“Despite anti-drug education campaigns which state marijuana is a gateway for harder drug use, new research from the University of New Hampshire says for most people that’s not true.” “But pot does serves as a “gateway,” says Dr. Karen Van Gund, associate professor of sociology., mainly for young people who are poor, unemployed, and subjected to severe psychological stress. In other words, the path to other drugs is not necessarily the pot, but rather the potholes young people encounter on the road.”
Tag Archives: pot
Pot smokers skinnier than non-tokers, study says – NBCNews
“We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the typical pot smoker — a lumpy, lazy couch potato with one hand wrapped around the remote and the other elbow-deep in a bag of nacho cheese Doritos.
But new research out of France gives a different spin to the stereotypical stoner.
“Cannabis is supposed to increase appetite,” says Dr. Yann Le Strat, a psychiatrist at Louis-Mourier Hospital in Colombes, France and co-author of a new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “So we hypothesized that cannabis users would be more likely to have higher weight than non-users and be more likely to be obese.”
Instead, Le Strat and his colleagues found just the opposite.
“We found that cannabis users are less likely to be obese than non-users,” he says. “We were so surprised, we thought we had [made] a mistake. Or that our results were due to the sample we studied. So we turned to another completely independent sample and found exactly the same association…”
“I know when we think about smoking pot, one of the jokes is that it gives you the munchies and dry mouth so you drink a bunch of water and eat a bunch of Cheetos,” she says.
“Maybe we need to adjust the stereotype.””
More: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/pot-smokers-skinnier-non-tokers-study-says-1C6437141
Pot is good for you? Marijuana fights the superbugs
The pot diet
“Never mind the munchies, study finds that pot smokers weigh less than non-smokers.”
“Turns out that in spite of the late-night pizza binges and countless bags of Doritos they consume, the average marijuana user is actually less likely to be obese than the general, non-pot-smoking public.”
Pot smoking may help relieve symptoms of MS – NBC News
“Smoking marijuana may improve some symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a new study suggests.
Patients with multiple sclerosis in the study had less muscle tightness, also called spasticity, and less pain after they smoked marijuana, compared with after they took a placebo…
More research is needed to confirm the findings and to investigate whether lower doses of marijuana may have similar benefits with fewer adverse effects, said study researcher Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, professor of neurosciences and director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at the University of California, San Diego.
The study is published today (May 14) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Improved symptoms
Previous studies have suggested marijuana use may have benefits for MS patients, but most have investigated oral forms of the drug, including mouth sprays and capsules. In addition, most studies have asked patients to report changes in their symptoms, rather than having a researcher objectively assess them…
Participants were randomly assigned to receive treatment with a marijuana cigarette or a placebo cigarette, which did not contain delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient of marijuana. Participants smoked a marijuana cigarette once a day for three consecutive days under the supervision of a researcher. Eleven days later, participants repeated the procedure, but this time, they switched treatment groups so that everyone received the marijuana cigarette and placebo at some point in the study. On average, participants smoked four puffs of their cigarettes at each session.
Shortly after each treatment session, the researchers assessed participants with a test specifically designed to measure spasticity.
After smoking marijuana, participants experienced a 30 percent reduction in spasticity, compared with when they smoked the placebo cigarette, Corey-Bloom said.”
More: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/pot-smoking-may-help-relieve-symptoms-ms-771076
Smoking Pot Eases Tremors in Parkinson’s
“Smoking cannabis appeared to reduce tremor and pain and improve sleep among Parkinson’s disease patients, researchers from Israel reported here.
Overall, patients’ scores on the standard Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) averaged 33 before they smoked cannabis in the laboratory and averaged 24 after 30 minutes (P<0.01), Ruth Djaldetti, MD, of Tel Aviv University Israel, reported at her poster presentation at the International Congress on Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders.
“We not only saw improvement in tremor in these patients, but also in rigidity and in bradykinesia,” Djaldetti told MedPage Today. “I would recommend use of marijuana to my patients as a last resort if nothing else was working for them or if they had pain.””
