It stopped having any noticeable effect on me, many years ago. Is this unusual? How does this happen?
Cheers, Karl L. Wuensch -----Original Message----- From: Mike Palij [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 7:48 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Michael Palij Subject: re: [tips] Sanjay Gupta on "Why I changed my mind on weed" On Thu, 08 Aug 2013 07:54:14 -0700, Carol DeVolder wrote: >I wonder what impact this more or less open letter will have: > http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/ I've read Gupta's article and the follow-up posts on Tips and I'd like to make a couple of points: (1) Here is the text of what constitutes a Schedule I narcotic according to the DEA: |Schedule I | |Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no |currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule |I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with |potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. Some examples |of Schedule I drugs are: | |heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), |3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote Anyone who has any experience with marijuana will appreciate the absurdity of having it identified as a Schedule I drug. Why alcohol is not listed here is the real question. Oh, and cocaine, methamphetamine (for "Breaking Bad" fans), oxycodone/OxyContin, adderall, and fentanyl are all Schedule II, that is, are considered less dangerous drugs than marijuana. Here is the DEA page: http://www.justice.gov/dea/druginfo/ds.shtml (2) Back when I was in graduate school at Stony Brook, the famed psychiatrist Max Fink (at SB's Med School's Psychiatry Dept) gave a colloquium in the psychology department on the effect of marijuana on cognitive processes (I forget what specifically he had done but a Google Scholar search for "Max Fink" and marijuana gets a lot of hits from the 1960s and 1970s. I spoke to Fink after his presentation and asked him if he had considered studying the effects of marijuana use on priming effects on the lexical decision task (Roger Schvaneveldt who was one of the original researchers on this topic was still at Stony Brook at this time). Fink said it would be an interesting thing to do but it was a great big pain in the butt getting funding for any research involving marijuana and if you did get funding, there were all sorts of regulations that one had to follow that really discouraged people from using it in research. He said the really foolish and scary thing was that there was research using new drugs that was far easier to get permission to do and with far less oversight and regulations but the drugs could be far more dangerous than marijuana (how dangerous was unknown but if one checks the side effects/adverse effects of drugs in PDR or one's favorite drug reference, one should not be surprised to see how often death, stroke, cardiac arrest, etc., are listed as side effects). Others have pointed out that U.S. legal policies concerning drugs were not rational, did not really rely upon scientific data, and which drugs were considered "safe" and which were considered "dangerous" often involved sociocultural and racial considerations. Draw your own conclusion about the race-drug connection. There is an entry on Fink on Wikipedia and it is mostly concerned with his work with ECT/Electroshock which, as we all know, is far safer than using marijuana. ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Fink For people considering a classroom exercise on the Pro's and Cons of marijuana for medicinal purposes, see the following handout: Http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/files/marijuana_notes.pdf The U.S. can benefit from a more rational drug policy and legislation. That it took this long for Sanjay Gupta to realize this about marijuana is disappointing because that means that there are probably many more physicians who have some unsubstantiated beliefs about pot but what else is new? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13060.c78b93d4d09ef6235e9d494b3534420e&n=T&l=tips&o=27000 or send a blank email to leave-27000-13060.c78b93d4d09ef6235e9d494b35344...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=27006 or send a blank email to leave-27006-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
