Over the past few weeks, most notably after the publication of Alex Berenson\u2019s \u201cTell Your Children,\u201d the media has been full of successive stories on the supposed mental health hazards of cannabis \u2014 seeming to signal a backlash to recent gains in normalizing the plant and overcoming the stigma.<\/p>\n
Right on the\u00a0heels of\u00a0much-hyped but dubious claims<\/a>\u00a0linking cannabis use to psychosis and schizophrenia, the latest reports cite a study that may (or, if you read past the headlines, may not) indicate that\u00a0use by adolescents<\/a>\u00a0can negatively impact brain development.<\/p>\n The study, published on Jan. 14 in the\u00a0Journal of Neuroscience<\/a>,\u00a0looked at the brains of 46 teenagers from England, Ireland, France and Germany. It found that those who reported using cannabis just once or twice displayed increased volume on MRI images. Most affected were various \u201cbrain regions involved in emotion-related processing, learning and forming memories.\u201d<\/p>\n A typical report on the study\u2019s claims comes from\u00a0NBC News<\/a>\u00a0under the headline: \u201cEven a little marijuana may change teen brain, study finds.\u201d The kicker: \u201cResearchers say even one or two joints cause changes in areas of the brain involved in emotion-related processing, learning and forming memories.\u201d<\/p>\n The study\u2019s lead author Hugh Garavan, a psychiatry professor at the University of Vermont School of Medicine, told NBC: \u201cMost people would likely assume that one or two uses [joints] would have no impact, so we were curious to study this \u2014 and especially to investigate if first uses may actually produce brain changes that affect future behavior like subsequent use.\u201d<\/p>\n But read a little further and it is conceded that the study did not say what the increased brain matter volume actually\u00a0means<\/i>.<\/p>\n In an admitted conjecture, Garavan linked the findings to the fact that, in kids of the studied age group, \u201ccortical regions are going through a process of thinning.\u201d He\u00a0suggested that this is a \u201csculpting\u201d process that makes the brain and its connections more efficient. \u201cSo, one possibility is that the cannabis use has disrupted this pruning process, resulting in larger volumes\u2026 in the cannabis users.\u201d<\/p>\n And he added: \u201cAnother possibility is that the cannabis use has led to a growth in neurons and in the connections between them.\u201d Which, despite the scary headline, would presumably not be a bad thing.<\/p>\n This is followed by a bunch of citations to\u00a0other studies<\/a>\u00a0noting, for example, supposed cannabis impacts on memory and ignoring all the\u00a0countervailing evidence<\/a>.<\/p>\n The account then goes on to note that 10 states and the District of Columbia have now legalized, with more likely to follow, implying an irresponsible leap into the unknown.<\/p>\n Only then do we reach the caveats \u2014 including that findings about teenage brains are \u201cpreliminary.\u201d<\/p>\n David Nutt, neuropsychopharmacology professor at Imperial College in London, is quoted in the NBC story saying enlargement of gray matter \u201cdoesn\u2019t seem to have a major impact on brain functioning, so while this study alone is not able to prove small amounts of cannabis negatively affect the brains of adolescents, this area of research is important and certainly worthy of further study.\u201d<\/p>\n For a more critical look at these claims, we turned to\u00a0Mitch Earleywine, a psychology professor at SUNY Albany and the author of\u00a0\u201cUnderstanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence<\/a>,\u201d published by the University of Oxford Press in 2002.<\/p>\n \u201cCareful examinations of brain research rarely make pithy headlines,\u201d Earlywine told Cannabis Now. \u201cThe brain has thousands of parts. If we compare cannabis users to non-users on hundreds of them, we\u2019re bound to find some difference by chance, much the way you\u2019re bound to get five heads in a row if you flip a coin enough times.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlywine said that previous research has suggested that cannabis users\u00a0\u2014 especially those who start young and smoke every day\u00a0\u2014 have deviant brain structure. \u201cBut one week, it\u2019s the dorsal anterior of the cingulate cortex, then it\u2019s the hippocampus, then the striatum, and this week it\u2019s the orbitofrontal cortex,\u201d he says. \u201cAt least two studies have now revealed increased connectivity in the brains of cannabis users, but we don\u2019t hear much about\u00a0that<\/i>, do we?\u201d<\/p>\n Earleywine portrayed a lack of transparency and rigor in studies such as the one now being touted, and challenged researchers to pre-register their studies on sites such as the one maintained by the\u00a0Center for Open Science<\/a>\u00a0to make clear their hypotheses and methods in advance.<\/p>\n \u201cIf one of these groups wants to pre-register their hypotheses and specify the spot where they think the purported deficits are going to be before they start poking around looking in every single spot in the brain, I will believe the finding,\u201d he said. \u201cUntil then, it\u2019s just a bunch of monkeys with fancy machines taking pictures and looking at them every which way.\u201d<\/p>\n A particular irony is that the now-touted findings come after years of mounting evidence of the capacity of cannabis to protect the brain, such as its efficacy in combating dementia. Scientists last year actually\u00a0identified the mechanism<\/a>\u00a0by which cannabinoids slow the deterioration of neurons in the brain.<\/p>\n In a\u00a0preliminary study<\/a>\u00a0issued by the\u00a0Salk Institute for Biological Studies<\/a>\u00a0in California, scientists grew nerve cells taken from a human brain to study factors that influence levels of a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer\u2019s disease. The team exposed the neurons to cannabis \u2014 finding that it cleared away the protein, reduced inflammation and allowed the brain cells to survive.<\/p>\n As so many\u00a0times before,\u00a0the scary headlines give a very selective view of the overall picture. And in any case, even the most damning findings do not constitute a case for continued prohibition, in Earleywine\u2019s view.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s assume that heavy cannabis use is bad, particularly for teens,\u201d he said. \u201cOK. How many people deserve to go to jail for that? Then how would we keep cannabis out of the hands of teens? Should we leave the task to the underground market the way we have since 1937, or try to get a handle on the problem with regulated sales?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that at the end of the day, nobody is advocating in favor of teenage marijuana use. But, all things considered, it\u2019s certainly worth examining where listening to fearmongering gets us, and whether or not that\u2019s the best place for us \u2014 and for teenagers \u2014 to go.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, how do you feel cannabis is portrayed in the mainstream media?<\/p>\n The post New Reports on Cannabis & Teenage Brains Overstate the Evidence<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Over the past few weeks, most notably after the publication of Alex Berenson\u2019s \u201cTell Your Children,\u201d the media has been full of successive stories on the supposed mental health hazards of cannabis \u2014 seeming to signal a backlash to recent gains in normalizing the plant and overcoming the stigma. RightContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6820,50,7200,687,53,7201,1570,7202,5720,7203],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32240,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32239\/revisions\/32240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cEven a Little\u2026\u201d<\/h4>\n
What the Reports Don\u2019t Say<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: New Reports on Cannabis & Teenage Brains Overstate the Evidence<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"