Seems like every week we receive more scientific data that clearly disputes earlier propaganda that smoking weed is hazardous to your health. This latest medical study comes to us from very reputable American Psychological Association, and their thorough research found that cannabis use by teenage boys was not linked to later physical or mental health issues.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center researchers originally invited 408 male 14-year-old public school students in Pittsburgh to participate in their 1987 study. The test subjects were 54 percent black, 42 percent white, and 4 percent of other ethnicities or races. The students were interviewed every year for 12 years until they were 36-years-old.
What they discovered was “a little surprising,” said lead researcher Jordan Bechtold, PhD, a psychology research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “There were no differences in any of the mental or physical health outcomes that we measured regardless of the amount or frequency of marijuana used during adolescence.”
Their findings, which were originally published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, contradicted previous studies that marijuana was harmful, especially for teenagers. In their study they found no correlation that cannabis use increases psychotic symptoms, depression, mood disorders, anxiety, allergies, headaches, high blood pressure, lung cancer or asthma.
Now who will you blame your miserable depression as an adult on? Well I’m sure your parents did something in your childhood to fuck you up, so there’s always that surefire excuse for your inadequacies.
The researchers split the participants into four groups based on their marijuana use: 46 percent were low or non-users, 22 percent were early chronic users, 11 percent only smoked when they were teenagers, and 21 percent started smoking when they were teens and continued to smoke as adults. They considered chronic use to be smoking marijuana once per week in late adolescence and approximately 3-4 times a week from age 20 to 26 years. So even the dudes in the study that got lit on the regular had no ill affects.
Researchers noted that early chronic users peaked at smoking marijuana at an average of 200 times per year by 22-years-old, and then slowly declining the frequency of their usage.
“We wanted to help inform the debate about legalization of marijuana, but it’s a very complicated issue and one study should not be taken in isolation,” Bechtold said.
Hopefully science can help rid society of antediluvian and draconian pot laws that have only punished citizens for a harmless diversion that has lined the pockets of the prison corporations.
[UPI]