Take a deep breath!

A research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) calculated that smoking a joint daily for 20 years might be benign, although most participants only smoked two or three joints every month. "I was surprised we didn't see effects [of marijuana use]," said UCSF epidemiologist Mark Pletcher, who headed the analysis.

1 Evaluation of diverse Preliminary study points to small sample size and inadequate study layout as motivations for scientists' inability to nail down a link between cannabis and cancer risk. But some suspect that such a link doesn't exist, and that marijuana may even have cancer-preventive effects. A 2008 study, for example, suggested that smoking marijuana may reduce the risk of tobacco-associated lung cancer, calculating that people who smoke both marijuana and tobacco have a lower risk of cancer than those who smoke only tobacco (though still a higher risk than non-smokers).

But even Pletcher isn't sanguine about marijuana's effects on the lungs, and suspects that there may still be long-term lung damage that can be hard to detect. "We really cannot promise ourselves about hefty usage," he explained. Your brain on drugs

There is some evidence to suggest that stoned subjects exhibit increased risk-taking and impaired decision-making, and score worse on memory tasks-and residual impairments have been detected days or even weeks after use. Some studies also link years of regular marijuana use to deficits in memory, learning, and concentration. A recent and widely discussed report on the IQs of New Zealanders followed since birth found that cannabis users who'd started their habit in adolescence had lower IQs than non-users.

In this study, led by researchers at Duke University,"you can see as a result of cannabis use, IQ goes down," said Derik Hermann, a clinical neuroscientist at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany who was not involved in the research.

But not 4 months later, a re-analysis and computer simulation at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo countered the Duke findings. Ole Rogeberg contended that socioeconomic factors, not marijuana use, contributed to the lower IQs seen in cannabis users.

Rogeberg's conclusion counters a sizeable literature, however, which supports a link between pot use and neurophysiological decline. Studies in both humans and animals suggest that people who acquiring a marijuana habit in adolescence face long-term negative impacts on brain function, with some users finding it difficult to concentrate and learn new tasks.

Notably, most studies on the subject suggest that while there may be negative consequences of smoking as a teen, users who begin in adulthood are generally unaffected. This may be due to endocannabinoid-directed reorganization of the brain during puberty, Hermann explained. The intake of cannabinoids that comes with pot use may cause irreversible"deceiving of this neural growth," he said.

In addition to the consequences for intelligence, many studies suggest that smoking marijuana raises the risk of schizophrenia, and may have similar effects on the brain. Hermann's group used MRI to detect cannabis-associated neuron damage in the pre-frontal cortex and found that it was similar to brain changes seen in schizophrenia patients. Other studies further suggest that weed-smoking schizophrenics have greater disease-associated brain changes and perform worse on cognitive tests than their non-smoking counterparts.

But much of this research can't distinguish between brain changes resulting from marijuana use and symptoms associated with the disease. It's possible that cannabis-smoking schizophrenics"may have unpleasant symptoms [that precede full-blown schizophrenia] and therefore are self-medicating" with the psychotropic drug, said Roland Lamarine, a professor of community health at California State University, Chico. "We have not seen a rise in schizophrenics, no matter more marijuana usage."

In fact, other research suggests that cannabis-using schizophrenics score better on cognitive tests than non-using schizophrenics. Such conflicting reports may be due to the varying concentrations-and varying effects-of cannabinoids in marijuana. In addition to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a neurotoxic cannabinoid that is responsible for marijuana's mind-altering properties, the drug also contains a variety of non-psychoactive cannabinoids, including CBD spray (CBD), which can protect against neuron damage. Hermann found that the volume of the hippocampus-a brain area important for memory processing-is slightly smaller in cannabis users than in non-users, but more CBD-rich marijuana countered this effect.

A deadly cocktail?

While data supporting the harmful effects of marijuana on its own are weak, some researchers are more worried about the drug in conjunction with other substances, such as tobacco, alcohol, or cocaine. Some studies suggest, for example, that marijuana may increase cravings for other drugs, leading to its infamous tag as a "gateway drug." A study published earlier this month affirmed This belief as it discovered that, at least in rats, THC vulnerability Increases cigarette's addictive consequences. Additional marijuana may not Blend well with prescription medications, as cannabis induces the liver to Metabolize medicine more gradually, increasing the threat of medication toxicity. To get more detail visit https://cbdforthepeople.com/