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Post by KTJ on Feb 9, 2016 20:26:15 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....What happens when you get stoned every single day for five yearsBy CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM | Monday, February 01, 2016This is probably too much marijuana for one person. — Photograph: Seth Perlman/Associated Press.NEW RESEARCH published today in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine confirms what many of us have suspected for some time: If you smoke a lot of weed — like a lot of it — it can potentially do permanent damage to your short-term memory.
Professor Reto Auer of the University of Lausanne led a team of researchers who examined data on the marijuana habits of nearly 3,400 Americans over a 25-year period. At the end of the study period, the subjects took a battery of tests designed to assess cognitive abilities — memory, focus, ability to make quick decisions, etc.
The study found that people who smoked marijuana on a daily basis for a long period of time — five years or more — had poorer verbal memory in middle age than people who didn't smoke, or who smoked less. This association remained even after researchers controlled for a variety of other factors known to affect cognitive performance, including age, education, use of other substances and depression.
Auer and his team measured lifetime marijuana exposure in a fantastic new unit of measurement they call “marijuana-years”. Essentially, if you smoke pot every day for a year, that equals one marijuana-year of use. Ditto if you smoke every other day for two years, or once a week for seven years.
The relationship between marijuana exposure and memory problems was essentially linear. The more pot people smoked, the worse they performed on the memory tests. But just how much worse?
Let's say we have two groups of 10 people each. You tell each of them a list of 15 words and ask them to memorize them. Then 25 minutes later, you ask them to recall all of the words to the best of their ability.
The first group consists of 10 people who don't smoke pot or only do so occasionally. Let's say on average, people in this group would be able to remember nine out of the 15 words.
The second group consists of people who smoked pot every single day over a period of five years. On average, they'd be able to recall 8.5 out of the 15 words.
That doesn't seem like a huge cognitive difference, and by and large it's not. But multiply that by every five marijuana years of exposure and the gap can start to get larger. For instance, say you had a group of people who smoked weed literally every single day from age 20 until they turned 45. At age 45, you'd expect these folks to remember, on average, 2.5 fewer words as a comparable group who had smoked occasionally or not at all over the same period.
Few people actually smoke this much pot. Among the 3,385 study subjects, only 311 (8 percent) had more than five marijuana-years of exposure. But many drug policy experts are concerned that legalizing marijuana and making it easier to get will cause rates of heavy, problematic use like this to rise.
One important caveat is that a study like this can't determine causality. It could be the case that heavy pot use makes your short-term memory bad, or it could be that people who operate at a lower level of cognitive function are more inclined to use marijuana heavily.
It's also worth noting that the other cognitive abilities researchers tested — focus and processing speed — did not seem to be significantly impacted by heavy marijuana use.
The association between short-term memory declines — potentially permanent ones — and heavy pot use is very real, according to this study, and shouldn't be discounted. On the other hand, it's also quite surprising that you can smoke weed every single day for five years, and not have it impact your problem-solving abilities or your ability to focus at all.
These findings also need to be understood in relation to what we know about the severe cognitive effects of persistent, heavy alcohol use, which include irreversible brain damage.
Overall, the take-home message is one of moderation. Whether your preferred vice is pot or alcohol or gambling or Big Macs, it stands to reason that if you overdo it, you're going to hurt yourself.• Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data for The Washington Post[i/]. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.__________________________________________________________________________ More on this topic:
• PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: An insider’s look at pot farming around the world
• Scientists have found that smoking weed does not make you stupid after all
• The case for marijuana legalization just got stronger
• The government is stifling medical marijuana research, major think tank declares
• Why Bernie Sanders’ marijuana proposal would be a big deal
• Marijuana is literally the least of the nation's drug worries, the police have announcedwww.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/01/what-happens-when-you-get-stoned-every-single-day-for-five-years
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Post by KTJ on May 10, 2016 18:13:52 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Unlike alcohol, it's tough to set DUI limits for marijuanaBy ASHLEY HALSEY III | 12:01AM EDT - Tuesday, May 10, 2016Marijuana plants. — Photograph: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images.THERE is a legal limit for drunk driving, but when it comes to marijuana, new research shows it may be impossible to say just how high is too high to drive.
There's no breathalyzer for pot, and researchers say blood tests are useless when it comes to telling whether someone who has been smoking is fit to drive.
The question matters now that four states have made it legal for any adult to smoke marijuana, and more than 20 others have approved its use for medical reasons. In Washington, one of the first states to approve recreational marijuana use, a study released this week found that 17 percent of drivers involved in fatal crashes two years after marijuana was legalized had THC, the component that creates the high, in their system.
At least 20 states have approved laws on marijuana use by drivers. A dozen of them have made any use of the drug by those behind the wheel illegal; six others have set a legal limit similar to the .08 alcohol level, with any driver testing above it subject to a DUI conviction.
A report by researchers at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety said there is no threshold that indicates when a marijuana smoker may be too impaired to drive.
“There is no reliable number that has any meaningful value in terms of predicting impairment,” said Jake Nelson, AAA's director of traffic safety and advocacy.
The AAA Foundation recommends doing away with setting legal limits for THC. Instead, it says each police department should put a cadre of officers through 72 hours of training, followed by field testing, to be certified as drug recognition experts (DRE).
If an officer suspected marijuana use, a DRE could be called in to conduct an hour-long series of tests, and if they provide confirmation, a blood test would follow.
“It shifts the burden of evidence from the prosecution to the defense,” Nelson said. “If you can prove that you weren't [using pot], you can avoid conviction, but if you can't beat this case, then you're going to jail.”
Nelson says that since there is no threshold, some people who are not fit to drive will get off the hook if they are stopped or involved in a crash.
“People who are driving impaired are still going to crash,” he said. But “if you have a blood concentration of THC below whatever stated threshold it is in your state, essentially the courts will presume sobriety. The odds of getting convicted of impaired driving, even if you're all over the road, are slim to none because of that number. And because we know from the research that the number is meaningless, that there's no research that supports any stated threshold, so to have those laws on the books is bad news.”
The second report released by the AAA Foundation this week examines the effect of marijuana use in Washington state, where recreational use has been legal for more than three years.
The numbers in Washington are made soft by a number of variables. For example, drivers who died within two hours of a fatal crash were likely to be tested for drugs and alcohol, those who died later were less likely to be tested, and those who survived were unlikely to be tested. What's more, many drivers who tested positive for THC also had alcohol in their system, considered a more potent mix than simply using one of the two intoxicants.
Still, the report found that in 2013, 8 percent of drivers in fatal crashes tested positive for marijuana use. In 2014, the number more than doubled to 17 percent.
“Of all the fatal crashes in the state, the proportion that involved a driver that had recently consumed marijuana more than doubled in one year,” Nelson said. “That doesn't say that people who had smoked marijuana and got behind the wheel were responsible for an increase in fatal crashes. It means that recent marijuana use is a growing contributing factor in traffic crashes that kill people.”• Ashley Halsey reports for The Washington Post on national and local transportation.__________________________________________________________________________ Read more on this topic:
• Support for marijuana legalization has hit an all-time high
• What today's Supreme Court decision means for the future of legal weed
• Trump softens position on marijuana legalizationwww.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/unlike-alcohol-its-tough-to-set-dui-limits-for-marijuana/2016/05/09/6298ff60-15f7-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html
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Post by KTJ on May 20, 2016 13:23:01 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Artisanal marijuana crabcakes: Is this the future of getting high?By MAURA JUDKIS | 3:15PM EDT - Thursday, May 19, 2015Matt Doherty teaches a class on how to make butter with cannabis during the “Blazed and Glazed” event at Mess Hall on Sunday May 15th. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.AS Matt Doherty wrapped up his cooking demonstration, a woman in the audience raised her hand to ask a question: How long would the cannabis-infused butter he had shown them how to make keep in the fridge?
“I've never had it go bad,” replied Doherty, the manager of a Capitol Hill hydroponic supply store. He paused. “It doesn't last long in my house.”
The audience at the cannabis food festival “Blazed and Glazed” giggled a little too hard at the joke. Many of the onlookers had arrived at culinary incubator Mess Hall as baked as a tray of the green herb that Doherty had put in the oven.
But wait — it's not what you're thinking. Hosting a cannabis cooking class is tricky when D.C. law permits a person to possess only 2 ounces of marijuana, so Doherty used oregano instead. That herb is a good stand-in for the real thing in recipes for a tincture and a mossy green cannabutter, the building blocks of cannabis cooking — which has reached new highs as penalties for growing or possessing marijuana are eased across the country.
