Is marijuana harmless?
<b> banshee said:</b><i> "The THC is the most important ingredient of this Herb. It is a Natural drug, an Herb, no garbage added ... And please, no artificial garbage with that great, natural pleasure Herb, called Marijuana ... Antibiotics have a lot of nasty side effects, which Marijuana does not." </i>
<b>Avatar</b> (from Latvia): <i>"but I think tht using mj is better than alchocol or smoking tabacco full of chemicals. at least mj is a natural product. </i>"
Banshee is for smoking marijuana, Avatar seems to be against it, at least for personal use. Both are on opposite sides of the subject, but both make the mistake of saying <i>"it is a Natural drug"</i> .. or <i>"Marihuana have no nasty side effects"</i>, believing it is <b>a harmless herb</b>. The marihuana debate has been going on for many years, and will never end, as long as there is somebody who likes the pleasure of getting "high". If he chooses to do it, go ahead, but don't propagandize it because <b>many innocent people</b> would belive it and will suffer the consequences. In a next post I will go into the subject of the "natural drugs" myth.
<b>Tetra hydro cannabinol</b> (THC) is a poison for your inmune system, you like it or not, the same as other "natural drugs" as cocaine, heroin, opium, etc. Natural drugs are as nasty and dangerous as synthetic ones, and sometimes worse. Of course, always depending on the dose. I don't know if one joint a day is harmfull or harmless --there is the issue of drug buildup in your organism, speed and capability of the chemical to be "washed" from the organism, etc. My contribution to this interchange of opinions will be just a few things of what scientists have discovered about marijuana (MJ).
A research team at the Argonne National Laboratory, headed by Dr. Eliezer Huberman (Huberman, E., <i>"Marijuana increases disease risk by inhibiting white blood cells"</i>, Committees of Correspondence: Drug Awareness Information Newsletter, April 1989) discovered that THC, and a number of related chemicals called <b>cannabinoids</b>, arrest the development of at least one group of white blood cells. These white blood cells, known as <b>monocytes</b>,.are a key part of the body's immune defense system. When these cells fail to mature properly they cannot perform their necesary disease-fightning functions. The technical name for this condition is known as <i>maturation arrest</i>, which literally means a failure to grow up and function normally.
The experiments used immature monocytes derived from human leukemia cells to study the effect of various cannabinoids on cell maturation. They used used leukemia cells because they represent a fairly uniform population of immature cells of a single type. In contrast, cells from normal human bone marrow represent an entire spectrum from primitive, undifferentiated forms, to fully mature functional cells, making them useless for studying cell maturation.
The three compunds evaluated were THC (the psychoactive ingedient in MJ), <b>cannabinol</b> (CBN), and <b>cannabidiol</b> (CBD), two other components of MJ that resembles THC. After innoculation with one of the three cannabinoids the cells were cultured for one to six days and then examined. Three were the physical characteristic that marked the cells as "developmentally arrested": First, their size and shape were that of <i><b>promonocytes</b></i> an immature, non-functional cell. Second, the cannabinoid-treated cells did not attach to glass as mature cells would do. Third, the treated cells continued to divide, unlike mature monocytes.
On the other hand, the treated cells did show biochemical and immunological evidence of maturation from more primitive forms. Thus, although THC appeared to initially stimulate development of leukemic cells, this development was subsenquently arrested before the cells became fully mature and functional. This, again, is the phenomenon known as <i>maturation arrest</i>
Furthermore, these changes occurred at concentrations of THC that have been found in the blood plasma <b>of human who have smoked marijuana joints</b>. There are two major consequences of maturation arrest of white blood cells. The first, and most obvius, is that such arrested cells are <b>nonfunctional and therefore ineffective</b> in helping the body to fight a disease. In the case of monocytes, depressed function can cause a numbre of or problems. In the bloodstream, mature monocytes ingest foreign organisms and present them to the T and B lymphocytes for further processing and antibody production. In addition, monocytes secrets a number of chemicals called <i><b>lympokines, which activate other immune cells. </b></i> (Wouldn't this be one of the reasons that keeps the drug addicts at the top of the list of "risk groups" in AIDS?).
The second consequence of "maturation arrest" relates to the fact that the arrested cells still possess the capacity to divide. When the body responds to an infection, for example, a number of substances are produced that stimulates the proliferation of different white blood cells from their primitive precursor cells in the bone marrow. If there is a lack of functional white blood cells because of maturation arrest, the body, sensing the lack of mature cells will continue to stimulate the bone marrow to produce more cells. As a result, there will be a buildup of large number of immature white blood cells in the circulation. If the maturation arrest is severe enough, <b>this defines the condition of leukemia;</b> that is, an excess of immature white blood cells in the circulating system.
These findings (made about 1988), along with studies that indicate that THC causes disturbances in both T and B lymphocytes, as well as reduced resistance to cancer growth and infections by viruses and bacteria, certainly call for precaution when it comes to legalize or advice people to smoke MJ "because it is harmless". <b>It is not. </b> See my next post: