lil angel15
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Marijuana makes you potty
May 01, 2007 12:00
Demon weed ... scientists have discovered physical evidence of the drug's damaging influence on the brain / The Daily Telegraph
IT'S the news sure to strike fear in the hearts of ageing Kombi owners everywhere - smoking marijuana really can wreck your brain.
New findings on the drug's damaging effects show it can trigger hallucinations and paranoid delusions in some people.
British doctors took brain scans of 15 healthy volunteers who had been given small doses of two of the active ingredients of cannabis as well as a placebo.
One compound called cannabidiol, or CBD, made people more relaxed. But even small doses of the component tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, produced temporary psychotic symptoms.
The results, to be presented at an international mental health conference in London this week, provide physical evidence of the drug's destructive influence.
"We've long suspected that cannabis is linked to psychoses but we have never before had scans to show how the mechanism works," said Dr Philip McGuire, a professor of psychiatry at King's College, London.
In analysing MRI scans of the study's subjects, Dr McGuire and his colleagues found THC interfered with activity in the inferior frontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with paranoia.
"THC is switching off that regulator," Dr McGuire said, adding it effectively unleashed the paranoia usually kept under control by the frontal cortex.
In another study being presented at the conference, a two-day gathering of mental health experts discussing the connections between cannabis and mental health, scientists found that marijuana worsened psychotic symptoms of schizophrenics.
Doctors at Yale University in the US tested the impact of THC on 150 healthy volunteers and 13 people with stable schizophrenia. Nearly half of the healthy subjects experienced psychotic symptoms when given the drug.
While the experts expected to see marijuana improve the conditions of their schizophrenic subjects - since their patients reported the drug calmed them - they found the reverse was true.
"I was surprised by the results," Yale's Dr Deepak Cyril D'Souza said. "In practice we found that cannabis is very bad for people with schizophrenia."
While Dr D'Souza had intended to study marijuana's impact on schizophrenics in more patients, the research was stopped prematurely because the impact was so pronounced it would have been unethical to test it on more people with schizophrenia.
"One of the great puzzles is why people with schizophrenia keep taking the stuff when it makes the paranoia worse," King's College professor Dr Robin Murray said.
Experts believe schizophrenics may mistakenly judge the drug's pleasurable effects to outweigh any negatives.
Understanding how marijuana affects the brain may ultimately lead experts to a better understanding of mental health in general.
"We don't know the basis of paranoia or anxiety," Dr McGuire said. "It is possible that we could use cannabis in controlled studies to understand psychoses better."
Daily Telegraph