Forget the dorm-roombrownie. Instead, think cannabis-infused burritos, French macarons, salad dressings, duck breast or a cannabis-infused sous-vide (or “sous weed”, as chef Mathew Ramsey put it) burger. Today, serious chefs are tinkering with the science of getting high, taking it into more rarefied culinary territory.
To the extent permissible by law, of course.
First, some chemistry: Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the marijuana molecule that gives you that buzz. It's soluble in fats and alcohol, and cannabis cooks often infuse a slow-heated butter or oil with marijuana and then use it as a substitute in conventional recipes. The technique has been around for decades, but now chefs are experimenting with it more openly.
“This industry is in its infancy, it's fascinating,” said Raquel Pelzel, a former editor at Cook's Illustrated and the co-author of more than 20 cookbooks. Her next one, co-authored with Bob Marley's daughter Cedella, is a collection of Caribbean-inspired recipes for dishes such as quinoa and mango salad, with instructions for making cannabutter and cannabis oil infusions and adding them in the proper dosage. It will be released on April 20th — yes, 4/20, “Weed Day” — next year.Chocolate mousse with mint contained 25 mg of cannabis at one booth at Mess Hall's “Blazed and Glazed” event. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.Last month, Pelzel participated in the first-ever panel discussion on cannabis cooking at the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. “It's like the wild, wild West, and everyone's looking to stake their claim,” she said.
But to do so, they have to work within the laws of various jurisdictions — and each one treats edibles differently.
Warren Brown, who brought the cupcake craze to Washington with his bakery, CakeLove, is now a partner in DC Taste Buds, an edibles company. But he won't be the one actually putting marijuana in his jarred cakes when the effort launches later this year.
In the District, “there's no legal way for an organization like mine to put a finger on cannabis,” he said. The company is taking a conservative approach after consulting multiple D.C. agencies and finding the laws “pretty difficult to navigate,” said partner Victoria Harris. “The language is incredibly vague.”
Instead, they will make the products and partner with medicinal cultivation centers, which will incorporate the cannabis — how, exactly, is a “trade secret”, Brown said — and sell the cakes at dispensaries.
“We're just going to stay within the bounds of what we can do with the law, and if the law expands to allow us to bake on-site with cannabis, we'll bake that way,” he said.
Other chefs aren't so concerned. In New York, where medicinal marijuana is legal but recreational pot isn't, “Hawaii” Mike Salman and his wife host a private, invitation-only cannabis supper club, preparing free five-course meals for up to 30 guests at least once a month. Their first seating takes place at — naturally — 4:20.
Salman, a self-taught chef, uses THC-infused oils and butters in dishes you might see on a restaurant menu: sesame-crusted yellowfin tuna, sous-vide chicken breast, miso black cod, lamb chops with cauliflower puree. He says he may bring the dinners to Washington someday — he has already perfected a cannabis crabcake recipe.A cannabis plant at “Blazed and Glazed”. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.People watch a cooking demonstration during “Blazed and Glazed” at Mess Hall. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.But the tricky thing about cooking with cannabis is that it affects every diner differently. One person's stairway to heaven is another person's bad trip.
With edibles, “it takes a little bit longer to metabolize and digest. You don't feel the effects so soon,” said Kevin Sabet, president and chief executive of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a bipartisan organization that opposes legalization. Sabet considers edibles extra dangerous: “You could be eating a beautiful lemon chiffon, and you don't feel anything, and then half an hour later, you could be having a psychotic episode.”
“We want you to be responsible, and part of being responsible is knowing when you're good,” said Salman, who said he paces his meals to help guests achieve a pleasant high without going overboard.
Still, he acknowledged, “You can't control everybody.” Sometimes, people “go a little crazy, and they'll take something off someone else's plate. We walk through the experience with everyone in the beginning. We really try to provide an environment that is safe and comfortable.”
Cannabis restaurants are on the horizon, too, though so far, they still face plenty of obstacles. Garyn Angel is the chief executive of MagicalButter, a company that sells a $175 suite of kitchen tools to help home cooks make cannabutter. He tried to open a cannabis restaurant in Seattle two years ago, but no dice.
