marijuana (Page 3)

One more argument bites the dust – As some states get consider making pot legal, new drug research shows that the “gateway effect” of marijuana (that teenagers who use marijuana are more likely to move on to harder illicit drugs as young adults) is overblown. This knocks down one of the main arguments of the anti-marijuana contingent. Some wars are necessary, but others, like the War Against Drugs, are just plain silly.

The research shows that whether teenagers who smoked pot will use other illicit drugs as young adults has more to do with life factors such as employment status and stress. In fact, the strongest predictor of whether someone will use other illicit drugs is their race and ethnicity, not whether they ever used marijuana.
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As more and more states and countries legalize marijuana, pot farms are springing up out there. In Canada (where it is still illegal), police discovered that a marijuana farm is being guarded by trained black bears, when they tried to raid it.

But the bears were benign: Instead of attacking they simply acted as guards and were actually quite tame, so the police were eventually able to arrest 2 pot farmers. BBC News quotes police sergeant Fred Mansveld as saying, “They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off.” The bears were fed dog food, so the farmers broke the law in 2 ways, since in Canada it’s also illegal to feed bears.
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More news about marijuana medicine: Combining the two most common compounds in Marijuana may boost the effectiveness of treatments to inhibit the growth of brain cancer cells and increase the number of brain cancer cells that die off. Doctors think that these 2 ingredients may be especially effective against glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive form of brain tumor and the cancer that killed Sen. Ted Kennedy.

That’s the good news, now here’s the bad news: Despite the promising findings of the study the researchers point out that they are not a recommendation for people with brain cancer to smoke marijuana, because it is highly unlikely that effective concentrations of either of these ingredients could be reached by smoking it.
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Most people will drink alcohol on New Year’s Eve, but those who do something else may wonder where those marijuana munchies come from. People who smoke pot almost always raid the refrigerator afterwards, but what is it about marijuana that causes them to do this?

It turns out that it’s all about having a sweet tooth: Researchers have discovered that cannabis acts directly on the tongue’s taste buds to enhance sweet taste. Biologist Robert Margolskee says, “Our taste cells may be more involved in regulating our appetites than we had previously known. Better understanding of the driving forces for eating and overeating could lead to interventions to stem the burgeoning rise in obesity and related diseases.”
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