>> ^Doc_M:
OK, I will grant that some psychedelics have a tendency to "open minds" but the fact is that they biologically work by damaging the brain's cognitive functions. They take one the single most amazing machine in the known universe and put holes in it like swiss cheese. This is not a good thing, but no one can deny that those holes have a way of letting unique thoughts in. I've experienced it and I'll admit it.
>> ^EndAll:
"Drugs have their advantages, but understanding reality is not one of them."
I didn't watch the video but I wanted to respond to this ^
I actually think certain drugs are very instrumental in helping to understand the true nature of reality. Many, many people have had mind opening experiences on certain psychedelic drugs that have changed their lives completely. I think some drugs can take us beyond the five-sense reality into what lies behind it. Reality is subjective. My reality is mine, yours is yours - what's true for me might not be true for you. But I have found certain drugs to make me much more in tune to what's going on around me; my reality.


The cool thing about psychedelics, Doc_M is they don't require a lot of use to get what you need out of them. Furthermore, I'd like to see some documentation backing up the claim of natural psychedelics' damaging effects on the human brain. That's mushrooms, Ibogaine, salvia, opium, peyote, marijuana, hell throw in LSD for good measure. And I'm not talking short term, I'm talking permanent damage to the brain's cognitive functions.

OK, I will grant that some psychedelics have a tendency to "open minds" but the fact is that they biologically work by damaging the brain's cognitive functions. They take one the single most amazing machine in the known universe and put holes in it like swiss cheese. This is not a good thing, but no one can deny that those holes have a way of letting unique thoughts in. I've experienced it and I'll admit it.

>> ^EndAll:
"Drugs have their advantages, but understanding reality is not one of them."
I didn't watch the video but I wanted to respond to this ^
I actually think certain drugs are very instrumental in helping to understand the true nature of reality. Many, many people have had mind opening experiences on certain psychedelic drugs that have changed their lives completely. I think some drugs can take us beyond the five-sense reality into what lies behind it. Reality is subjective. My reality is mine, yours is yours - what's true for me might not be true for you. But I have found certain drugs to make me much more in tune to what's going on around me; my reality.

It's as pointless to smoke weed as it is to argue with you intellectual giants.

I hate to have to repeat myself but one study I cited above found that:

While the long term and heavy use of cannabis is not linked to the severe or grossly debilitating cerebral effects associated with chronic heavy alcohol abuse, it has been LINKED to more subtle IMPAIRMENT associated with MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION.


Long term use does not mean that the effects wear off in 2 hours or 24 hours. These are LONG TERM effects of using the drug. Maybe if you didn't personally suffer any long term side effects you'd have a level of reading comprehension that allowed you to catch that the first time around.


Why do pot heads always bring up alcohol when a marijuana debate arises? The fact that weed is less dangerous than alcohol is not a good arguement. Jumping off a small bridge is less dangerous than jumping off a large one, but neither is a good idea.

I don't think people should drink, but we tried making it illegal and it didn't work. I don't drink and I don't smoke weed - that doesn't mean I didn't when I was a kid. I've concluded through personal experience that marijuana is just a selfish waste of time, resourses, and energy and the use of it should be discouraged and looked down upon by society.

What are the merits of smoking marijuana?
How does it benefit individuals?
How does it effect families?
How does it benifit society?
Are users more productive because of it?
Are there harmful physical side effects?
Are there harmful emotional or mental side effects?
Would marijuana use increase if it were legalized?
Does use of marijuana effect one's judgement?


@pho3n1x: Different tests performed during autopsies can produce conclusive evidence whether the subject was high at the time of death or has simply used marijuana in the recent past.

how many list alcohol as primary cause of death? Yeah, people O.D. on cocaine, too. What's your point? See above.

Just like pipp3355, I see that there are some major problems with this "experiment."

The subject even admitted that he had a more difficult time and he had to make an effort to concentrate harder.
The host admitted that the study was in NO WAY scientific or empirical.

Even though there wasn't much of any science in the video, you can find some science below:

According to the FDA, 249 medical marijuana patients were killed between 1/1/97 - 6/30/05. Marijuana, cannibis, and other Cannabinoids are listed as the secondary cause of death. It is unclear in the study how many people were prescribed marijuana between those dates.

From Wikipedia: "...a recent study by the Canadian government found cannabis contained more toxic substances than tobacco smoke. It contained 20 times more ammonia, (a carcinogen), five times more hydrogen cyanide (which can cause heart disease) and nitrous oxides, (which can cause lung damage) than tobacco smoke.

