Does Marijuana Cause Brain Damage and Have Any Long Term Effects? - By: Joe Marley

No, and no. Many of the myths spread by the government, DARE, and supposedly 'scientific' studies done in the 1970s by government sponsored experiments are supposed to prove that marijuana use causes brain damage and has ill long term effects, but the circumstances under which the experiments were performed are either neglected, or not mentioned at all.

Facts About Marijuana Brain Damage
In the original studies scientists found that upon postmortem examinations of rhesus monkeys used in the experiments had structural changes in several brain regions. The rhesus monkeys were exposed to THC and the brain changes primarily involved the hippocampus, which is a vital element to learning and memory. In other studies that used rodents they also reported similar brain damage, which suggests negative long term effects of marijuana and brain damage.

What they don't tell you is that in order to achieve these results they had to administer extremely high doses of THC to the test subjects. They had to give them up to 200 times the psychoactive dose in humans. Notice that this is 200 times the psychoactive dose in humans, not 200 times the psychoactive dose in rhesus monkeys or rodents. Rodents and rhesus monkeys are smaller, have less body weight and mass as humans, so an appropriate psychoactive dose for the rodents and rhesus monkeys would probably be at most half of what a human needs. Also up to 100 times the human dose has failed to reveal any damage as told in "Neurotoxicology of Cannabis and THC: A Review of Chronic Exposure Studies in Animals (1991)" written by A.C. Scallet.

In the most recently published study involving rhesus monkeys they were exposed to face mask inhalation equivalent of four to five joints per day for a year. 7 months later they were cut open and found no brain damage. The hippocampus was exactly the same as before, and as in normal brains, there were no changes in cell size, cell number, or brain architecture.

"while behavioral and neuroendocrinal effects are observed during marijuana smoke exposure in the monkey, residual neuropathological and neurochemical effects of marijuana exposure were not observed seven months after the year-long marijuana smoke regimen."

No postmortem examinations have been done on the brains of heavy marijuana users, but numerous marijuana experiments have been done with people where test subjects have been given marijuana in a laboratory setting, and then compared them to controls on a variety of cognitive tests and brain scans. In the studies no significant difference were found, and there is a lot of evidence that being high does not impair retrieval of information that has been learned previously. Though, being high , especially being really high will interfere with marijuana users ability to transfer new information to long term memory, which all stoners already know is well and true. Though this temporary disabling of storing long term memories is only in effect while the user is high.

Heavy Marijuana Use Doesn't Cause Long Term Effects
In an even more recent marijuana study around 2003, long term and daily marijuana use does not cause any permanent brain damage as well as long term effects. The research only found a slight impairment in memory and learning of long term marijuana users. This impairment if properly examined could be proven to be experimental error, report errors, or it could just be a slight impairment according to the researchers it was "very small".

Besides the "very small" impairment the heavy marijuana users results on thinking tests were similar to those that don't smoke marijuana. They took 700 regular marijuana users and compared them with 484 non-users on various aspects of brain function: reaction time, language skills, motor skills, reasoning ability, memory, and their ability to learn new information.

The minimal differences were found in users who smoked daily, or several times a week or month, and had very little long term effects from smoking marijuana.

About the Author

The Weed Smokers Guide, anything and everything you need to know about smoking, growing, cooking marijuana and weed, including bongs, pipes, marijuana strains, and reviews. You can also learn about the effects of marijuana vs. alcohol and marijuana vs. tobacco.

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