“It was a little ahead of its time,” he said.
Because Washington state's Initiative 502 doesn't permit public consumption, “you can't have marijuana in public view in any way,” said Brian Smith, spokesman for the state liquor and cannabis board.
Even if public consumption laws were changed, a state-by-state patchwork of testing requirements and regulations governing edibles — in Washington, a sample from every batch must be tested for potency — would still pose numerous hurdles for a cannabis restaurant. And then there's the fear of legal troubles should a guest have a bad reaction to a marijuana-infused dish.Chef Giovanni Merle teaches a class how to make cannabis-infused corn muffins. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.In the meantime, trained chefs who like working with cannabis have found work in grow labs. Dain Colandro, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, is now director of production at Connecticut's Advanced Grow Labs.
The more grow labs expand their product lines, “the more there's going to be a need for chefs or trained cooks,” Colandro said. Given the amount of food science that goes into cannabis cooking, “I think they should start to teach this kind of stuff in culinary school.”
Chemistry, of course, isn't the only important thing — chefs are interested in the flavors, too.
“Cannabis is a hard ingredient to work with,” Colandro said. “Because it’s so bitter, it could be a very aggressive or strong taste that you have to work around or try to mask.” He has found that it doesn't pair well with acidic fruits, such as lemons. There's also a harmony to be found in pairing certain strains with certain foods. The sativa strain produces a more vibrant buzz, so Pelzel, the cookbook author, says she thinks it goes well in breakfast foods, or a granola bar before a long hike. The mellower indica is better for desserts or an evening tea.
“Once all the stigma and the negativity surrounding it is put to bed, it will be interesting to see all the incredible ways that people dream up to use the plant,” she said.
Until then, aspiring marijuana foodies learn online, or in oregano-scented sessions such as Mess Hall's, which drew more than 200 attendees, from 20-somethings to elderly couples.Marijuana macarons by Giovanni Merle. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.After the demonstrations, people strolled around a marketplace where they could buy paraphernalia or, with the purchase of a T-shirt, choose a “gift” made by Giovanni Merle, a French-trained pastry chef whose chocolate mousses and macarons each contained a mellow amount of active ingredient.
“This opens the door to a lot of things,” said Melissa K., 36, who declined to give her last name. She said she usually just makes brownies, but now, “I was thinking about making some cinnamon toast, or being a little bit hipster and making avocado toast.”
But even as savory uses for cannabis enter the mainstream, junk food is still where the business is. Pot brownies will never lose their appeal. Even chef Mario Batali has posted his recipe for them. And at Colandro's Advanced Grow Labs, they're still the top seller.
The industry still has some growing up to do.
“I think that it’s like when you turn 21 and everyone goes out and does crazy shots and drinks silly drinks. And as you get older, you learn about Scotch and whiskey, and you start to refine and curate your palate and your collection,” Pelzel said. “I think the same thing will happen with cannabis. Everyone will be silly, and then they'll mature.”• Maura Judkis covers culture, food, and the arts for The Washington Post.www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/artisanal-marijuana-crabcakes-is-this-the-future-of-getting-high/2016/05/18/47189c60-1795-11e6-9e16-2e5a123aac62_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Jun 11, 2016 13:42:02 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Justin Trudeau may have made the best case for legal pot everBy CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM | 7:39AM EDT - Friday, June 10, 2016Justin Trudeau says legalizing marijuana is the best way to keep this baby from smoking marijuana. — Photograph: Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press/Associated Press.SPEAKING on Wednesday at an economic conference, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made one of the more buttoned-down, straight-edged arguments for marijuana legalization I've heard in recent years. It's worth quoting at length so I've done that below:
Look, our approach on legalizing marijuana is not about creating a boutique industry or bringing in tax revenue, it's based on two very simple principles…
The first one is, young people have easier access to cannabis now, in Canada, than they do in just about any other countries in the world. [Of] 29 different countries studied by the United Nations, Canada was number one in terms of underage access to marijuana. And whatever you might think or studies seen about cannabis being less harmful than alcohol or even cigarettes, the fact is it is bad for the developing brain and we need to make sure that it's harder for underage Canadians to access marijuana. And that will happen under a controlled and regulated regime.
