CANNABIS, OUR CHILDREN and the MEDIA

“Maternal instinct, ought to have been the driving force concerning use of marijuana and the potential congenital damage to the health of the fetus, but thanks to our media, it’s largely been ignored.

Regarding the now well-accepted effects of consumption during adolescence: the uniform voice of all the respiratory physicians, the long term brain structure changes, the high incidence of psychiatric disorders, and the now proven gateway effect, one must realize there is quite a unison chorus, all crying “caution.”

Legalizers, of course, with the help of the media, hide the truth!  The debate at present, relates to “civil rights” – the users right to get stoned without affecting anybody else – or at least, doing minimal harm, to those around them.

They not only ignore the work of the eminent Prof. Nahas, but in light of their goal, full legalization, becoming honest about the dangers, is just not going to happen.

But we too, must accept our part in this failure – the ‘follow-up’ on the vital dissemination of this information.  Rather, lies and propaganda “linger-lacking” waiting, as government ignores it’s primary mandate – to protect the populace – and the legalizers, of course, hire pseudo-scientists, with a goal of validating any imagined implication of medicinal use!

Congenital effects: has the alarm been sounded loudly enough?

In his book, “Keep Off the Grass,” published some 28 years ago, Gabriel G. Nahas, M.D., Ph.D., devoted an entire chapter to “Marijuana and DNA” in which he described experiments he and his fellow researchers noted abnormalities in the biology of the human cell, specifically lymphocytes, as a result of smoking marihuana.

When these cells were cultured for three days, the ’cells from the marihuana smokers showed “an abnormally high number of chromosome breaks” compared with cells taken from non-smokers.’

Later in his book, when hypothesizing about possible fetal effects of marihuana smoking, Nahas stated:

“From my own observations, it is logical that a substance known to slow down the division of cells could affect the fetus, an organism in which cell division is occurring at a very rapid rate.”

Parallels with tobacco consumption, also ought to have been a red flag!

The majority, now aware, of course, that tobacco has been definitively linked with lung cancer, few are cognizant of the dose-response – relationship between lifetime tobacco consumption – the interaction of the dose and duration.  In recent decades, it has been demonstrated with the lung cancer incidence.

But what is not widely understood is that the best relationship was shown by advanced U.N. statisticians to be with the FOURTH POWER OF THE DURATOIN OF TOBACCO EXPOSURE – so that if one smokes tobacco for twice as long then one’s incidence of lung cancer rises 16-FOLD! 

But when we factor in the congenital abnormalities – the whole discussion is re-cast completely.

All studies show increased:

1. cono-ventricular septal defects

2. greatly increased gastroschisis,

3. 8 fold elevated anotia (born with no ears) or microotia;

4. and neural tube closure defects (spina bifida etc.).

Concerns continue, that the four congenital / childhood cancers related to cannabis – brain, rhabdomyosarcoma and leukaemia and non-lymphoblastic leukaemia are ignored, as legalizers flood the media with bogus claims and the media cooperates with their goal of legalization.

Unfortunately, current technologies, while obviously much more powerful than the tools Dr. Nahas had at his disposal, are largely not being employed to define the harms of use of illicit drugs.

This is not to say that no work is being done in this area, but with the government’s abdicating its role and squandering tax money, as future generations continue using — and the result is, more are at risk and the blood is on all their hands!

Nahas also did very nice work with sperm mutagenesis and chromosomal clastogenesis, which also necessarily implies subfertilty, foetal death and major foetal abnormalities.

These arguments are completely missing from the present self-centered civil rights debates.   Meanwhile the real evidence of Science accumulates almost entirely on our side, yet it too is ignored by the myopic media.

Among his many other prestigious endeavors, Dr. Nahas was a professor of medicine (anesthesiology) at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.  One cannot help but see a comparison between cigarette smoking a lung cancer and know other serious ramifications are yet to be discovered.

By the late 1940s, physicians in the UK and US alarmed at rising rates of the disease it would take at least another half century before science was able to identify the precise pathophysiology of the disease at the cellular level.

Not unlike this debate over marijuana, … during this time, despite the growing warnings from the medical profession and public health officials, the tobacco industry fought back with biased research, paid-for professional endorsements and other propaganda until they were stopped in their tracks by the facts.

Implications of new scientific investigations are startling – details now show free oxygen radicals as a major cause of congenital abnormalities.

Free radicals are not one of the chemical species we normally test for, but research in the last few years has shown that they are an impo0rtant part of cell signaling.  However when excessive, they damage all major cellular organelles and species – including DNA and therefore genes, and key enzymes and proteins and membranes etc.

They are produced in high volume by tobacco.

Remember how cannabis is partially burnt when smoked.   Well any smoked material will also produce enormous amounts of oxy-radicals the cannabis literature talks about 10¹⁹ per puff!!!

This correlation also explains the terrible congenital anomalies described in cannabis use too!   Yet the media remains silent . . . yet should the media be held accountable for not drawing attention to crucial information which protect our children?