Have you seen the recent headlines, “Study Finds Marijuana as Addictive as Heroin” or “Marijuana Makes you Stupid.” I did and immediately asked myself, “Have we gone back in time?”
After reassuring myself that we hadn’t, in fact, gone back in time, I pulled up the study that prompted so many Reefer Madness-esque headlines.
Recently published in the latest volume of the journal, Addiction, the article is a review of the last 20 years of research on the health effects of marijuana. As it turns out, the study, authored by Wayne Hall, a drug advisor to the World Health Organization, is not telling us anything we don’t already know. Instead, the media has skewed and misquoted the findings to, surprise surprise, create an eye-catching headline.
Although the study found that marijuana use had no permanent effect on the IQ of people who use marijuana periodically or started using as adults, media alarmists chose to focus their attention on the one and only group of people whose IQ was affected by marijuana use. That group was “the small proportion of cannabis users who initiated in adolescence and persisted in daily use throughout their 20s and into their 30s.”
Is marijuana really as addicting as heroin as many of the headlines read? Let’s see what the article actually says. “The life-time risk of developing dependence among those who have ever used cannabis was estimated at 9% in the United States in the early 1990s as against 32% for nicotine, 23% for heroin, 17% for cocaine, 15% for alcohol and 11% for stimulants." Yes, you can become addicted to marijuana, just as you can become addicted to nearly anything, but the study makes it quite clear that it is significantly less than most drugs.
The study doesn’t say anything we don’t already know about marijuana’s effect on driving, namely that marijuana use doubles the risk of an automobile accident. According to the study, “…it was clear from laboratory studies that cannabis and THC produced dose-related impairments in reaction-time, information-processing, perceptual-motor coordination, motor performance, attention and tracking behaviour. This suggested that cannabis could potentially cause car crashes if users drove while intoxicated, but it was unclear whether in fact cannabis use did so. Studies in driving simulators suggested that cannabis-impaired drivers were aware of their impairment and compensated for these effects by slowing down and taking fewer risks. There were similar findings in the few studies on the effects of cannabis use on driving on the road…In summary, the epidemiological and laboratory evidence on the acute effects of cannabis suggests strongly that cannabis users who drive while intoxicated increase their risk of motor vehicle crashes 2–3 times as against 6–15 times for comparable intoxicating doses of alcohol.”
Other shocking revelations by the study:
Marijuana use has dramatically increased in recent times, yet there has been no increase in the rates of psychosis…despite what the headlines say.
You actually can overdose on THC, the active compound in marijuana. Based on animal studies, the estimated fatal dose of THC is between 15 and 70 grams. Let’s put this in perspective. The average joint has about 0.06 grams of THC. So based on animal studies, it is estimated that someone can die if they smoke between 238 and 1,113 joints in a day.
Pregnant women should not use marijuana. Big surprise. The study found that there is an evidentiary link between marijuana use during pregnancy and cognitive problems of the child later in life. However, “uncertainty remains because of the small number of studies, the small samples of women in each and the researchers’ limited ability to control for the confounding effects of other drug use during pregnancy, maternal drug use post-birth and poor parenting.”
Don’t believe everything the headlines tell you.
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