Mental And Physical Effects Of Marijuana

Mental And Physical Effects Of Marijuana http://www.businessinsider.com/mental-and-physical-effects-of-marijuana-2014-4?op=1

What Marijuana Does To Your Body And Brain

By JENNIFER WELSH, DINA SPECTOR AND RANDY ASTAIZA

It's 4/20. For those not in the know, "4/20" is the unofficial holiday for pot smokers and marijuana legalization activists around the world to celebrate by lighting up on April 20.

The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim traced the term back to 1971. A group of California high school friends, known as the "Waldos" used "4/20" as a code word to refer to the time of the day when they would smoke outside of school.

This year, for the first time, residents of Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay can celebrate the day with legal recreational marijuana.

The plant, best-known for its "feel-good" effects and touted for its uses for multiple diseases, can also be damaging to our bodies and minds.

The high you get from marijuana mostly comes from a chemical called Tetrahydrocannabinol, also known as THC, which is found in varying potency in different strains of cannabis.

Most of THC's effects happen in the brain, where the chemical interacts with receptors on brain cells called cannabinoid receptors. Our bodies actually make chemicals very similar to THC, which are used in normal brain function and development. THC co-opts these natural pathways to produce most of its effects.

When THC hits brain cells, it causes them to release dopamine, a feel-good brain chemical. This is a part of the brain's reward system, which makes you feel good when you do things that ensure the survival of yourself and your offspring. These things include eating and having sex.
When over-excited by drugs, the reward system creates feelings of euphoria.

But that's not all good. It can mess up your reward system.

When the rewards system is overstimulated, for example, by the abuse of drugs like cocaine, it can go haywire and cause a dependence (or in extreme cases addiction) on whatever is providing the rewarding feeling. It can also diminish how rewarding normal things, like eating, feel.
This can cause apathy and dependence on the drug.

The active ingredient in marijuana acts in the part of the brain called the hippocampus to alter the way information is processed and how memories are formed. Animal studies have shown that this is particularly true while the brain is still developing — specifically why the legal smoking age is 21 in the states that have legalized it.
This blockage of memory formation can cause cognitive impairment in adulthood if use happens during adolescence, at least in rats. It can also quicken age-related brain cell loss, though marijuana has been shown to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

THC messes with brain areas called the cerebellum and basal ganglia, which regulate balance, posture, coordination, and reaction time. When these brain areas are disturbed, the user has a harder time walking and talking correctly, becoming quite clumsy. It also impacts their ability to drive.
Cannabis use may increase the risk of depression.
Cannabis use may increase the risk of depression.
AP
Although there is no conclusive evidence that marijuana makes users depressed (it's just as likely that people who are depressed use pot), one recent study from the Netherlands found that smoking cannabis increases the risk of depression for young people who have a genetic vulnerability to the mental illness.
In the long-term, smoking marijuana increased depressive symptoms in subjects with a special serotonin gene responsible for increased risk of depression. 

Intense anxiety, fear, distrust, or panic are common side effects.

Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of recreational marijuana users react with intense anxiety after taking the drug, making it one of the most commonly reported side effects.
But it may decrease anxiety too, provided people don't consume too much.
But it may decrease anxiety too, provided people don't consume too much.

Medical marijuana users claim that the drug helps relieve pain and suppress nausea — the two main reasons it's often used to relieve the side effects of chemotherapy.
In 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School suggested that that these benefits may actually be from reduced anxiety, which would improve the smoker's mood and act as a sedative in low doses. Beware, though, higher doses may increase anxiety and make you paranoid.

Marijuana users who have taken large doses of the drug may experience acute psychosis, which includes hallucinations, delusions, and a loss of the sense of personal identity. These episodes may be related to the link between marijuana use and psychosis, but are distinct.

Along with actual psychosis, cannabis users can also have audio and visual hallucinations from the effects on the brain areas that process what we see and hear.
These audio hallucinations include “looping” sounds, where one particular sound (that is usually one syllable in duration) will repeat over and over again until it is either replaced by a different sound or the effects of THC begin to wear off.

There are five stages of sleep, which get progressively deeper as the night goes on. The first four stages are called rapid eye movement, or REM. THC, the main active chemical in marijuana, has been shown to interrupt the later phases of REM sleep, the point during the night that is most crucial to making the body feel re-energized when you wake up. 

A London tourist smoking pot in Amsterdam.
Within a few minutes of inhaling marijuana, your heart rate increases, sometimes by 20 to 50 beats per minute (normal is 70 to 80 beats per minute). In some cases, like when taking other drugs with marijuana, heart rate can double.
This heart rate increase usually subsides relatively quickly, in about 20 minutes.

