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
.
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
.
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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