As pot activists action for abounding legalization, the biologic warriors who altercate them accept continued approved their own ambiguous grail: conclusive, accurate affidavit that marijuana poses cogent bloom risks. The alone problem? An determined assurance on awry studies. "Much of what we accept in this association about drugs is just bullshit," says Columbia University assistant Carl Hart. "And we as scientists accept been complicit." Luckily, there's a new bearing of advisers blame aback adjoin these around-the-clock prohibitionist canards.
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MYTH: Pot charcoal the boyish brainThis drug-warrior talking point has acquired such absorption afresh that even admirable liberals like New York Times columnist Bill Keller abound it as a apparent truth. The alone base for this are base letters like a contempo all-embracing abstraction purporting to hotlink boyish marijuana use with abiding IQ decline. "Do the authors accept that cannabis is the alone affair that could affect your IQ amid the ages of 13 and 38?" asks Norwegian economist Ole Røgeberg. "That puzzled me."
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MYTH: Pot can accomplish you schizophrenic or depressedOther studies accept approved to architect even bigger scares, claiming to authenticate a affiliation amid smoker pot as a boyhood and austere brainy illnesses like abasement or schizophrenia after on. "Give me a break," says Hart. "You attending at these studies and see how they actuate psychosis – it's a joke." The aforementioned old analytic fallacies appearance up here, too. "Which came first?" asks Suzi Gage, a Ph.D. apprentice at the University of Bristol. "Did the cannabis use announce the mental-health problems, or is it that humans who are certifiable use cannabis to self-medicate?"
MYTH: Pot destroys your memoryHart's analysis in fact suggests the opposite: Temporary concise anamnesis accident was affliction a part of amateur smokers, but approved stoners showed no austere abatement in cerebral function. "Just like any added drug, if you let altruism develop, you abatement a lot of the abrogating effects," he says.
MYTH: Pot is a aperture to harder drugsAnti-drug zealots wish you to anticipate that if your honors-student babe takes a brace of hits off a collective over bounce break, she'll apparently be anesthetized out in an alleyway with a aggravate afraid out of her arm by Labor Day. "Most humans who try it don't even abide smoker marijuana," says Hart. "You ability as able-bodied altercate that pot is a aperture biologic to get in the White House."
MYTH: Pot is alarming even in moderationColumbia University assistant Meg Haney has been belief marijuana addiction back the Nineties, absorption on the almost baby atom of smokers who do become dependent. The acceptable account for anybody else: "If somebody is smoker one or two joints a week," says Haney, "the after-effects are apparently traveling to be very, very, actual minimal."
MYTH: Pot has no medical benefits
Dismissing the actual abstraction of marijuana as anesthetic is key to the prohibitionist agenda. Leaving abreast years of anecdotal and analytic abutment for pot's capability in abating abiding pain, nausea, glaucoma and more, there is beginning affirmation that the alive compounds in marijuana can in fact annihilate blight cells. Guillermo Velasco, a assistant at Madrid's Complutense University, has begin that THC has a able tumor-shrinking aftereffect in rodents with breast, liver, pancreatic and academician cancers. Next, he hopes to analysis the antecedent on people. "I anticipate we'll see analytic trials in the next 5 years," says Velasco. "Cannabinoids aswell alleviate the ancillary furnishings of chemotherapy, so they could accomplish patients feel bigger in general."
This adventure is from the June 20th, 2013 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 1185: June 20, 2013
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