Isn’t the cannabis today generally a lot higher in THC content than back in the day?
But yeah, there’s been so much clumsy lying anti-cannabis propaganda that nowadays, a lot of people will reflexively deny even the possibility it might actually have bad effects.
I suspect that stress does - there are already studies about stress related changes in DNA methylation.
We will likely see an increase in health warnings about Cannabis and Nicotine as it affects youth health. Big Tobacco’s market is threatened by weed and vaping which will further marginalize their US market. In the UK, doctors encourage smokers to switch to vaping as far healthier than tobacco. Granted, animal research shows nicotine damages rat brains. Of course, none of those studies factor in that human teen brains are relatively way bigger and grow way slower - thus humans metabolize nicotine efficiently. Case in point - all my grad school classmates smoked as teens - we all got doctorates. No credible research into retarding human teen brain development exists.
Cannabis, as we know, is foremost a sin in many sects; a sacrament in others. Cannabis not only threatens Big Tobacco - it threatens Big Beer and Big Liquor. Thus Wall Street is encouraging Trump’s appointed public health officials to go on the warpath - ban flavoring nicotine for eCigarettes, scaring people not to use pot, etc.
I have been involved in addiction research since the late '70s. I stopped smoking when the SG showed it reduces longevity. I saw pot smoking as a career limiter (it often is) so I stopped while in college. If my kids were vaping or smoking pot, I would prefer that to tobacco and alcohol. Both influence health negatively. Both are 10 times safer than tobacco and booze when used wisely and in moderation.
About the only safe unsafe conclusion about the effect of pot on health (sperm count awaiting better science) is that use while driving or working - anything requiring a clear head - degrades attention and reflexes just like alcohol.
Yeah, like that. I can’t quite recall, but I think also that high-intensity exercise has a beneficial effect on methylation in muscle cells. And just in general, from podcasts and articles, my impression is that this area is subject to changes due to environment over short time frames.
That is where all the mutants are coming from.
The idea that people will stop drinking beer or booze because they can legally smoke weed does not seem well founded to me. It seems much more plausible to me that they will both smoke and drink.
Superhero themed porn movie where the hero has smoked so much weed that when he ejaculates in the faces of evil big breasted supervillains they get stoned and giggly.
My favourite part:
“We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute”
Ironically weed makes me really horny.
chokes
Seriously, have you seen the names getting into the legal cannabis market?
Not the quasi-legal markets in the States where the local cops won’t look at you twice, but you have to claim the Fifth on your IRS returns and the feds will happily seize everything you own, but a fully legal market like, say, Canada?
I guarantee it’s big alcohol and big tobacco. They are not giving up. They are cheering it on. Dig into the corporate ownership around vaping deep enough and you will find the same thing.
The problem in the States is you have so many conflicting laws jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that it’ll take a long time to make those markets viable. Something you can only sell in six states isn’t worth working around all the other restrictions. Widespread legal adoption? They’d be all over that, and with distribution networks already designed for age-restrictive products, would have most of the market cornered in less than a decade.
Well, to be fair, we now know that one of them wasn’t.
Yep. For all its statistical deficiency, anecdotal data is still data. (-:
By “threaten,” I think you mean “throws a lifeline to”
“… this marks what could be the beginning of Big Tobacco’s entrance into the marijuana industry. Cigarette sales for many of the industry’s giants have been down, and tobacco alternatives simply haven’t provided enough of an impact to offset that cigarette volume decline.”
And taking this in a different annoying direction:
Why the hell are they fucking around with rats, if they’re going to examine the sperm of humans?
If the rats showed no effect, but the humans did, would anyone say, “Gee, I don’t know. The rats are fine. So all is well”?
If the rats showed an effect, but the humans did not, would anyone say, “This is scary stuff! We should try this on… I guess… frogs next”?
Christ.
With humans in this situation, you rely on self-reporting (which is… unreliable) to give you a statistically correlation (that might be due to something else in the lifestyle of pot smokers), but with rats, you actually control what the rats are being exposed to. It’s not like the same experiments are being done on both & the same data being collected…
Study: THC in cannabis linked to
genetic mutationschanges in DNA expression in sperm
FTFY.
“Changes in DNA expression” is how the genome reacts to changes in the environment.
Happens all the time, as the result of many of different sorts of chemical and environmental stimuli.
So far, the changes observed have not been demonstrated to cause any harm.
(Really, though, if you don’t understand the difference between “changes in methylation, altering gene expression” and “genetic mutation”, you should probably avoid further attempts to explain Skerry-Sounding Science to the rubes, since you don’t understand it, either.)
(…and if you did know the difference, but wrote that bullshit-clickbait headline and article anyway, you should quit writing anything at all, since you’re irresponsibly polluting the infosphere for corporate profit.)
(But you wouldn’t do that, right?)
Welcome to BoingBoing!
How to beat the slow season of people spending time with family and friends: “Smoking Cannabis will make You listening to Jazz and give your children thinner fingers to type better on smart phones”.
Well, here’s a primer on the chicken and the egg story.
First there was Australopithecus. Then, this one discovered Cannabis Sativa (highly likely deposited by the responsible evolution-crew) and smoked it for a very long time - thus evolving into Homo Sapiens. And since Homo came about a fraction of a second before midnight, he now proclaims to know everything and what is not known, yet, will be known soon. Homo will make sure that it now finds reasons why it shouldn’t even be here by its own ‘standards’.
Kind of awkward to read something like this - alleging any negative impact of the plant the two legged menace has been smoking since its inception. If Cannabis is ‘bad’ - so is humanity as a whole. Because Cannabis was there before the easily overwhelmed brain of Homo Sapiens developed docking stations for the THC the plant contains, in order to calm down. Prohibition of Cannabis equals making a living with killing.
But who cares about the long term benefits of Cannabis, if money can be made to demonize it? If anything, Cannabis is free contraception done by men to take the burden of birth control off of women. The first birth control method for men that lets you enjoy all its lovely side effects. Who knew that not wanting to have kids could be so entertaining?