Cannabis use has been linked to exacerbating the effects of psychosis, schizophrenia, bronchitis, and emphysema by several peer-reviewed studies for those who are vulnerable to such illnesses based on personal or family history.

In July 2007, British medical journal The Lancet published a study that indicates that cannabis users have, on average, a 41% greater risk of developing psychosis than non-users. The risk was most pronounced in cases with an existing risk of psychotic disorder, and was said to grow up to 200% for the most-frequent users.

While the long term and heavy use of cannabis is not linked to the severe or grossly debilitating cerebral effects associated with chronic heavy alcohol abuse, it has been LINKED to more subtle IMPAIRMENT associated with MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION.

These mental impairments are likely the cause of the delusions that many marijuana users have about themselves while high. It's baffling that they can think for a minute that they have greater cognative abilities and sharper reflexes while under the influence of a drug that causes depressant and hallucinogenic side effects. The fact that cannibus use lowers blood pressure, impairs psychomotor coordination, hinders one's ability to concentrate, and negatively effects short-term memory is not up for debate. These things have been proven time and time again.


If it doesn't kill you, it will most certainly make you as dumb as a bag of nails.

My favourite:

You should contact me if you are a skinny woman. If your words are a meaningful progression of concepts rather than a series of vocalizations induced by your spinal cord for the purpose of complementing my tone of voice. If you’ve seen the meatbot, the walking automaton, the pod-people, the dense, glazy-eyed substrate through which living organisms such as myself must escape to reach air and sunlight. If you’ve realized that if speech is to be regarded as a cognitive function, technically they aren’t speaking, and you don’t have to listen.

Agreed on it needs to be legalized at least off of schedule 1 so we can regulate rather than pretend we can make it go away like we do now. Can't even do many types of research now since we can't "distribute" so can't do controlled studies.

On your second point, Snap right back at ya In "MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION" as you put it there's a small catch involved. Similar to the way the risk of psychotic disorders is badly overstated (almost nothing to a hair over almost nothing) this is overstated and badly as well. The effects are mostly WHILE intoxicated, for casual use that doesn't extend much if at all past that. You wouldn't know that from the scare stories though. I'll offer you some sources for further research if you'd care to follow up on it and a decent source for a bunch more.

"The results of our meta-analytic study failed to reveal a substantial, systematic effect of long-term, regular cannabis consumption on the neurocognitive functioning of users who were not acutely intoxicated. For six of the eight neurocognitive ability areas that were surveyed. the confidence intervals for the average effect sizes across studies overlapped zero in each instance, indicating that the effect size could not be distinguished from zero. The two exceptions were in the domains of learning and forgetting."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, p. 686.

"In conclusion, our meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to address the question of longer term neurocognitive disturbance in moderate and heavy cannabis users has failed to demonstrate a substantial, systematic, and detrimental effect of cannabis use on neuropsychological performance. It was surprising to find such few and small effects given that most of the potential biases inherent in our analyses actually increased the likelihood of finding a cannabis effect."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, p. 687.

"Nevertheless, when considering all 15 studies (i.e., those that met both strict and more relaxed criteria) we only noted that regular cannabis users performed worse on memory tests, but that the magnitude of the effect was very small. The small magnitude of effect sizes from observations of chronic users of cannabis suggests that cannabis compounds, if found to have therapeutic value, should have a good margin of safety from a neurocognitive standpoint under the more limited conditions of exposure that would likely obtain in a medical setting."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, pp. 687-8.

A Johns Hopkins study published in May 1999, examined marijuana's effects on cognition on 1,318 participants over a 15 year period. Researchers reported "no significant differences in cognitive decline between heavy users, light users, and nonusers of cannabis." They also found "no male-female differences in cognitive decline in relation to cannabis use." "These results ... seem to provide strong evidence of the absence of a long-term residual effect of cannabis use on cognition," they concluded.

Source: Constantine G. Lyketsos, Elizabeth Garrett, Kung-Yee Liang, and James C. Anthony. (1999). "Cannabis Use and Cognitive Decline in Persons under 65 Years of Age," American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 149, No. 9.

"Current marijuana use had a negative effect on global IQ score only in subjects who smoked 5 or more joints per week. A negative effect was not observed among subjects who had previously been heavy users but were no longer using the substance. We conclude that marijuana does not have a long-term negative impact on global intelligence. Whether the absence of a residual marijuana effect would also be evident in more specific cognitive domains such as memory and attention remains to be ascertained."

