The Impact of Cannabis Use on Cognitive Functioning in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Meta-analysis of Existing Findings and New Data in a First-Episode Sample.
Yücel M, Bora E, Lubman DI, Solowij N, Brewer WJ, Cotton SM, Conus P, Takagi MJ, Fornito A, Wood SJ, McGorry PD, Pantelis C.

Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health, National Neuroscience Facility, Alan Gilbert Building, 161 Barry Street, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia.

Abstract
Cannabis use is highly prevalent among people with schizophrenia, and coupled with impaired cognition, is thought to heighten the risk of illness onset. However, while heavy cannabis use has been associated with cognitive deficits in long-term users, studies among patients with schizophrenia have been contradictory.

This article consists of 2 studies. In Study I, a meta-analysis of 10 studies comprising 572 patients with established schizophrenia (with and without comorbid cannabis use) was conducted. Patients with a history of cannabis use were found to have superior neuropsychological functioning. This finding was largely driven by studies that included patients with a lifetime history of cannabis use rather than current or recent use.

In Study II, we examined the neuropsychological performance of 85 patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP) and 43 healthy nonusing controls. Relative to controls, FEP patients with a history of cannabis use (FEP + CANN; n = 59) displayed only selective neuropsychological impairments while those without a history (FEP – CANN; n = 26) displayed generalized deficits. When directly compared, FEP + CANN patients performed better on tests of visual memory, working memory, and executive functioning. Patients with early onset cannabis use had less neuropsychological impairment than patients with later onset use.

Together, these findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia or FEP with a history of cannabis use have superior neuropsychological functioning compared with nonusing patients. This association between better cognitive performance and cannabis use in schizophrenia may be driven by a subgroup of “neurocognitively less impaired” patients, who only developed psychosis after a relatively early initiation into cannabis use.

When it comes to well-meaning prohibitionists, you can’t find any better representative than Canada’s National Post columnist Barbara Kay.  In her latest piece, she investigates the latest studies about “marijuana-induced psychosis” and presents them as an argument for maintaining marijuana prohibition, as she did back in 2008.

Her colleagues razzed (as did I) and asked why marijuana should remain illegal while alcohol and tobacco, which she admits is more “noxious in its effects in the general public”, are legal.  Two reasons: history and economics, she argues:

The use of alcohol stretches back over the millennia as an integral part of human civilization and remains, when used properly, a prime ingredient of civilized conviviality and positive social bonding. Alcohol in moderation is not only a social lubricant, it is good for one’s health.

It’s the old Art Linkletter / Richard Nixon argument:

The transcripts show Linkletter telling Nixon, “There’s a great difference between alcohol and marijuana.”

Nixon replies: “What is it?” The president wants to know!

“When people smoke marijuana,” Linkletter explains, “they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Nixon says. “A person does not drink to get drunk. . . . A person drinks to have fun.”

A year later, however, Linkletter changed his tune.  According to the New York Times, “After much thought and study he had concluded that the drug was relatively harmless.”

Nixon and Kay are wrong, of course: plenty of people are drinking to get drunk, most particularly the young people she’s so concerned would suffer from “marijuana-induced psychosis”.  According to SAMSHA, 8% of youth aged 12-17 engaged in binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row, or as I used to call it, Friday night) in the past thirty days.  Twice as many (16%) teens report experiencing a blackout from alcohol use.

I’m not arguing that we prohibit responsible use of alcohol for adults in order to protect the children from irresponsible use, but that’s exactly what Kay is supporting for marijuana.  Yet everything she praises about alcohol – thousands of years of human use, integral to civilization, social bonding, good for health – are praises tenfold for cannabis use.

It is rather kooky to criminally prohibit marijuana and then claim its lack of social integration is reason to keep it prohibited.  It is ghoulish to support the legality of alcohol and tobacco with economic arguments, as Kay continues:

As for tobacco, if we knew hundreds of years ago what we know now about its effects – never good, only bad – I would have argued against legalizing it as well. But as with alcohol, it’s not so easy to disband an industry as huge and profitable as tobacco on the grounds that it is unhealthy. There is too much at stake economically. So we’re stuck with it.

