Thursday, April 17, 2014

Recreational Pot in NJ: A Misguided Endeavor



Yesterday, The Journal of Neuroscience released a study by medical researchers from Boston’s Harvard University and Chicago’s Northwestern University on the inherent dangers associated with recreational pot usage
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 The analysis concludes that even “light to moderate recreational use [of marijuana] can cause changes in brain anatomy.  The study was conducted with youths in the 18 to 25 age bracket.  All participants were from the Boston area
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The results are quite disturbing.
 
This study calls into question the quality of judgment and the nature of research demonstrated by proponents in favor of legalizing pot consumption for recreational use in New Jersey.

It was  only weeks ago that The Star Ledger featured an editorial on “The Inevitability of legalized pot,” supported “State Sen. Nicholas Scutari’s pot-legalization plan,” and roundly criticized Governor Christie’s refusal to go along with that ill-advised proposal.

The editorial pooh-poohs “Christie’s rigid opposition to its legal use, whether for medicine or fun,” calling it “anything but a ‘Reefer Madness’ mentality,”  thereby dangerously conflating legitimate medicinal use with habit-forming, mind-damaging recreational usage, as this new study demonstrates.

A sister newspaper, The Times of Trenton, published a similar editorial in early April, in which it called for legalizing marijuana because “the New Jersey State Municipal Prosecutors Association has overwhelmingly recommended legalizing pot.”

However, subsequent reports appearing in The Boston Globe  and in USA Today  cite the results of a new study by medical researchers in Boston and Chicago which present data and conclusions that shed a completely different light on the casual, recreational use of pot.

Citing that work published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Globe writer Kay Lazar reports that “young adults who occasionally smoke marijuana show abnormalities in two key areas of their brain related to emotion, motivation, and decision-making, raising concerns that they could be damaging their developing minds at a critical time, according to a new study by Boston researchers.”

The brain regions which may be undergoing structural changes are the Nucleus accumbens and the Amygdala.  The former is “a hub in the brain that is involved with decision making and motivation,” while the latter “is involved with emotional behavior.”

Lead author of the study in Boston was Dr. Jodi Gilman, “a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a brain scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital.”  Another key researcher who collaborated in this work is Dr. Hans Breiter.  He is “a psychiatrist and mathematician at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.”

Breiter indicates that “just casual use [of marijuana] appears to create changes in the brain in areas you don’t want to change.  Dr. Gilman goes on to explain that “these changes may be evidence that the brain is forming new connections that encourage further drug use, a sort of drug learning process.”

This new scientific study significantly dampens wishful thinkers’ ill-founded assumptions that there is no harm in smoking pot “for fun,” as some seem to claim.

NOTE:  The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of nearly 40,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.  It publishes The Journal of Neuroscience in which the study on the effect of marijuana use upon young people appeared.

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