Casual marijuana use linked to brain changes

[FarrenH]

16. This reeks of bullshit and Gereman's comments are extremely apposite

Sanjay Gupta's 180 degree turn on cannabis came from attending a few seminars in Europe and reading some of the very positive research being done there. And he said exactly what Gregory Gerdeman said. The US federal government has been relentlessly throwing money at research to find something - anything - that would give the veneer of medical authority to senseless policy for decades. The default response to announcements like these should be extreme skepticism.

"Changes"? How does one go from there to "harm"? The amygdala is associated with emotional reactions and memory. Color me surprised. Ordinary learning causes physical changes. Is this long term? Doubt it. I'll put money on "changes" meaning the same thing it means when you say "being in a scary situation causes changes in the amygdala". I've got an IQ above 140. The smartest people I've known have all smoked pot. Carl freaking Sagan smoked it routinely, while heading up most of NASA's deep space probe projects in the seventies.

I cannot account for why people who presumably are fully apprised of the history and innocuous nature of the substance would so relentlessly try to suppress it decade after decade. Is it really a failure to realize that strongly held misconceptions over long periods don't signal hidden truth? The same "Father knows best" mentality that has seen the USA creep to the right in recent decades? The US government seems so committed to doing the science until it yields the truth they want, in the face of decades of absent evidence and overwhelming evidence of the counterproductive effects of US drug policy, that the idea that it comes down to economic interests - of the police, of the prison system, of the pharmaceutical industry - seems compelling