Forbidden Medicine – WebMD
“Laws and medicine clash over medicinal marijuana use. If it weren’t for his few daily tokes from marijuana cigarettes, Kiyoshi Kuromiya believes he would no longer be alive.The Philadelphia AIDS patient and activist had lost 40 pounds over a four-month period and spent most days nauseated before he began smoking pot in 1995 to boost an appetite suppressed by his disease.”Marijuana saved my life,” says Kuromiya, 57, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. “It’s a great irony to me that I can buy cigarettes, which will kill me, anywhere. But marijuana, which has kept me breathing, is illegal.”Kuromiya and others with debilitating ailments have long argued that marijuana should be legally available when standard medical treatment can’t relieve a patient’s suffering and pain.”
More: http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/forbidden-medicine
Marijuana blood sugar study shows potential health benefits for users
“A study shows a positive link between marijuana and blood sugar control in diabetes patients. A study by the National Health and Nutrition Surveyfound that marijuana use is linked to smaller waists, better blood sugar control and insulin resistance.”
“Researchers based in Boston compared five years’ worth of data from 579 marijuana users and thousands of non-users, LA Weekly reported.
The results come from a comparison of insulin and glucose levels in both groups. Participants that had used pot in the last month had much lower levels of fasting insulin and higher levels of so-called “good” cholesterol HDL-C — which may mean big news for diabetics.
Researchers hypothesize that marijuana could be used to control and manage diabetics’ blood sugar levels.”
Marijuana Blood Sugar: A New Study Shows That Pot Smoking May Reduce Weight and Diabetes Risk
“A new study has shown there may be a link between marijuana and diabetes prevention.”
“A new study has found that people who had used marijuana in the past month had smaller waists and lower levels of insulin resistance, which is a diabetes precursor, than those who had never tried the drug, according to Reuters.
“These are preliminary findings,” Dr. Murray Mittleman, who worked on the study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters. “It looks like there may be some favorable effects on blood sugar control.”
Majority Support Medical Pot in New NEJM Poll
“To recommend, or not to recommend, medicinal marijuana? That’s the question recently posed in a New England Journal of Medicine interactive online poll. To get a feel for physicians’ opinions, NEJM presented readers with a fictional clinical situation. Here’s the scenario:
“Marilyn is a 68-year-old woman with breast cancer metastatic to the lungs and the thoracic and lumbar spine. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy with doxorubicin. She reports having very low energy, minimal appetite, and substantial pain in her thoracic and lumbar spine. For relief of nausea, she has taken ondansetron and prochlorperazine, with minimal success. She has been taking 1000 mg of acetaminophen every 8 hours for the pain. Sometimes at night she takes 5 mg or 10 mg of oxycodone to help provide pain relief. During a visit with her primary care physician she asks about the possibility of using marijuana to help alleviate the nausea, pain, and fatigue. She lives in a state that allows marijuana for personal medicinal use, and she says her family could grow the plants. As her physician, what advice would you offer with regard to the use of marijuana to alleviate her current symptoms? Do you believe that the overall medicinal benefits of marijuana outweigh the risks and potential harms?”
Readers weighed in with a variety of impassioned opinions. And the results, the authors said, were surprising: 76% of respondents said they would recommend medicinal marijuana. Here’s part of the discussion:
“Physicians in favor of medicinal marijuana often focused on our responsibility as caregivers to alleviate suffering. Many pointed out the known dangers of prescription narcotics, supported patient choice, or described personal experience with patients who benefited from the use of marijuana. Those who opposed the use of medicinal marijuana targeted the lack of evidence, the lack of provenance, inconsistency of dosage, and concern about side effects, including psychosis. Common in this debate was the question of whether marijuana even belongs within the purview of physicians or whether the substance should be legalized and patients allowed to decide for themselves whether to make use of it.””
More: http://ripr.org/post/majority-support-medical-pot-new-nejm-poll