By the time Thomas Hodorowski made the connection between his marijuana habit and the bouts of pain and vomiting that left him incapacitated every few weeks, he had been to the emergency room dozens of times, tried anti-nausea drugs, anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants, endured an upper endoscopy procedure and two colonoscopies, seen a psychiatrist and had his appendix and gallbladder removed. The only way to get relief for the nausea and pain was to take a hot shower. He often stayed in the shower for hours at a time. When the hot water ran out, "the pain was unbearable, like somebody was wringing my stomach out like a washcloth," said Hodorowski, 28, a production and shipping assistant who lives outside Chicago. [continues 892 words]
In the '60s, marijuana was a hallmark of the counterculture, along with free love, bell bottoms, long hair and bandannas. But marijuana has had the most staying power. This month, in a remarkable first, the recreational use of marijuana became legal (depending on your definition) in Colorado and Washington state. More than a dozen other states have decriminalized possession of small amounts, and Massachusetts recently became the 18th state to allow its use for medicinal purposes. Although federal law still bans both the sale and possession of marijuana, President Barack Obama has said the federal government has "bigger fish to fry" and will not aggressively prosecute tokers in states where its use is legal. [continues 764 words]
In the '60s, marijuana was a hallmark of the counterculture, along with free love, bell bottoms, long hair and bandannas. But marijuana has had the most staying power. This month, in a remarkable first, the recreational use of marijuana became legal (depending on your definition) in Colorado and Washington. Over a dozen other states have decriminalized possession of small amounts, and Massachusetts recently became the 18th state to allow its use for medicinal purposes. Though federal law still bans both the sale and possession of marijuana, President Obama has said the federal government has "bigger fish to fry" and won't aggressively prosecute tokers in states where its use is legal. [continues 992 words]
Marijuana smoking often starts in adolescence - and the timing could not be worse, a new study suggests. Young adults who started using the drug regularly in their early teens performed significantly worse on tests assessing brain function than did subjects who were at least 16 when they started, scientists reported last week. The findings led researchers at McLean Hospital to surmise that the developing teenage brain may be particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of marijuana. "We have to understand that the developing brain is not the same as the adult brain," said Dr. Staci A. Gruber, the paper's senior author and director of cognitive and clinical neuroimaging at McLean, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Belmont, Mass. [continues 102 words]
People with chronic pain who took just a puff of marijuana three times a day got some mild pain relief and, with rare exceptions, did so without getting high, a Canadian study reports. (Yes, they inhaled.) The patients, who suffered from persistent nerve damage that did not respond to other pain drugs, also reported better sleep and less anxiety, the researchers said. The study is one of the first randomly controlled clinical trials to test the pain-relieving properties of smoked marijuana and of its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, said Dr. Mark A. Ware, a pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal who was lead author of the paper, published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal. [continues 137 words]
Emergency room visits for nonmedical use of prescription and over-the-counter drugs doubled during a recent five-year-period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are reporting. The increase, reported last week in the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, puts the number of medical emergencies for abusing legal drugs on a par with those for illegal drugs. The most emergency visits were for reactions to the opioid painkillers oxycodone, hydrocodone and methadone: 305,900 visits in 2008, up from 144,600 in 2004. The anti-anxiety drugs called benzodiazepines accounted for 271,700 visits in 2008, up from 143,500 in 2004. [continues 71 words]
Most teenagers these days think smoking cigarettes is very dangerous. Yet most adolescents also do not consider frequent binge drinking or occasional marijuana smoking to be anywhere near as risky. These findings are drawn from the responses of 44,979 people ages 12 to 17 who took part in national drug use surveys conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2007 and 2008. While nearly 70 percent of youths perceived "great risk" from smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day, only 40 percent thought having five or more alcoholic drinks once or twice a week was very risky, and only 34 percent perceived great risk from smoking marijuana once a month. About half thought using cocaine or LSD once or twice a month was very risky. [continues 95 words]