It may cause red eyes
The traditional red eyes of a marijuana user — Visine anyone? — come from blood vessels expanding in the eye.

One uncomfortable effect of smoking weed is dry mouth or thirst. 
The common side-effect, equivalent to the feeling of having a bunch of cotton balls shoved in your mouth, is not just the result of inhaling hot smoke. It turns out cannabinoids receptors are located where our saliva is produced. When these receptors are activated by cannabis use, they inhibit the production of saliva.

After marijuana intake, most people feel the need to eat. And eat a lot. The drug increases food enjoyment and interest in food, increasing appetite. This is thought to be caused by the THC interacting with the cannabinoid receptors in a brain area called the hypothalamus.
Interestingly, a link has been drawn between milk products and cannabinoids. Some researchers think that these cannabinoids in milk play an important role in infant survival, because they stimulate the child's appetite and cause them to eat more and suckle, which could be why THC has a similar effect in adults.

A study published in the American Journal Of Medicine on April 15, 2013 suggested that pot smokers are skinnier than the average person and have healthier metabolism and reaction to sugars, even though they do end up eating more calories because of the munchies.
The study analyzed data from more than 4,500 adult Americans — 579 of whom were current marijuana smokers, meaning they had smoked in the last month. About 2,000 had used marijuana in the past, while another 2,000 had never used the drug.
They studied their body's response to eating sugars: their levels of the hormone insulin and their blood sugar levels while they hadn't eaten in nine hours, and after eating sugar.
Not only are pot users skinnier, but their body has a healthier response to sugar.

According to a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association in January, marijuana does not impair lung function and can even increase lung capacity.
Researchers looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of 5115 young adults over the course of 20 years. Tobacco smokers lost lung function over time, but pot users actually showed an increase in lung capacity.
The increased lung capacity may due to taking a deep breaths while inhaling the drug.

Marijuana use can prevent epileptic seizures, a 2003 study showed.
Robert J. DeLorenzo of Virginia Commonwealth University, gave marijuana extract and synthetic marijuana to epileptic rats. The drugs rid the rats of the seizures for about 10 hours. Cannabinoids like the active ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (also known as THC), control seizures by binding to the brain cells responsible for controlling excitability and regulating relaxation.
The findings were published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

Marijuana alleviates pain, reduces inflammation, and promotes sleep, which may help relieve pain and discomfort for people with rheumatoid arthritis, researchers announced in 2011.


Researchers from rheumatology units at several hospitals gave their patients, sativex, a cannabinoid-based pain-relieving medicine. After a two week period, people on Sativex had a significant reduction in pain and improved sleep quality compared to placebo users.

Patients with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis could benefit from marijuana use, studies suggest.
University of Nottingham researchers found in 2010 that chemicals in marijuana, including THC and cannabidiol, interact with cells in the body that play an important role in gut function and immune responses. The study was published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
THC-like compounds made by the body increase the permeability of the intestines, allowing bacteria in. The plant-derived cannabinoids in marijuana block these body-cannabinoids, preventing this permeability and making the intestinal cells bond together tighter.

Marijuana may be able to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, a study led by Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute suggests.
The 2006 study, published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, found that THC, the active chemical in marijuana, slows the formation of amyloid plaques by blocking the enzyme in the brain that makes them. These plaques are what kill brain cells and cause Alzheimers.

One chemical found in marijuana, called cannabidiol, prevents cancer from spreading, researchers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco reported in 2007.
Cannabidiol stops cancer by turning off a gene called Id-1, the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, found. Cancer cells make more copies of this gene than non-cancerous cells, and it helps them spread through the body.
The researchers studied breast cancer cells in the lab that had high expression levels of Id-1 and treated them with cannabidiol. After treatment the cells had decreased Id-1 expression and were less aggressive spreaders.

» White House Counterterror Chief: “Confrontational” Children Could be Terrorists Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» White House Counterterror Chief: “Confrontational” Children Could be Terrorists Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!





Corporate-Fascist Regime in the US Proclaims All US Citizens Terrorists

White House Counterterror Chief: “Confrontational” Children Could be Terrorists

Obama adviser tells parents to be suspicious of their own kids!

White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco gave a speech this week in which she urged parents to watch their children for signs of “confrontational” behavior which could be an indication of them becoming terrorists.

During the speech at at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on Tuesday night, Monaco, who replaced John Brennan last year in overseeing the executive branch’s homeland-security activities, said that parents need to be suspicious of “sudden personality changes in their children at home.”

“What kinds of behaviors are we talking about?” she asked. “For the most part, they’re not related directly to plotting attacks. They’re more subtle. For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home—becoming confrontational.”

Monaco lamented the fact that, “The government is rarely in a position to observe these early signals,” encouraging parents to act as watchdogs to detect radicalization in line with President Obama’s goal of combating homegrown extremism.

Over the last decade, the federal government has broadened its definition of what constitutes potential terrorism to such a degree that the term has lost all meaning and is clearly being used as a political tool to demonize adversarial political activism.

Indeed, only yesterday Senator Harry Reid caused outrage when he labeled supporters of Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy “domestic terrorists”.

Although such tactics pre-date the 2009 release of the MIAC report, the Missouri Information Analysis Center document was perhaps the most shocking in that it characterized a whole swathe of conservative Americans as domestic extremists, including Ron Paul supporters, people who own gold and people who display political bumper stickers.

A Homeland Security study leaked in 2012 upped the ante even further, demonizing Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

Lisa Monaco’s speech and the federal government’s track record in assailing both banal behavior and political activism as potential “terrorism” serves as a reminder that the war on terror has now been focused inwardly against innocent Americans, making it all the more harder to detect actual terrorists.

» Western lawmakers talk federal land takeover Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» Western lawmakers talk federal land takeover Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!



US lawmakers talk federal land takeover

More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-, timber -and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.

“It’s simply time,” said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. “The urgency is now.”

​Pentagon mulls deployment as Poland asks for 10,000 troops — RT News

​Pentagon mulls deployment as Poland asks for 10,000 troops — RT News



Pentagon mulls deployment as Poland asks for 10,000 troops

The Pentagon may deploy more ground troops in Poland, although the number may be much smaller than what the eastern European NATO member wants to see. Washington is seeking to reassure allies amid fears of a Russian aggression.

Warsaw and Washington may announce the deployment of additional American troops in Poland next week, Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said following a meeting with his US counterpart, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon on Thursday.

He added that Poland would play a leading role in the NATO build-up of troops in Eastern Europe, “under US patronage,” the Washington Post reported. He added that the US needs to “re-pivot” back to Europe from Asia to counter “Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

Siemoniak earlier called on the Pentagon to deploy as many as 10,000 American troops in his country. Poland already hosts some 100 to 150 US military servicing a battery of surface-to-air Patriot missiles, which was deployed in 2010 to give Warsaw more confidence for hosting elements of the NATO anti-ballistic missile shield in Europe.

The Polish minister’s calls were mirrored by NATO’s top military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, who said in an interview this month that one of the options the alliance has on the table is to move a 4,500-member combat brigade from Fort Hood, Texas, to Europe. 

Obama’s long-term approach to Russia uses containment strategy | Dallas Morning News

Obama’s long-term approach to Russia uses containment strategy | Dallas Morning News

Obama’s long-term approach to Russia uses containment strategy

WASHINGTON — Even as the crisis in Ukraine
continues to defy easy resolution, President Barack Obama and his
national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to
forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version
of the Cold War strategy of containment.

Just as the U.S.
resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union
and its global ambitions, Obama is focused on isolating President
Vladimir Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties
to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own
neighborhood, and effectively making it a pariah state.

Obama has
concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff
over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive
relationship with Putin, aides said. As a result, Obama will spend his
final 21/2 years in office trying to minimize the disruption Putin can
cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved, and
otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign
policy areas where progress remains possible.

“That is the
strategy we ought to be pursuing,” said Ivo Daalder, formerly Obama’s
ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs. “If you just stand there, be confident and raise the cost
gradually and increasingly to Russia, that doesn’t solve your Crimea
problem and it probably doesn’t solve your eastern Ukraine problem. But
it may solve your Russia problem.”

The manifestation of this
thinking can be seen in Obama’s pending choice for the next ambassador
to Moscow. While not final, the White House is preparing to nominate
John Tefft, a career diplomat who previously served as ambassador to
Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania.

When the search began months ago,
administration officials were leery of sending Tefft because of concern
that his experience in former Soviet republics that have flouted
Moscow’s influence would irritate Russia. Now, officials said, there is
no reluctance to offend the Kremlin.

In effect, Obama is
retrofitting for a new age the approach to Moscow that was first set out
by the diplomat George Kennan in 1947 and that dominated U.S. strategy
through the fall of the Soviet Union. The administration’s priority is
to hold together an international consensus against Russia, including
even China, its longtime supporter on the U.N. Security Council.

While
Obama’s long-term approach takes shape, though, a quiet debate has
roiled his administration over how far to go in the short term. So far,
economic advisers and White House aides urging a measured approach have
won out, prevailing upon a cautious president to take one incremental
step at a time out of fear of getting too far ahead of skittish
Europeans and risking damage to still-fragile economies on both sides of
the Atlantic.