Source: Fried, Peter, Barbara Watkinson, Deborah James, and Robert Gray, "Current and former marijuana use: preliminary findings of a longitudinal study of effects on IQ in young adults," Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2, 2002, 166(7), p. 887.

# "Although the heavy current users experienced a decrease in IQ score, their scores were still above average at the young adult assessment (mean 105.1). If we had not assessed preteen IQ, these subjects would have appeared to be functioning normally. Only with knowledge of the change in IQ score does the negative impact of current heavy use become apparent."

Source: Fried, Peter, Barbara Watkinson, Deborah James, and Robert Gray, "Current and former marijuana use: preliminary findings of a longitudinal study of effects on IQ in young adults," Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2, 2002, 166(7), p. 890.

Source for those and more, lots of sourced detail which includes perspective rather than tossing bold claims out without that perspective, can be found at the following. Yes, it includes both the good and the bad and the root site for that page covers medical marijuana and other drugs as well.http://www.drugwarfacts.org/marijuan.htm

The problem in part is that people use pot (and other drugs) sometimes to hide from life or to make themselves feel better about their failures and we try to assume the pot caused the problem rather than the problem caused them to find a way to make themselves feel better, in this case with pot. Association doesn't automatically mean cause and effect. It's not brain food, but it's not all that dangerous in casual use either. Even with heavy use function tends to drift back to the baseline with time, you just have to quit abusing. Better to look for the reasons for abuse than to blame the substance which isn't all that dangerous or toxic in itself.

I agree that more accurate studies could be done. Catch 22; Marijuana must be legalized in order to conduct more accurate studies on the effects it has on the brain and on society as a whole. There is still the fact that marijuana use "...has been LINKED to ...subtle IMPAIRMENT associated with MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION." This is not, however, my argument for why it should remain illegal (It's my argument for why marijuana users should not be allowed to debate the issue).

OH, SNAP!

>> ^deedub81:
According to the FDA, 249 medical marijuana patients were killed between 1/1/97 - 6/30/05. Marijuana, cannibis, and other Cannabinoids are listed as the secondary cause of death. It is unclear in the study how many people were prescribed marijuana between those dates.

If it doesn't kill you, it will most certainly make you as dumb as a bag of nails.
From Wikipedia: "...a recent study by the Canadian government found cannabis contained more toxic substances than tobacco smoke. It contained 20 times more ammonia, (a carcinogen), five times more hydrogen cyanide (which can cause heart disease) and nitrous oxides, (which can cause lung damage) than tobacco smoke.
Cannabis use has been linked to exacerbating the effects of psychosis, schizophrenia, bronchitis, and emphysema by several peer-reviewed studies for those who are vulnerable to such illnesses based on personal or family history.
n July 2007, British medical journal The Lancet published a study that indicates that cannabis users have, on average, a 41% greater risk of developing psychosis than non-users. The risk was most pronounced in cases with an existing risk of psychotic disorder, and was said to grow up to 200% for the most-frequent users.
While the long term and heavy use of cannabis is not linked to the severe or grossly debilitating cerebral effects associated with chronic heavy alcohol abuse, it has been LINKED to more subtle IMPAIRMENT associated with MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION.


party pooper.

According to the FDA, 249 medical marijuana patients were killed between 1/1/97 - 6/30/05. Marijuana, cannibis, and other Cannabinoids are listed as the secondary cause of death. It is unclear in the study how many people were prescribed marijuana between those dates.


If it doesn't kill you, it will most certainly make you as dumb as a bag of nails.

From Wikipedia: "...a recent study by the Canadian government found cannabis contained more toxic substances than tobacco smoke. It contained 20 times more ammonia, (a carcinogen), five times more hydrogen cyanide (which can cause heart disease) and nitrous oxides, (which can cause lung damage) than tobacco smoke.

Cannabis use has been linked to exacerbating the effects of psychosis, schizophrenia, bronchitis, and emphysema by several peer-reviewed studies for those who are vulnerable to such illnesses based on personal or family history.

n July 2007, British medical journal The Lancet published a study that indicates that cannabis users have, on average, a 41% greater risk of developing psychosis than non-users. The risk was most pronounced in cases with an existing risk of psychotic disorder, and was said to grow up to 200% for the most-frequent users.

While the long term and heavy use of cannabis is not linked to the severe or grossly debilitating cerebral effects associated with chronic heavy alcohol abuse, it has been LINKED to more subtle IMPAIRMENT associated with MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION.

Did I mention I hate PowerPoint? I think it actually has a negative impact on peoples cognitive function. I know of some people who think in slides and bullets.