With a bit of planning you can cut down or stop and get your life back on track. Set alarms to get up and go to bed at the same times each day.
Try to eat regular meals and drink plenty of water. Plan activities you can do every day. This could be going for a walk, doing some exercise or making some art — whatever suits you. You can do this by keeping a simple cannabis diary on your phone or in a small notebook. Aim to do this for one week. Each time you smoke, note down: What day and time you smoked Where you were and who you were with How much you smoked How you felt before you smoked How you felt afterwards It may look something like this: Saturday 11am In my bedroom on my own 2 spliffs Before: felt worried about school After: felt more relaxed.
Print Copy link Link copied to clipboard. Is this page useful? How could we improve this page? I want to volunteer. I am looking for a job. Too much means that it might do more harm than good.
The amount of active ingredient in a pill and the metabolic path that the ingredient takes after it enters your body—these are things that drugmakers will have painstakingly mapped out before the product comes on the market, with a tractor-trailer full of supporting documentation. And the few studies we do have were done mostly in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when cannabis was not nearly as potent as it is now.
Because of recent developments in plant breeding and growing techniques, the typical concentration of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, has gone from the low single digits to more than twenty per cent—from a swig of near-beer to a tequila shot. Or simply getting more stoned, more quickly?
Is high-potency cannabis more of a problem for younger users or for older ones? For some drugs, the dose-response curve is linear: twice the dose creates twice the effect. Which is true for cannabis? It also matters, of course, how cannabis is consumed. It can be smoked, vaped, eaten, or applied to the skin. How are absorption patterns affected? He warned that the fastest-growing segment of the legal market in Washington State was extracts for inhalation, and that the mean THC concentration for those products was more than sixty-five per cent.
Nor did we know how higher-potency products would affect THC consumption. When it comes to cannabis, the best-case scenario is that we will muddle through, learning more about its true effects as we go along and adapting as needed—the way, say, the once extraordinarily lethal innovation of the automobile has been gradually tamed in the course of its history.
Berenson begins his book with an account of a conversation he had with his wife, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating mentally ill criminals. Berenson used to be an investigative reporter for the Times , where he covered, among other things, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Then he left the paper to write a popular series of thrillers. The result is disturbing. Many people with serious psychiatric illness smoke lots of pot. The marijuana lobby typically responds to this fact by saying that pot-smoking is a response to mental illness, not the cause of it—that people with psychiatric issues use marijuana to self-medicate.
That is only partly true. In some cases, heavy cannabis use does seem to cause mental illness. Berenson thinks that we are far too sanguine about this link. He wonders how large the risk is, and what might be behind it. Messamore reports that, following the recent rise in marijuana use in the U. These are otherwise stable middle-class professionals.
Their delusions and paranoia hardly responded to antipsychotics. Is this the reason, Berenson wonders, for the rising incidence of schizophrenia in the developed world, where cannabis use has also increased?
In the northern parts of Finland, incidence of the disease has nearly doubled since In Denmark, cases have risen twenty-five per cent since In the United States, hospital emergency rooms have seen a fifty-per-cent increase in schizophrenia admissions since If you include cases where schizophrenia was a secondary diagnosis, annual admissions in the past decade have increased from 1.
The delusions and paranoia that often accompany psychoses can sometimes trigger violent behavior. Once again, there is no definitive answer, so Berenson has collected bits and pieces of evidence. For example, in a paper in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence , researchers looked at the results of a survey of more than twelve thousand American high-school students. The authors assumed that alcohol use among students would be a predictor of violent behavior, and that marijuana use would predict the opposite.
In fact, those who used only marijuana were three times more likely to be physically aggressive than abstainers were; those who used only alcohol were 2.
And scientists continue to investigate the medicinal properties of other chemicals found in the cannabis plant, such as cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive compound being studied for its effectiveness in treating pain, pediatric epilepsy and other conditions.
In , the THC concentration in marijuana samples confiscated by law enforcement averaged near 15 percent, compared with an average concentration of four percent in the s.
High-potency forms of the drug can expose new users to increased concentrations of THC and greater risk of experiencing adverse or unpredictable reactions. For frequent users, higher potency can increase the risk of marijuana addiction. Learn more about the history of marijuana and legislative policy. When marijuana is smoked, THC passes rapidly from the lungs into the bloodstream, which carries the substance to the brain and other organs throughout the body.
THC is absorbed more slowly when ingested through food or drink. These receptors—ordinarily activated by THC-like chemicals produced naturally by the body—are part of the neural communication network, called the endocannabinoid system, which plays an important role in normal brain development and function.
The highest density of cannabinoid receptors is found in parts of the brain that influence pleasure, memory, thinking, concentration, sensory and time perception, and coordinated movement. Marijuana over-activates the endocannabinoid system, causing the "high" and other effects that users experience, such as:.
Research indicates that using marijuana can cause or exacerbate problems in daily life. Heavy users tend to report lower life satisfaction, poorer mental and physical health, more relationship problems and less academic or career success when compared with non-using peers. Use of the drug is also associated with a higher likelihood of dropping out of school.
Several workplace studies associate marijuana use with increased absences, tardiness, accidents, workers' compensation claims and job turnover. Marijuana use is associated with a range of health issues, particularly related to heart and lung problems and mental health conditions. Marijuana smoke is an irritant to the lungs, and frequent smokers can experience many of the same respiratory problems experienced by tobacco smokers, such as:.
One study found that people who smoke marijuana frequently but do not smoke tobacco have more health problems and miss more days of work than those who don't smoke marijuana, mainly due to respiratory illnesses. It is not yet known whether marijuana smoking contributes to the risk for lung cancer.
Research also indicates that use raises the heart rate by percent shortly after smoking; this effect can last up to three hours. One study found that marijuana smokers have a 4. The risk may be even greater for older adults and those with cardiac vulnerabilities. A number of studies link chronic marijuana use and mental illness. High doses can produce a temporary psychotic reaction in some users. Use of the drug can also worsen the course of illness for patients who have schizophrenia.
A series of large, longitudinal studies also shows a link between marijuana and the development of psychosis. Using marijuana during pregnancy is associated with increased risk of neurobehavioral problems in babies.
Because THC and other compounds mimic the body's own endocannabinoid chemicals, marijuana use by pregnant mothers may alter the developing endocannabinoid system in the brain of the fetus.
Consequences for the child can include difficulties related to attention, memory and problem solving. Marijuana has also been shown to negatively affect the brain development of young people who are heavy users.
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