Marijuana addiction? Sounds like two words that don't seem
to go together. You can't
really get addicted to it, right? Marijuana isn't like
cigarettes with their nasty nicotine—
it's actually more "recreational" and even
"medical"—right?
Watch enough movies and television and you may get the idea that behind closed doors
across America,everyone's toking up—as if it were a dirty little secret
that even the most normal of folks kept to themselves, although their close friends
"might have known..." But here are six things no one ever told you about marijuana—the real
dirty little secrets of marijuana itself.
Marijuana has its own marketing campaign. Whether Madison
Avenue ad men sit around large polished wooden tables in their suits and put
together focus groups and smile happily at revenue charts isn't the point. But look
around and you'll see a
campaign does exist, complete with late night talk show
hosts implying their closet use of it, famous singers and actors extolling its virtues so
much so that it feels like the "undrug"— positioned apart from those "other, more
dangerous" ones and gobbling up its
own special piece of market share in your mind. Not as
dangerous? Keep reading...
It has real withdrawal symptoms. Researchers at McLean
Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts and Columbia University in New York City found
that regular smokers of marijuana who stop smoking it indeed experience withdrawal.
Additionally, studies have
shown that aggression, anxiety, stomach pain and increased
irritability manifestthemselves during abstinence from the drug.
It speeds up your heart. Marijuana use actually increases
the heart rate as much as 50 percent. Not only that: it can cause chest pain in people
who have a poor blood supply to the heart—and it does so much more rapidly than
tobacco smoke can do.
Stoners aren't just "cute" in their stupidity—they
actually do get lower grades, and they are less likely to graduate from high school than
their non-smoking peers, studies show. For heavy smokers—those who smoke it nearly
every day—critical skills
related to attention, memory and learning are significantly
impaired even after they had not used the drug for at least 24 hours
That 'medical marijuana' is safe is a lie. In fact, no where
is it even legal. The US Food and Drug Administration has never approved marijuana
for any use. It's a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, with
high potential for abuse just
like Cocaine, Heroin and LSD. Benefits claimed by medical
marijuana proponents: the THC in marijuana provides relief of nausea due to cancer
chemotherapy and reduces intraocular (inside the eye) pressure due to glaucoma.
However, approved and effective
medications to relieve these symptoms have been available
for quite some time. Marinol, containing synthetic THC, is taken (not smoked) in
controlled doses. But even this medication has side effects including paranoid
reaction, drowsiness and abnormal
thinking. Studies have shown that real THC as found in
marijuana is actually a neurotoxin, a substance that damages or impairs the
functions of nerve tissue. And to get this neurotoxin from marijuana, you'll also need to be
willing to ingest more than
400 other chemicals found in marijuana.
Marijuana effectively cuts you off from others. It might
seem social to pass the dutchie on the left hand side, but burned out users are so
unaware of their surroundings that they don't respond when friends speak to
them, and do not realize
they even have a problem. Marijuana compromises one's
ability to learn, to remember information and—the more it's used—the more likely it is
that a user will fall behind in accumulating intellectual, job or social skills.
