Marijuana | Addiction Treatment Strategies

New research shows that people who start using marijuana at a young age and those who use the greatest amount of marijuana may be the most cognitively impaired.
 The research was presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego.
Marijuana users show deficits in the ability to switch behavioral responses according to the context of a situation, also known as cognitive flexibility. The new study, directed by Staci Gruber, PhD, at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, compared people’s performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, a test of cognitive flexibility. During the…

Regular cannabis users who start using the drug before the age of 15 perform worse on brain tests than those who start later, according to new research published in the June issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Researchers from the Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo say their study suggests that early cannabis use may have more harmful effects on people’s cognitive functioning.
The researchers asked 104 chronic cannabis users to take part in a series of neuropsychological tasks. These tested their executive functioning, attention, perseverance, ability to form abstract concepts, visual and motor skills, and mental…

Facts and Stats
1) Marijuana in the 70?s had from 1-3% THC concentration. Today’s concentration is 18-25%. This represents an increase of at least 600% and as much as 2,500%;
2) THC is a hallucinogenic drug;
3) Commonly experienced side effects of THC include memory loss, distorted perception including the inability to gauge and accurately process emotional information , difficulty with cognition and problem solving, loss of motor skills, decreased muscle strength, increased heart rate and increased anxiety;
4) Marijuana contains approximately 400 known chemicals including those found in cigarettes. It also deposits…

Cannabis use during adolescence and young adulthood increases the risk of psychotic symptoms, while continued cannabis use may increase the risk for psychotic disorder in later life, concludes a new study published online in the British Medical Journal.
Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in the world, particularly among adolescents, and is consistently linked with an increased risk for mental illness. However, it is not clear whether the link between cannabis and psychosis is causal, or whether it is because people with psychosis use cannabis to self medicate their symptoms.
So a team of researchers, led by Professor Jim van…