New Study: Even Casual Marijuana-Use Damages Brain

Marijuana

The popular notion that marijuana is largely harmless has led many people to shrug at efforts to legalize the drug across the country. A groundbreaking study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, however, shows that even casual marijuana-use carries serious implications.

The Boston Globe reports:

Young adults who occasionally smoke marijuana show abnormalities in two key areas of their brain related to emotion, motivation, and decision making, raising concerns that they could be damaging their developing minds at a critical time, according to a new study by Boston researchers.

Other studies have revealed brain changes among heavy marijuana users, but this research is believed to be the first to demonstrate such abnormalities in young, casual smokers.

The study examined forty young adults ages 18 to 25. Of the forty participants, half reported using marijuana at least once a week while the other half reported not having used marijuana in the past year as well as indicating they had smoked marijuana fewer than five times in their lives. This allowed researchers to compare casual marijuana users with non-users.

What they found was marijuana-use affects brain development–even among casual users–and that the amount of marijuana a casual user smoked directly affected the brain, with heavier users showing more brain abnormalities.

As we have written before, chronic or heavy marijuana use has been linked to deficiencies in cognitive function, schizophrenia, stroke, and even death. This latest study, however, takes that research a step further, linking even moderate marijuana-use with negative consequences.

This raises a serious question: If even casual marijuana use has negative effects on the brain, how can marijuana be used safely as medicine? If using marijuana as little as a few times a week affects a person’s emotions and impairs their judgment, how can a person use “medical” marijuana at all without suffering cognitively?

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Study Finds Cannabis Impairs Fetal Brain Development

Marijuana

A new study conducted by a group of international researchers has found cannabis use during pregnancy endangers development of the unborn child’s brain.

According to the Karolinska Institute in Sweden–one of the medical schools involved in the study–the study shows “consuming cannabis during pregnancy clearly results in defective development of nerve cells of the [fetus’] cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that orchestrates higher cognitive functions and drives memory formation.”

Researchers indicated the effects would be long-lasting–possibly lifelong–and may not materialize until well after the child is born.

Researchers also noted that as marijuana plants are increasingly cultivated to contain greater levels of THC, the risk posed to unborn children rises as well.

“During the past decades, selective agriculture of Cannabis spp. resulted in increased THC content at the expense of cannabidiol (Pitts et al, 1992; Pijlman et al, 2005). In the context of the present study, this is of particular concern since we predict that higher THC concentrations will be, upon efficient cross‐placental transfer (Grotenhermen, 2003), increasingly detrimental for fetal development and postnatal health. Therefore, irrespective of the legal status of cannabis, caution must be exercised to hinder fetal cannabis exposure due to its unequivical impact on the establishment of synaptic connectivity in neuronal networks underpinning memory encoding, cognition and executive skills.”

This just goes to show, yet again, that marijuana may be a lot of things, but “harmless” simply is not one of them.

Click here to read the study.

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