The White House has prepared another list of
Russian figures and institutions to sanction in the next few days if
Moscow does not follow through on an agreement sealed in Geneva on
Thursday to defuse the crisis. But the president will not extend the
punitive measures to whole sectors of the Russian economy, as some
administration officials prefer, absent a dramatic escalation.

The
more hawkish factions in the U.S. State and Defense departments have
grown increasingly frustrated, privately worrying that Obama has come
across as weak and unintentionally sent the message that he has written
off Crimea after Russia’s annexation. They have pressed for faster and
more expansive sanctions.

The prevailing view in the West Wing,
though, is that while Putin seems for now to be enjoying the glow of
success, he will eventually discover how much economic harm he has
brought on his country. Obama’s aides noted the fall of the Russian
stock market and the ruble, capital flight from the country, and
increasing reluctance of foreign investors to expand dealings in Russia.

The
two sides have not completely cut off ties, though. U.S. troops and
equipment are still traveling through Russian territory en route to and
from Afghanistan. Astronauts from the two countries are in orbit
together at the International Space Station. A joint program
decommissioning old Russian weapons systems has not been curtailed.

Still, the relationship cannot return to normal either, even if the Ukraine situation were settled soon, specialists said.

“There’s
really been a sea change, not only here but in much of Europe about
Russia,” said Robert Nurick, a Russia expert at the Atlantic Council. “A
lot of the old assumptions about what we were doing and where we were
going and what was possible are gone, and will stay that way as long as
Putin’s there.”

Peter Baker,



The New York Times

U.S. special forces struggle with record suicides: admiral | Reuters

U.S. special forces struggle with record suicides: admiral | Reuters



US Special Forces are Swept with Record Levels of Suicides

(Reuters) - Suicides among U.S. special operations forces, including elite Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, are at record levels, a U.S. military official said on Thursday, citing the effects of more than a decade of "hard combat."

The number of special operations forces committing suicide has held at record highs for the past two years, said Admiral William McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command.

"And this year, I am afraid, we are on path to break that," he told a conference in Tampa. "My soldiers have been fighting now for 12, 13 years in hard combat. Hard combat. And anybody that has spent any time in this war has been changed by it. It's that simple."

It may take a year or more, he said, to assess the effects of sustained combat on special operations units, whose missions range from strikes on militants such as the 2011 SEAL raid that killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden to assisting in humanitarian disasters.

He did not provide data on the suicide rate, which the U.S. military has been battling to lower. In 2012, for example, more active duty servicemen and servicewomen across the U.S. armed forces died by suicide - an estimated 350 - than died in combat, a U.S. defense official said.

That trend appears to have held in 2013 although preliminary data is showing a slight improvement, with 284 suicides among active duty forces in the year to December 15, the official added.

McRaven's command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, oversees elite commandos operating in 84 countries.

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps special operations commands comprise about 59,000 people, according to Pentagon documents.

Special operations forces have been lionized in popular culture in recent years, in movies such as "Zero Dark Thirty," about the hunt for bin Laden, and "Act of Valor," as well as a National Geographic special.

Kim Ruocco, who assists the survivors of military members who commit suicide, said members of the closely knit special operations community often fear that disclosing their symptoms will end their careers.

Additionally, the shrinking size of the U.S. armed forces has put additional pressure on soldiers, whose sense of community and self-identity is often closely tied to their military service, said Ruocco, director of suicide prevention programs for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, an advocacy group for military families.

Google: the unelected superpower - Telegraph

Google: the unelected superpower - Telegraph

Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities have pored over 1,800
US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking
out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled
by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great
surprises there, then.

But the government is not the only American power whose motivations need to be
rigourously examined. Some 2,400 miles away from Washington, in Silicon
Valley, Google is aggressively gaining power with little to keep it in check.

It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that its
chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a White House advisor. In Britain, its executives
meet with ministers more than almost any other corporation.

Google can’t be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that
benefit its shareholders, but it is up to governments to push back. As
things stand, Google – and to a lesser extent, Facebook – are in danger of
becoming the architects of the law.

Meanwhile, these companies are becoming ever more sophisticated about the
amount of information they access about users. Google scans our emails. It
knows where we are. It anticipates what we want before we even know it. Sure
there are privacy settings and all that, but surrendering to Google also
feels nigh on impossible to avoid if you want to live in the 21st century.
It doesn’t stop there either. If Google Glass is widely adopted, it will be
able to clock everything we see, while the advance of Google Wallet could
position the company at the heart of much of the world’s spending.