Just take a deep breath!

Back in 2012, a study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) calculated that smoking a single joint every day for two decades might be benign, though most participants just smoked three or two joints each month. “I was surprised we did not see effects [of marijuana use],” said UCSF epidemiologist Mark Pletcher, who headed the study.

One assessment of various epidemiological online cbd merchant account studies points to small sample size and poor study design as grounds for scientists’ inability to nail a link between cannabis and cancer risk. However, some suspect that this type of link does not exist, and that marijuana may even have cancer-preventive outcomes. Even a 2008 study, for instance, indicated that smoking marijuana can reduce the risk of tobacco-associated lung cancer, even calculating that those who smoke marijuana and tobacco have a much lower probability of cancer than people who smoke merely tobacco (although a high hazard than non smokers ).

But even Pletcher isn’t sanguine about marijuana’s effects on the lungs, also suspects that there could still be long term lung damage which could be difficult to find. “We really can not reassure ourselves about heavy usage,” he explained.

Your mind on drugs

There is some evidence to suggest that stoned subjects exhibit increased risktaking and impaired decision-making, and score on memory tasks-and residual impairments are discovered days or weeks after usage. Some studies also link years of frequent marijuana use to deficits in memory, learning, and concentration.

Within this study, headed by researchers at Duke University,”that you might definitely see as a effect of cannabis usage, IQ goes down,” said Derik Hermann, a clinical neuroscientist at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany who wasn’t involved from the research.

Although perhaps not 4 weeks later, a re-analysis and computer simulation at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo countered the Duke findings. Ole Rogeberg contended that socio economic aspects, not bud usage, led to the reduced IQs found in cannabis users.

Rogeberg’s judgment counters a sizeable literature, but which supports a link between pot use and neuro-physiological reduction. Studies in both animals and humans indicate that people who acquiring a marijuana addiction in maternity confront long term unwanted impacts in brain function, with several users finding it tough to concentrate and learn new tasks.

Notably, most studies about them declare that while there can be negative consequences of smoking for a young adult, users who start in maturity are often unaffected. This may be caused by endocannabinoid-directed reorganization of the brain during puberty, Hermann explained. The consumption of cannabinoids that comes with bud use may trigger irreversible”misleading of their neurological growth,” he explained.

Along with the consequences for intelligence, many studies suggest that smoking marijuana increases the probability of schizophrenia, and might have similar impacts on mental performance. Hermann’s group used MRI to find cannabis-associated neuron damage while in the pre-frontal cortex and found it was like brain changes found in schizophrenia patients. Different studies further suggest that weed-smoking schizophrenics have greater disease-associated brain fluctuations and also perform better on cognitive tests than their counterparts that are senile.

But a lot of this research can’t distinguish between brain fluctuations caused by marijuana use and symptoms linked to the illness. It’s likely that cannabis-smoking schizophrenics”may possibly have unpleasant symptoms [that precede full-blown schizophrenia] and therefore are self-medicating” with the psychotropic medication, said Roland Lamarine, a professor of public health in California State University, Chico. “We’ve not seen a rise in schizophrenics, in spite of a lot more marijuana usage.”

In reality, other research shows that cannabis-using schizophrenics score better on cognitive tests than non-using schizophrenics. Besides tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a neurotoxic cannabinoid that’s responsible for bud’s mind-altering properties, the medication also contains an assortment of non psychoactive cannabinoids, including cannabidiol (CBD), that may drive back neuron damage. Hermann revealed that the amount of the hippocampus-a brain area important for memory processing-is marginally smaller in cannabis users than in non-users, but more CBD-rich marijuana countered this result.

A lethal cocktail?

While data supporting the damaging effects of marijuana on its are weak, some investigators are more worried about the medication together with other chemicals, such as smoking tobacco, alcohol, or alcoholism. Some studies indicate, for instance, that marijuana may increase cravings for other drugs, contributing to its notorious label as a”gateway drug.” Research released earlier this month affirmed that this theory as it discovered, at the least in rats, THC exposure increases tobacco’s addictive results. What’s more, marijuana might well not mix well with prescribed drugs, as cannabis causes the liver to metabolize drugs more slowly, increasing the chance of medication toxicity.