CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D.
ELIAS
“OFTEN-DESTRUCTIVE
POT NOW TREATED LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS”
California
voters legalized recreational marijuana via a ballot initiative in November
2016, almost six years ago. Since then, the weed has evolved into something
like a normal business, complete with webcasts on operating efficiently,
disputes about where stores can be located and gripes about underground
operators siphoning off too much of the take.
But
there’s little normal about pot itself. First made semi-legal by the 1996
Proposition 15, which allowed medical marijuana use with a doctor’s
“recommendation” (not a real prescription, since pharmacies never sold it),
medipot operated in a kind of gray legal area for 20 years, but was
nevertheless in common use.
But this
is no ordinary business. It involves selling a substance at least as
debilitating to many as alcohol, but while legal standards govern the purity
and strength of various liquors, there is nothing to assure marijuana’s
consistent purity, especially on the black market where police say at least
two-thirds of pot sales occur.
Then
there are the medical effects of the weed, both long-term and short-term. The
immediate effects are well known: spaced-out behavior, impaired judgment, both
clouded and heightened senses depending on your personal biology, a distorted
sense of time, slower reactions and lowered motor skills, lowered inhibitions,
less mental focus and memory – and more. On the positive side, there’s also
pain reduction and better tolerance for some medications and their side
effects.
For those
who make it past these frequent and fleeting issues, now there’s proof of long-term
mental harm from prolonged pot use.
This has
been suspected for decades, but a report published this spring in a journal of
the American Psychiatric Assn. makes it definite: If you want to be mentally
sharp and capable in middle age or later, don’t use pot regularly.
Concluded
the report, “At age 45, people who (said they used) cannabis weekly or more
frequently over the past year showed greater cognitive decline than those who
never used cannabis.”
This was
based on a study of 938 persons in Dunedin, New Zealand, 93 percent of them
Caucasian and all born in 1972 or 1973. Starting at age 18, all participants
were interviewed at least once every six years about their use of marijuana,
tobacco and alcohol. Cognitive tests were given at ages 7, 9 and 11 and again
at age 45. Close relatives, spouses and friends also completed questionnaires
about whether the participants experienced memory or attention problems over
the past year.
The 86
participants classed as long-term cannabis users had normal average IQ’s of
99.3 as children, but dropped to below-average as middle-aged adults with
average IQs of 93.8. Meanwhile, participants who reported never using marijuana
saw their IQs rise slightly (by 0.7 points) between childhood and middle age.
At the same time, long-term tobacco and alcohol users also experienced IQ drops
as they aged, but these averaged more than 4 points less than the IQ loss among
users of the weed. Pot use is illegal in New Zealand.
Their
friends and relatives also described long-term marijuana users as having more
attention, concentration and memory problems than non-users or those who smoked
pot only occasionally.
The test
cohort, of course, is still too young to assess how pot use might affect their
rates of dementia as they reach their 60s and 70s.
The
conclusion here is obvious: Anything that increases cannabis use or encourages
regular or habitual usage should be discouraged.
But that’s
not happening in California, where more and more cities are making it easier and
easier to open dispensaries within their boundaries.
The
long-term New Zealand study and other indicators from American sources make it
clear that marijuana affects much more than highway safety, although it surely
has a negative impact on that.
Rather than encouraging pot dispensaries
strictly because they are legal, sane policy would be the exact reverse. Plus,
schools and colleges need to warn their students on a regular basis of the
weed’s negative effects.
Anything
different invites a steady decline in the intellectual abilities of average
Californians.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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