Boilermaker said:
Thank goodness we have google these days and we aren't easily fooled by so-called experts. Being a resident doesn't automatically make you an authority on the subject, and you are clearly, factually wrong:
Actually, I'm not wrong about a single thing that I said. Apparently you lack basic reading comprehension. Even the links you provided were wrong.
Really? Allaboutcounselling? That's a veritable New England Journal of Medicine right there!
But even so, your own source states:
Marijuana overdose is not thought to cause serious symptoms that can result in the death of the user, and in fatal cases, death is usually due to other drugs or a medical condition of the patient. In fact, the few cases in which marijuana overdose was named as the primary cause of death are highly contested and controversial. This is mostly due to the nature and potency of marijuana. At levels where death due to an overdose of THC (the primary active chemical in marijuana) is thought to be possible, a user would have to take enormous amounts of the drug, far past what is taken for recreational purposes.
In other words, what this article defines as an "overdose" is not a life threatening condition. It will not cause cardiac arrest, it will not suppress respiratory drive, it will not cause loss of consciousness.
Hallucinations, paranoia, vomiting and nausea can be bad things...but that's not what one classically calls an overdose a la alcohol or cocaine OD, which can cause death. Perhaps, I should have said "lethal overdose" but still, if that's the best you can come up with, that's pretty weak sauce.
Red Bull, coffee and even Coca Cola can cause those same symptoms!
The Merck Index lists the LD50 for cannabis in rats at 42 mg/kg. And the only way they could get the rat to inhale that much was by forcing it to inhale long after it had passed out. In other words you have to be really trying hard to kill yourself with pot.
Did you bother to read any of those articles? None of those articles contradicted any of my claims. They said marijuana can have some negative health effects...especially if smoked. That's not news to anybody. I never claimed that marijuana does absolutely no harm. In fact there are very few things in that don't.
That still doesn't change the fact that marijuana can be used in moderation just like alcohol and cheeseburgers can.
Results: As joints smoked per week increased, performance decreased on tests measuring memory, executive functioning, psychomotor speed, and manual dexterity. When dividing the group into light, middle, and heavy user groups, the heavy group performed significantly below the light group on 5 of 35 measures and the size of the effect ranged from 3.00 to 4.20 SD units. Duration of use had little effect on neurocognitive performance.
Conclusions: Very heavy use of marijuana is associated with persistent decrements in neurocognitive performance even after 28 days of abstinence. It is unclear if these decrements will resolve with continued abstinence or become progressively worse with continued heavy marijuana use.
A couple of problems with this article right off the bat:
1) Selection bias- this was not a randomized controlled study. They selected people who had similar 4th grade test scores and then divided them into users and non-users. There could be a great many confounding variables which the study cannot control for.
2) Correlation does not prove causation- even a high school statistics student knows this. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that a person who has the time to smoke a lot of pot (as opposed to working, going to school, hitting the gym etc.) is going to do worse than someone who doesn't!
Even the article states that there is only an
association. Being black is associated with higher rates of incarceration, poverty and lower levels of education. There aren't too many people who would argue that "blackness" caused these things!
Current users experienced significant increases in anxiety, irritability, physical tension, and physical symptoms and decreases in mood and appetite during marijuana withdrawal. These symptoms were most pronounced during the initial 10 days of abstinence, but some were present for the entire 28-day withdrawal period. These findings support the notion of a marijuana withdrawal syndrome in humans.
It's rather ironic: you start out by saying one shouldn't blindly follow authority (which is correct) and then you go on to cite a bunch of flawed studies. Did you read the details of this study? It was based on questionnaires. In other words it produced ZERO physiological evidence. Essentially what it says is that people who used to smoke a lot of pot but have now withdrawn from it feel crappy. The same could be said for people who stopped gambling or went on a healthy diet after eating tons of junk food.
Even if these are truly "withdrawal symptoms" they are rather mild, don't you think? Alcohol withdrawal causes seizures and hallucinations and can very often lead to death. Even caffeine withdrawal produces significant headaches.
So what we've established here is that pot withdrawal is even less severe than when people stop drinking coffee. Great point there bud.
The “amotivational syndrome” which has been associated with marijuana use has not been examined systematically in relation to marijuana use and mental health [...]
These data suggest that amotivational symptoms observed in heavy marijuana users in treatment are due to depression.
Sciencedirect? This is your idea of a good source? I'll give you a better source on the matter....how about the World Health Organization?
"The evidence for an "amotivational syndrome" among adults consists largely of case histories and observational reports (e.g. Kolansky and Moore, 1971; Millman and Sbriglio, 1986). The small number of controlled field and laboratory studies have not found compelling evidence for such a syndrome (Dornbush, 1974; Negrete, 1983; Hollister, 1986)... (I)t is doubtful that cannabis use produces a well defined amotivational syndrome. It may be more parsimonious to regard the symptoms of impaired motivation as symptoms of chronic cannabis intoxication rather than inventing a new psychiatric syndrome."
Hall et al. conclude that around one in ten people who ever try cannabis will become dependent at some point.[49] For those who use cannabis several times the chance is increased from one in five to one in three and daily users are considered at the greatest risk of dependence with about a one in two chance
Well if Hall et. al. say it, then it must be true!!
Also, I never said that it's not possible to become dependent on pot. One can become
psychosomatically dependent on sex, on their relationship partner, on junk food etc. and any number of other things. What I said is that it's impossible to get CHEMICALLY addicted to pot. You've produced no evidence to the contrary.
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In conclusion, I'm not claiming that pot has absolutely no negative effects. Obviously inhaling smoke is bad for you (although pot can be vaporized or eaten). And I'm sure it has negative health effects if consumed in massive quantities.
Anything taken in excess can cause problems....even water. The bottom line is that pot is a far less harmful than a lot of other widely used substances.