The other piece of it is there are billions upon billions of dollars flowing into the pockets of organized crime, street gangs and gun-runners, because of the illicit marijuana trade, and if we can get that out of the criminal elements and into a more regulated fashion we will reduce the amount of criminal activity that's profiting from those, and that has offshoots into so many other criminal activities. So those are my focuses on that.
I have no doubt that Canadians and entrepreneurs will be tremendously innovative in finding ways to create positive economic benefits from the legalization and control of marijuana, but our focus is on protecting kids and protecting our streets.
Trudeau made these remarks in response to a conference participant who said that “Canada could be to cannabis as France is to wine.” These enthusiastic predictions about the burgeoning marijuana industry — billions of dollars in revenue and taxes, thousands of jobs created — should be familiar to anyone who's followed efforts to legalize pot here in the United States.
But Trudeau's argument for legalization is concerned less with creating benefits, and more with reducing harms. He starts from the same place that many legalization opponents start from — concern for the safety of children.
Opponents of legalization have always argued that relaxing marijuana laws will inevitably lead to increased use among teens and adolescents. This would obviously be a problem, because younger users are more at risk for marijuana dependency than adults, and heavy use among teens has been linked to a whole host of social and mental health problems.
But Trudeau points to an easy-to-overlook fact: It's already incredibly easy for teenagers to get high if they want to. In 2015, for instance, nearly 80 percent of U.S. 12th-graders said it would be easy for them to obtain marijuana. It's clear, in other words, that current policies centered on making the drug completely illegal are doing little to keep it out of the hands of kids who want to use it.
Trudeau argues that taking pot out of the black market and putting it under the aegis of a regulatory structure will actually make it harder for kids — those most susceptible to the drug's harms — to obtain it. We don't really know yet if that's the case. Legalization experiments in Colorado and elsewhere are still too young to draw sweeping conclusions about the effects of legalization on teen use and access.
That said, the early data is encouraging. A recent study published in Lancet Psychiatry found that the over the past decade or so — as 13 states passed medical-marijuana laws, 10 states relaxed penalties for marijuana use, and Colorado and Washington became the first states to fully legalize recreational pot use — not only have national teen marijuana use rates declined, but problems associated with teen marijuana use, like dependency, have fallen too.
Beyond that, the latest federal data shows no significant year-over-year change in marijuana use among teens in Colorado and Washington in the year after marijuana became legal there.
Experts say none of this is particularly surprising. “Most of the legal changes have pertained only to those 21 and over, so the absence of a big increase in teens is exactly what you'd expect,” Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University told me late last year.
In short, it may be the case that marijuana legalization will have a much smaller impact on teen use rates than once feared. This doesn't mean that legalization doesn't bring risks of its own, however. If marijuana is more widely available, more people will use it, and a certain percent of them will develop a dependency on the drug. And another subset of users will end up doing incredibly stupid or dangerous things while high.
But the question is weighing these very real risks of harm against the harms that are already occurring because of prohibition. Marijuana prohibition ruins lives — lives of the hundreds of thousands of people arrested for possessing the drug each year, or the lives of thousands of people put behind bars for years on account of simple marijuana possession, or the lives of people living in the communities wracked by violence when rival drug gangs fight over turf and put innocents in the crossfire.
Trudeau is saying that this current approach isn't working, and that people legitimately concerned over the harms of the drug trade should consider a radically different approach. So far, the evidence is backing him up.• Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data for The Washington Post. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/10/why-people-who-hate-marijuana-should-legalize-it-anyway-according-to-justin-trudeau
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Post by arribas26 on Sept 8, 2017 17:00:37 GMT 10
Smoking can be quite harmful for us. My uncle was a smoker and failed every time to get over it. So came to know about virginia opiate addiction treatment center and visited there with him. He started the treatment there and within few months got over it.
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Post by KTJ on Sept 8, 2017 18:29:20 GMT 10
Marijuana tea is probably the least harmful way to take it.
That and marijuana baking.
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Post by filipowi71 on Jul 27, 2018 18:21:36 GMT 10
No doubt marijuana is good thing if taken in limited quantities, however, problem is that most of people never understand it and for one reason or other, go over the limit. I have worked with a top Los Angeles DUI attorney and have seen so many horrifying incidents involving smoking pot.
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Post by Yassir Rebob on Jul 28, 2018 0:10:49 GMT 10
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