasis of the individual's body at the time of memory storage (like a "marker" that says, "This information was gathered at a time when the body's chemical composition was....") and that it was this compartmentalization that accounted for variables of memory loss in relation to most drug studies.

As I mentioned, it's been a long time, but the analogy she used was of a warehouse (your subconscious) with boxes that had certain markers on them in order to make that grouping of information more easily accessible. Thus, the box marked "learned while stoned" (for an extremely simplistic example) would not necessarily be found by a "retrieval order" that didn't correspond with the same markers (i.e., "retrieve while stoned;" as opposed to "retieve while not stoned"). The "tags" have to match up for effective memory retrieval.

Has anybody heard or seen this argument/research before?

Also, aren't there THC eyedrops that are given to glaucoma patients?

And one final note, when I smoked from a bong, I got much higher than from a pipe, typically off of just one full hit and any head knows that you can scrape your bong during times of drought and smoke the "resin," which typically gives one a very strong high for a much shorter period, followed usually by a fairly prominent headache, which would seem to me to contradict the notion (or at least bring it into question) that smoking from a bong removes the "good stuff." If the good stuff were removed (by and large) then wouldn't one expect the bong hit to be of low quality and the resin smoking to be of higher, longer lasting quality (with no headache; presumably as a result of toxins stripped along with some active THC)?

Majestyk

I don't think "damage" was the appropriate term to use in the description of the effects that marijuana smoking in relation to brain. Although it can be used to describe the effects, most people associate "damage" with "destruction". The cells and neural pathways are not destroyed by THC. Altering the chemical balance of the brain would not be considered as "Brain Damage". Damage to the brain's processes would be a more accurate usage.

The accusation that Alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana can also be viewed at the societal level. I've heard more than one law enforcement officer express that they would rather face an encounter with someone who had just smoked a joint as opposed to one who had just finished a six pack.

theyeti

I didn't see anything about THC acting as an antagonist. Rather it seems to function as an agonist, meaning that it causes receptors to activate by binding in a manner similar to other neurotransmitters. So from what I can tell, it's not blocking or interfering with anything. Rather, it appears to be stimulating the effects of domamine at some point along the pathway. Unfortunately, that site has precious little info.

theyeti

Koyaanisqatsi

I was also wondering if anyone here had pierced through these stupid anti-pot propaganda ads of late (where the catch phrase is, "Marijuana. It's not as harmless as we all thought.")?

The argument is clearly specious, but I haven't the time to hunt it down.

For those of you unfamiliar with them, they attempt to link car crashes with pot by stating something tenuous, like "a percentage of accident victims last year tested positive for marijuana;" the implication being that marijuana then caused the accident, when it was more likely the case that some idiot kid got drunk and stoned and it was either the alcohol or the combination of the two, but primarily as a result of the alcohol that caused the accident.

Anyone?

sweep

Koyaanisqatsi, AND everyone else, whatever you do, don't scrape your bong after use! What you are doing is smoking TAR, which probably explains the headaches. The Tar should not be confused with resin (hashish).

What do you call 'good stuff'? where are you getting it? (home grown or from a field or what? not addresses) how leafy is it? How frosty is it?

theyeti

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to determine whether a person who has THC in their system was recently stoned, or was stoned a few weeks ago. I don't think that they can tell if an accident victim was stoned at the time of the accident, unless the person admits to it. Even if it can be determined, there needs to be controlled studies showing that marijuana is a causal factor in accidents, and not merely correlated. (And I believe that such studies have been done, but they show relatively modest levels of impairment.)

I don't doubt that marijuana can impair driving ability at least under certain circumstances. The impairment is almost certainly less than that from alcohol, and more importantly, stoned people are less likely to want to drive while impaired. But the argument fails, because it does nothing to convince people that smoking pot and not driving is a bad thing. Just like DUI statistics can't show that drinking in the safety of your own home is harmful.

theyeti