So if a substance makes government a ton of money and creates a ton of jobs, it really doesn’t matter that it kills 400,000 North Americans a year, does it?  See, if marijuana wanted Barbara Kay’s support, all the money it generates and jobs it creates would need to be legal and taxed, then she wouldn’t mind being “stuck with it”.  But since marijuana’s effects are “usually good, rarely bad”, Kay sticks with her support of criminal prohibition of cannabis.

The latest studies confirm that the risk of marijuana-induced psychosis is real, and the most at-risk users are teenagers; regular teenage pot smokers seem to have double the risk of developing paranoia, hallucinations and psychotic breaks five years later.

These studies she links to are referenced in an article that features the story of Don Corbeil:

Corbeil had been smoking pot since he was 14, a habit that escalated to about 10 joints a day.

He started hearing voices and, at one point, Corbeil thought he was the Messiah. Police found him one day talking incoherently, and brought him to hospital, where he was eventually diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.

Corbeil had dabbled in other drugs, such as acid and ecstasy. But marijuana was his mainstay.

Of course, the article does note that “who exactly is at risk remains hazy” and “the study, however, did not determine whether the drug prompted symptoms or was used to self-medicate.”  It also noted “the vast majority of pot smokers will not go psychotic.”  But the warnings that the small subset of young teenagers already susceptible to mental illness that smoke ten joints a day might have an increased risk of psychoses is enough for Kay to support locking adults in cages for smoking a joint at home.

According to CAMH, more than thirty percent of Onrtario’s Grade 10 students reported cannabis use in the past year. Add to that the worries about the vastly increased strength of today’s marijuana. Since the 1970s mainstream marijuana has seen a 25-fold increase in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient.

“Pot 2.0!  It’s Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed!”  Look, I’ve seen the clothes, hairstyles, and listened to the music of the 1970s… there is no way our parents’ weed was 25 times weaker than what we’re smoking now.  In fact, even the article from which Kay cribs the “Ontrario” high school sophomore data knows better:

And what they’re smoking is not their hippie dad’s doobie. Growers have bred more potent pot, more than doubling the amounts of Tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, and decreasing the cannabidiol, a protective ingredient.

Eh, “doubling”, “25-fold increase”, it’s all the same to a prohibitionist.

Now if Kay were really worried about those kids and their access to pot, maybe she should explain how what we’re doing now is working when 3-in-10 Ontario sophomores have smoked it this year?  According to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse, the number of tobacco smokers aged 15-19 works out to aboot 3-in-20 (14%), eh?  They also find that only aboot 1-in-20 (5.6%) 15-19-year-olds have an unhealthy dependence on alcohol.

It’s not that marijuana is harmless and that’s why we should legalize it.  We’ve found that prohibition of a very harmful substance, alcohol, was a worse problem than the minority of people who use it irresponsibly or unhealthily.  We’ve found that strict regulation of an addictive substance, tobacco, has had remarkable success in reducing its use.  So why wouldn’t we try that solution with a substance that is far less harmful and addictive than those two?

Barbara Kay tries to straddle the fence, because even she knows the truth about cannabis, but is still reluctant to give up on prohibition:

Clearly the actual statistical negatives of pot are very small. But what seems to emerge is that for a very small subset of the population, the risk for psychosis is high. One of these days it may be possible to test for that susceptibility as we do for allergies. What we know is that the health facts on marijuana use are not all in, and until researchers are as familiar with the effects of marijuana as they are with those of alcohol and tobacco, there should be no rush to make pot available in local handy stores.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/09/barabara-kay-more-warnings-about-the-dangers-of-pot/#ixzz0vBvpu4L2

We are still learning plenty about alcohol and tobacco and their effects on health and behavior.  It wasn’t that long ago that “Doctors Smoke Chesterfield” ads were on our TV sets and nobody had ever heard of “fetal alcohol syndrome”.  Yet discovery of tobacco and alcohol’s previously unknown health dangers never prompted Barbara Kay to pull those products from local handy stores (is that Canadian for “convenience store”?)  And day after day here at NORML we report study after study that shows heretofore unknown benefits of cannabis use, like this one that shows schizophrenics who use cannabis demonstrate better cognitive functioning… the same people whose susceptibility to cannabis Kay is using to frighten us into caging adults over cannabis.

As for allergies – there are people on this continent who are deathly allergic to peanuts.  Some of them are even children.  For the rest of us, peanuts are nice plant product we consume for nourishment, enjoyment, and occasionally while socializing.  The fact that peanuts can kill a tiny subset of people with an allergy didn’t lead us to laws banning all peanut use for adults.  Instead we did the sensible thing and required confectioners, bakers, and snack food manufacturers to label their products not only if they contain peanuts, but even if their non-peanut snacks are made with equipment that has touched peanuts.

So legalize it already and slap on a warning label: “This product contains cannabinoids. Discuss cannabinoid use with your doctor.  Cannabinoids should not be used by pregnant women, children, and those susceptible to psychoses or with a family history of mental illness.”

(AlterNet) As darkness approached, [Robin Rae Brown, 48,] returned to her pickup truck to find Broward County’s Deputy Sheriff Dominic Raimondi and Florida Fish and Wildlife’s Lieutenant David Bingham looking inside the cab. The two men asked what she was doing and when she said she had been bird watching, Bingham asked whether she had binoculars. As she opened her knapsack, Officer Raimondi spotted her incense and asked if he could see it. He took the bowl and incense, asking whether it was marijuana. “No,” she recalls saying. “It’s my smudge, which is a blend of sage, sweet grass, and lavender.” “Smells like marijuana to me,” said Raimondi, who admitted he had never heard of a smudge stick. He then ordered Robin to stand by her truck, while he took the incense back to his car and conducted a common field test, known as a Duquenois-Levine, or D-L, test. The result was positive for marijuana.

Exactly 90 days later, Robin was arrested at the spa in Weston, Florida where she has worked as a massage therapist for three years. She was handcuffed in front of clients and co-workers, and charged with felony possession of marijuana. She was brought to a local police precinct in the town of Davie where she was booked and held for three hours. Unable to post the $1,000 bail because she was not allowed to call her boyfriend Michael, she was transferred to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pompano Beach. At no time was she read her rights.

Five hours after her arrest, she was finally allowed a brief phone call and left a message for Michael to post her bail. At the jail, a female officer came in and told Robin to take off all her clothes. She had already been searched at the precinct station and had her shoes, socks and bra confiscated. “I’m on my period,” she said. “I don’t care,” said the officer, who ordered her to pull her underwear down to her ankles, squat over the floor drain and cough. The following morning at 4:30 a.m. she was released onto the streets of Pompano Beach with no idea where she was.

John Kelly’s entire article on Alternet is worth a read.  He shows how too many states have accepted the notion that if a police officer dips a substance into these unreliable D-L test packets and says it’s weed, well then, it’s weed, when in fact we are arresting, detaining, and imprisoning thousands based on little more than an officer’s word and pseudoscience.

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Hemp Headlines

1. Cannabis college opening Rhode Island
2. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com finds greater support for Prop 19 by robo-polls over human pollsters
3. Oregon Court of Appeals says marijuana use alone isn’t enough reason to take children from mother

Daily Toker Tunes

Brought to you by John Doe Radio.com

• Groovin’ Thursday: Indubious – “Ganja Weed”

Cannabis Conversations

• Austin filmmaker Bob Ray touring the Pacific Northwest for CrashCamFilms.com

Southern California Scene with Tere Joyce

• Lynnette Shaw from Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, consultant on Prop 19, on legalization in California

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cocaine isn’t our bailiwick here at NORML and personally I have a no-white-powders rule. But one of the biggest glaring examples of the racism of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs is the Crack-Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity.

It works like this: if you’re caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine, you get the same mandatory minimum as someone caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine. Crack cocaine and powder cocaine, chemically speaking, are identical with respect to addictive potential and psychoactive effect.

The difference, of course, is that crack cocaine is used by urban poor black people and powder cocaine is used by suburban affluent white people. Generally speaking.

So Congress, controlled by huge Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, is sending a bill to the Democratic president who campaigned on eliminating the crack/powder disparity. This bill will increased the trigger of a mandatory minimum for crack from 5 grams to 28 grams (an ounce).

Meaning that instead of a 500:5 disparity for white vs. black people’s cocaine, the disparity will now only be 500:28. For the math-impaired, that means that our cocaine sentencing laws will go from being 100 times more racist to blacks to being 18 times more racist to blacks.

I suppose I should be thrilled with any adjustment to mandatory minimums, but I have suffered one too many “compromises” by a huge Democratic majority and president I voted for who promised a whole lot of things I really believe in*, only to start negotiations in the middle, compromise to the right, and call it a victory for the left. (Funny, I don’t remember George W. Bush, with a barely-GOP majority, ever being stymied in pushing through Congress anything he wanted, except privatizing Social Security. And it was a Democratic Congress under Republican President Reagan who gave us this 500:5 mandatory minimum disparity in the first place!)

Chris Weigant at HuffPo nails how me and many others are feeling about this latest victory for bi-partisanship:

In true incrementalist fashion, Democrats have now made things slightly less unfair, but fell far short of actual fairness. It’s as if, right after the Civil War, Congress announced that black people would now count as four-fifths of a person, instead of the previous three-fifths — in other words, a step towards equality, but not exactly the giant leap of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Which makes it rather hard to praise such an effort, even though it does represent (some) progress.

This is landmark legislation, I realize. Moving away from the “lock them all up” mentality, for politicians, is remarkable simply because it does not happen often (read: “ever”). Backing down on Draconian drug laws is not exactly atop the priorities list of many politicians, because the ads attacking them for doing so just about write themselves. So I do applaud Congress for addressing the issue (both houses have now passed the bill).

While Congress did not have the courage of their convictions to do so this time around, they did take a baby step in the right direction. This is momentous, because it is the first such step in this direction in three or four decades. But I still can’t help but wish that Congress had tackled the problem not in such an incrementalist political fashion, but rather as an issue of rank inequality to be rectified by removingall of the legally-codified unfairness at once — to restore the concept of equal treatment under the law, rather than perpetuating (if slightly lessening) the inherent injustice which still exists.

* For example…

Holding accountable the companies that spied on us without warrants.

Ending extraordinary rendition of prisoners for torture.

Closing Guantanamo Bay

Ending “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”

Allowing Medicare to negotiate in bulk for lower drug prices.

“I won’t sign any health care reform bill without a public option.”

Ending DEA raids on legal medical marijuana states

Supporting Main Street over Wall Street.

I was just hoping for a change more meaningful than “He’s better than Bush”. Shee-it, I’M better than Bush!

(OregonLive.com) The state cannot take children away from a mother who tests positive for marijuana use without evidence that shows her drug use endangers the children, the Oregon Court of Appeals has ruled.

DHS workers visited the home and … found that the home was clean, the children had appropriate food to eat and they appeared “happy and healthy,” the appeals court wrote in its decision. A DHS worker also had testified that the mother “appears to have appropriate parenting skills.”

[I]n reversing the decision, the appeals court said “the record lacks evidence showing that mother’s use of marijuana, her ‘chemical abuse problem’ as found by the trial court, is a condition or circumstance that poses any risk to her children. That evidence is necessary to establish jurisdiction over the children.”

Keep in mind this isn’t a mom with a medical marijuana card, but just a regular occasional cannabis consumer.  We’ve reported on stories of people losing custody or having their custody severely curtailed because their medicinal marijuana use comes up in a court.  Now we have case law (until and if it is appealed to the Supreme Court) that says marijuana use in and of itself is not enough to prove you are a bad parent…

…just as the millions of cannabis-consuming parents can tell you from experience.  These are the good people I know who put their kids to bed and retire to the patio or garage to light up an end-of-day relaxant.  They keep their stash locked up away from the kids.  They are better parents than half the beer-drinking parents I know, and maybe precisely because their cannabis use allows them to de-stress and not take out a bad day at work on their kids.

The Marijuana Music Awards have grown over the years.  And, the music that gets entered has grown also.  Not to mention some of the artists themselves probably grow.  No, I dont know that.  But, I do know I’ve got to Judge the Marijuana Music Awards two prior years to this one and I was always impressed with the tunes I heard.  The John Doe Radio Show has thrived off these tunes and in The Stash, the section of the end of our show where we highlight the best of tunes that I can find, the majority of them have been Marijuana Music Award entries.

This year was no different.  Best Reggae was won by an act called Indubious.  The song is called ‘Ganja Weed’. Self proclaimed West Coast Reggae Funk Pioneers, the tunes that kick out from this group are nothing less than funky.  And. I quote from their band description here:  “Rising up out out of the fertile soil of Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, the group of Intergalatic Reggae Revolutionaries known as Indubious come straight from the heavens above to spread the word of love and light through their epic sound.”

So enjoy this tune, and think of other places where intergalactic beings are enjoying, well… Intergalactic Reggae.

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Ganja Jon ready to budtend at the new Cannabis Café From New Cannabis Café

Saturday, July 31, 2010 at 4:20pm, the World Famous Oregon NORML Cannabis Café reopens at 323 SE 82nd Ave in Portland, Oregon.

We’re so thrilled to be back after a three-month hiatus trying to find a building that was suitable in size and comfort to house the popular café.  We had looked at numerous buildings, including a marina, before we found this location.  Personally, I’m thrilled that the new café is just a six-block walk away from RollaJay Studios.

The location was completely remodeled to be a wine and piano bar.  The interior is decked out in beautiful light wood panel.  The floor has both tiled and carpeted areas.  The place comes with this gorgeous wicker furniture, barstools and chairs, tables and couches, and comfy little faux fireplaces for those winter months.

“Radical” Russ relaxes in the new cozy café furniture From New Cannabis Café

For entertainment, the place comes with a Karaoke setup and 50″ big screen TV (no, the piano in the photo is not staying).  There’s a back area outfitted with a shuffleboard table, a tournament air hockey table, a pocket (not coin operated) billiards table, and a sit-down two person table arcade machine with 30 or more of the greatest video games from the 1980’s (Frogger! Millipede! Ms. Pac-Man! Missile Command! Defender!)

There is an immaculate bar and kitchen area, with a great little alcove for a 270-degree vapor bar area and a walk-up hash bar area.

You can join us on NORML SHOW LIVE for the Grand Re-Opening.  We’re also looking into hosting our Friday live shows there with a permanent remote studio to save us setup time (besides, it’s just six blocks away!)

Our entrance is where that “FOR RENT” sign is. View Oregon NORML Locations in a larger map

Above the café is a little strip mall with a Mexican bakery (mmm, pastries!), a deli/lotto store (here in Oregon, we have video poker lottery, so some little places open up that are essentially just mini video casinos, but by law they have to serve food, because these gambling devices have to be just a part of a restaurant or bar), salon, and right next door is a tobacco and smoke shop.  There’s even a McDonald’s across the street and some great coffeeshops and restaurants a short walking distance away on Stark St.

For more information see http://usacannabiscafe.com.

In the summer of 2010, Josh Heinrichs will be releasing his highly anticipated, first full length, solo album since disbanding Jah Roots last year. The album, ‘Josh Heinrichs & Friends,’ will feature a diverse & highly talented mix from today’s current, international, reggae scene. Some of the artists collaborating in the studio with Josh are Cas Haley, members of Katchafire, Inna Vision, Ooklah The Moc, Clear Conscience, 77 Jefferson, as well as others, yet to be announced.

Josh Heinrichs founded Jah Roots in 2001, along with four musician-friends from his hometown of Springfield, MO. Over the following eight years, they released five studio albums and toured extensively throughout the USA. During this time, Heinrichs wrote a number of songs that eventually gained fantastically large on-line notoriety, and were downloaded en masse all over the world. The band’s success was recognized in the official media outlets of such locales as Guam, Hawaii and New Zealand. However, after years playing to overflowing crowds at outdoor festivals and packed mid-sized venues, the toll of non-stop touring began to take a personal toll, and Heinirchs decided to step away from the band he had taken so far, in order to devote more time to his wife and children.

Be on the look out for Josh Henrich and Friends to be released on August 24th. Today’s Toker Tune is a live version of “Spliff and My Lady from the CD “Josh Heinrichs and The Soul Riddim Band Live at Schwagstock.

You can check out more Josh Heinrichs music and his tour schedule at www.facebook.com/JoshHeinrichsReggae www.myspace.com/joshuaheinrichs and you may purchase Josh’s music on i-tunes Josh Heinrichs

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