Pubdate: Wed, 23 Nov 2005
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2005 Independent Media Institute
Contact:  http://www.alternet.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1451
Author: Annalee Newitz
Note: Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once got her cat 
stoned but didn't notice any intelligence-enhancing side effects.
Cited: the University of Saskatchewan study 
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/115/11/3104
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

GOOD DRUGS

Researchers Discovered That Chemicals From Marijuana Rejuvenate an 
Area of the Brain Linked With Learning.

My favorite news bump of the past couple of months started in one of 
my favorite Canadian cities: Saskatoon.

Researchers there at the University of Saskatchewan demonstrated that 
marijuana rejuvenates cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain 
associated with learning and memory. Neuroscientist Xia Zhang and his 
team injected rats with a superpotent chemical synthesized to 
resemble a chemical found in a typical puff of pot. And, under the 
influence of this mega-marijuana, the rats started growing new brain cells.

Please tell me this means that all those annoying PSAs with Rachael 
Leigh Cook smashing things and talking about "your brain on drugs" 
will have to be rethought -- or possibly just erased from the 
nation's cultural memory. Then again, with all those new brain cells 
we'll be growing, it might be hard for us to forget.

I don't want to jump on the I-told-you-so bandwagon about this, 
because the U of S study comes with all the usual disclaimers: Rats 
aren't the same as people; the drug the rats took wasn't exactly the 
same as marijuana; the drug was administered in ultradoses; don't do 
this at home; etc. But it's still hard not to dance around a little 
when I find a good, solid scientific study that doesn't just 
reiterate all the old propaganda about how pot rots your brain and 
turns you into a zombie.

There are a lot of weird historical reasons for that propaganda, not 
the least of which is racism. Alcohol, a drug that is arguably more 
debilitating and socially destructive than pot, is a European vice. 
Pot, on the other hand, was used by Natives across the Americas.

It was outlawed in the United States during the 1930s -- roughly 
around the same time that young Natives were being rounded up and put 
into orphanages to be "civilized." It was also around this time that 
black jazz musicians were enjoying the weed as well.

But no group was more closely associated with marijuana than 
Mexicans. In 1935 a representative from a California antidrug group 
told the New York Times, "Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious 
of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican 
immigration." Legislators chose to use the Mexican word for the drug 
to intensify this connection. And pot regulation started in states 
near the Mexican border -- where it was being imported at a rapid 
clip -- and culminated in the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, a federal law 
that made nearly all pot trafficking a crime.

None of the legislation that prohibited marijuana sales was motivated 
by health concerns. In fact, the hearings leading up to the 1937 law 
dealt very little with "this is your brain"-style issues: The main 
evidence used to demonstrate the ill effects of marijuana (other than 
its connection with Mexicans) was a few sensationalist articles from 
Hearst newspapers about how pot turned upstanding citizens into criminals.

After the Marihuana Tax Act went into effect, law enforcement 
gradually cracked down on all the US citizens trying frantically to 
grow their hippocampi. But people interested in bringing scientific 
fact into this mystified kerfuffle were also there trying to remind 
everyone that drugs weren't the problem.

I was reminded of this quite forcefully the other day when I picked 
up a first edition of Aldous Huxley's 1946 monograph Science, 
Liberty, and Peace on the street in New York City's East Village. In 
it, Huxley argues that the government uses science to keep its 
citizens in line, thus perverting science from its aim of 
enlightenment. Huxley is also the author of another famous monograph, 
The Doors of Perception, a very eloquent defense of mescaline and 
other banned drugs as tools for mind expansion. As his novel Brave 
New World makes clear, Huxley was well aware of the negative uses to 
which drugs could be put, but he still argued that people should be 
free to try them, because they might also have educational properties 
nobody understood yet.

The guys with stoned rats over at the U of S are scientists in the 
Huxley tradition: They refuse to be cowed by propaganda that prevents 
us from discovering the possible benefits of drugs. I don't know 
about you, but I'm feeling kind of high on science right now.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake