Marijuana and other drugs are taking over our youth. They think doing drugs, smoking or drinking makes them “cool”!

I am personally very against of any drug use. It is harming our health,  social life, relationship, and everything else.

If there is any good thing about doing drugs, please let me know, and why not, I will start doing drugs too.

This is an article that I found in WORLD SCIENCE while trying to find out if there is anything good about smocking pot. Please read and leave a comment. If you have any experience with smocking pot please share with us. Do you think smocking marijuana is good or bad?

“Long before it’s in the papers”
April 29, 2009

Pot may be both good and bad, researchers say

Nov. 25, 2006
Special to World Science

For scientists, as for so­ci­e­ty at large, ma­ri­jua­na has been among the most be­dev­il­ing of drugs.

Some stud­ies have found that the il­lic­it sub­stance dam­ag­es the mem­o­ry. Oth­ers sug­gest that it does­n’t, or even that it’s ben­e­fi­cial for some con­di­tions, in­clud­ing Alz­hei­mer’s dis­ease. Through it all, the pub­lic clam­ors for an­swer­s—des­per­ate­ly needed to re­solve a decades-long, rau­cous de­bate over wheth­er pot is safe enough to be le­gal.

Leaves of the ma­ri­jua­na or Can­na­bis sa­ti­va plant (cour­te­sy Io­wa Dept. of Pub­lic Safe­ty)
A theory now emerg­ing from a re­search group pro­poses that the truth may be more com­plex than ei­ther side in that de­bate would have us be­lieve. Ma­ri­jua­na may have played a trick on us all, they sug­gest, by play­ing the roles of both health vil­lain and he­ro.

In hefty doses, they ar­gue, its ac­tive in­gre­di­ent may pro­tect the brain ag­ainst var­i­ous types of da­m­age, where­as in ti­ny doses, harm­ful ef­fects would come through.

The bad doses would be much low­er than those nor­mal­ly ob­tained from smok­ing a “joint,” ar­gues Yo­sef Sar­ne of Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty in Is­ra­el, a mem­ber of the re­search team. On the oth­er hand, he notes, a large dose in­ev­i­ta­bly be­comes a small one as the body slow­ly clears it out—so per­haps a us­er can nev­er side­step the dan­gers com­plete­ly.

Sar­ne and five colleagues at the university pre­sented find­ings in sup­port of their hy­po­the­sis in the Nov. 6 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Neu­ro­science Let­ters.

The ac­tive com­pound res­pon­si­ble for ma­ri­jua­na’s “high” is called del­ta nine te­t­ra­hy­dro­can­na­bi­nol, or THC. This and re­lat­ed com­pounds, in high doses, tend to re­strict the re­lease of a chem­i­cal called glu­ta­mate from brain cells, Sarne and col­leagues ar­gued. This ef­fect can be help­ful be­cause ex­cess re­lease of glu­ta­mate—which is also an es­sen­tial chem­i­cal mes­sen­ger in the brain—is im­pli­cat­ed in var­i­ous dis­or­ders, in­clud­ing Alzheimer’s.

This, the scientists wrote, may ex­plain why THC-like com­pounds, called can­nabi­noids, help pro­tect brain cells in cases such as is­che­mia, or blocked blood ves­sels; ex­ci­to­tox­i­ci­ty, or over­sti­m­u­la­tion of nerve cells; and even phy­si­cal in­jur­ies.

Stud­ies sug­gest cannabi­noids tem­per glu­ta­mate re­lease by par­tially block­ing mo­lec­u­lar gate­ways in nerve cells, known as voltage-dependent cal­ci­um chan­nels, Sarne and col­leagues wrote.

But ultra-low doses ap­pear to have the op­po­site ef­fect, they added.

Thus they proposed that “an acute treat­ment re­sults in a high con­cen­tra­tion of the drug close to the time of trau­ma and there­fore pro­tects the brain from the acute in­sult, while chron­ic treat­ment ex­poses the or­gan­ism to low con­cen­tra­tions of can­na­bi­noids for long pe­ri­ods of time.” Dur­ing that time, “mi­nor” nerve cell dam­age ac­cu­mu­lates.

In the stu­dy, Sarne and col­leagues in­jected mice with THC doses that they said were some 1,000 times low­er than what hu­mans would get from smok­ing a joint, tak­ing in­to ac­count body weight. The treat­ment sig­nif­i­cantly wors­ened the ro­dents’ per­for­mance on maze tests three weeks lat­er, com­pared to un­treat­ed mice, they wrote.

Ex­act­ly how the chem­i­cal dam­ag­es the brain re­mains un­clear, Sarne’s team wrote, as are the im­pli­ca­tions for hu­mans.

“Hu­man sub­jects may overcome such mi­nor deficits,” they wrote. Some brain im­ag­ing stud­ies have found that fre­quent smok­ers “can com­pen­sate for sub­tle cog­ni­tive deficits by en­list­ing larg­er brain re­gions or by re­cruit­ing ad­di­tion­al brain ar­eas…. Yet, such sub­tle deficits might emerge un­der cer­tain be­hav­ior­al or phys­i­o­lo­gi­cal con­di­tions.”

The im­por­tance of this re­search goes “be­yond its sci­en­tif­ic sig­nif­i­cance,” the team wrote in a pre­vi­ous pa­per, pub­lished in the jour­nal Med­i­cal Hy­pothe­ses in 2004. “Can­na­bi­noids are the most wide­ly used drugs of abuse. In spite of the many re­ports on their long-term neu­ro­toxic ef­fects, can­na­bi­noids are still con­sid­ered by many as ‘safe soft drugs,’” and their ben­e­fi­cial ef­fects are of­ten cit­ed to back up claims for their long-term safe­ty.

Distinguishing these two modes of ac­tion may help edu­cate the pub­lic as to pot’s un­healthy con­se­quences, while clar­i­fy­ing the clin­i­cal ben­e­fits, they wrote. Can­na­bi­noids are used or un­der con­sid­er­a­tion for use, they not­ed, to fight pain and in­flam­ma­tion, to pre­vent vom­it­ing and nau­sea from chemoth­erapy, to stim­u­late ap­pe­tite in AIDS and an­o­rex­ia pa­tients, and to treat mus­cle spasms in mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis.