“Despite anti-drug education campaigns which state marijuana is a gateway for harder drug use, new research from the University of New Hampshire says for most people that’s not true.” “But pot does serves as a “gateway,” says Dr. Karen Van Gund, associate professor of sociology., mainly for young people who are poor, unemployed, and subjected to severe psychological stress. In other words, the path to other drugs is not necessarily the pot, but rather the potholes young people encounter on the road.”
“We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the typical pot smoker — a lumpy, lazy couch potato with one hand wrapped around the remote and the other elbow-deep in a bag of nacho cheese Doritos.
But new research out of France gives a different spin to the stereotypical stoner.
“Cannabis is supposed to increase appetite,” says Dr. Yann Le Strat, a psychiatrist at Louis-Mourier Hospital in Colombes, France and co-author of a new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “So we hypothesized that cannabis users would be more likely to have higher weight than non-users and be more likely to be obese.”
Instead, Le Strat and his colleagues found just the opposite.
“We found that cannabis users are less likely to be obese than non-users,” he says. “We were so surprised, we thought we had [made] a mistake. Or that our results were due to the sample we studied. So we turned to another completely independent sample and found exactly the same association…”
“I know when we think about smoking pot, one of the jokes is that it gives you the munchies and dry mouth so you drink a bunch of water and eat a bunch of Cheetos,” she says.
“Maybe we need to adjust the stereotype.””
More: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/pot-smokers-skinnier-non-tokers-study-says-1C6437141
“Turns out that in spite of the late-night pizza binges and countless bags of Doritos they consume, the average marijuana user is actually less likely to be obese than the general, non-pot-smoking public.”
“Smoking marijuana may improve some symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a new study suggests.
Patients with multiple sclerosis in the study had less muscle tightness, also called spasticity, and less pain after they smoked marijuana, compared with after they took a placebo…
More research is needed to confirm the findings and to investigate whether lower doses of marijuana may have similar benefits with fewer adverse effects, said study researcher Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, professor of neurosciences and director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at the University of California, San Diego.
The study is published today (May 14) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Improved symptoms
Previous studies have suggested marijuana use may have benefits for MS patients, but most have investigated oral forms of the drug, including mouth sprays and capsules. In addition, most studies have asked patients to report changes in their symptoms, rather than having a researcher objectively assess them…
Participants were randomly assigned to receive treatment with a marijuana cigarette or a placebo cigarette, which did not contain delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient of marijuana. Participants smoked a marijuana cigarette once a day for three consecutive days under the supervision of a researcher. Eleven days later, participants repeated the procedure, but this time, they switched treatment groups so that everyone received the marijuana cigarette and placebo at some point in the study. On average, participants smoked four puffs of their cigarettes at each session.
Shortly after each treatment session, the researchers assessed participants with a test specifically designed to measure spasticity.
After smoking marijuana, participants experienced a 30 percent reduction in spasticity, compared with when they smoked the placebo cigarette, Corey-Bloom said.”
More: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/pot-smoking-may-help-relieve-symptoms-ms-771076
“Smoking cannabis appeared to reduce tremor and pain and improve sleep among Parkinson’s disease patients, researchers from Israel reported here.
Overall, patients’ scores on the standard Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) averaged 33 before they smoked cannabis in the laboratory and averaged 24 after 30 minutes (P<0.01), Ruth Djaldetti, MD, of Tel Aviv University Israel, reported at her poster presentation at the International Congress on Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders.
“We not only saw improvement in tremor in these patients, but also in rigidity and in bradykinesia,” Djaldetti told MedPage Today. “I would recommend use of marijuana to my patients as a last resort if nothing else was working for them or if they had pain.””
More: http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/forbidden-medicine
“People who had used marijuana in the past month had smaller waists and lower levels of insulin resistance – a diabetes precursor – than those who never tried the drug, in a new study.
The findings, based on surveys and blood tests of about 4,700 U.S. adults, aren’t enough to prove marijuana keeps users thin or wards off disease. And among current pot smokers, higher amounts of marijuana use weren’t linked to any added health benefits, researchers reported in The American Journal of Medicine.
“These are preliminary findings,” said Dr. Murray Mittleman, who worked on the study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
“It looks like there may be some favorable effects on blood sugar control, however a lot more needs to be done to have definitive answers on the risks and potential benefits of marijuana usage.”
Although pot smoking is a well-known cause of “the munchies,” some previous studies have found marijuana users tend to weigh less than other people, and one suggested they have a lower rate of diabetes. Trials in mice and rats hint that cannabis and cannabinoid receptors may influence metabolism.”
