How Marijuana Affects You: Part 3

From WebMD..

How Does Marijuana Affect You? 
In our previous two posts, we discussed what makes Cannabis a medicine and how to effectively administer it. In this post we discuss any possible detrimental health effects of cannabis.

Cancer.
No link has been found between smoking marijuana and cancers in the lung, head, or the neck. Limited evidence suggests that heavy marijuana use may lead to one type of testicular cancer. Researchers don’t have enough information whether cannabis affects other cancers, including prostate, cervical, and bladder cancers and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Lungs.
Regular marijuana use can give you constant coughs and phlegm. They may go away when you stop smoking. It’s unclear if marijuana can lead to asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Cannabis actually helps open the airways at first. But evidence shows that regular marijuana use will make your lungs not work as well.

Mental health.

 People with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders may be more likely to use marijuana heavily, about twice a month. Researchers have also found links between cannabis use and bipolar disorder, major depression, and childhood anxiety. What’s hard to untangle is if marijuana use leads to mental illness, or if it’s the other way around.

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How Marijuana Affects You: Part 2

From WebMD.. 

How Does Marijuana Affect You?  

In our last posting, we started a discussion of the active treatment ingredients in Cannabis medicine. Then we started to discuss ways to administer the drug treatment, starting with smoking. We now resume....

Ways you can smoke cannabis include:

• Rolled into a cigarette
• In a pipe or water pipe, called a bong
• In a cigar that has been hollowed out and refilled with marijuana, called a blunt
• In the form of sticky resins that have been drawn from the cannabis plant. Resins often have much higher amounts of THC than regular marijuana.

Eating or drinking. 

This slows marijuana’s effects because the THC has to go through your digestive system. It may take 30 minutes to 2 hours for you to get high. But it will last longer -- up to 8 hours -- than if you smoked or vaped pot. You can mix cannabis into brownies, cookies, candy, and other foods, or brew it into a tea.

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How Marijuana Affects You: Part 1

From WebMD.. 

How Does Marijuana Affect You?  

IN THIS ARTICLE

Key Chemicals

Ways to Use It

Benefits

Harms

Medical marijuana is now legal in a majority of states. A small but growing number of states and cities have legalized recreational pot as well. Marijuana still is the most commonly used illegal drug in the U.S. 

Marijuana has some well-proven benefits, including relief for long-term pain. But smoking marijuana can have some bad effects on your health, including making breathing problems worse.

The federal ban on marijuana makes it hard to study its effects on humans. For example, very little research exists on edible marijuana.

Key Chemicals

Marijuana comes from the dried flowers of cannabis plants.It has more than 500 chemicals. Cannabis can have a psychoactive -- or mind-altering -- effect on you.

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Marijuana: Good or Bad?

According to the National Institutes of Health, people have used marijuana, or cannabis, to treat their ailments for at least 3,000 years. However, the Food and Drug Administration have not deemed marijuana safe or effective in the treatment of any medical condition, although cannabidiol, a substance that is present in marijuana, received approval in June 2018 as a treatment for some types of epilepsy.

Marijuana is being increasingly legalized in the U.S., but is it safe?

This tension, between a widespread belief that marijuana is an effective treatment for a wide assortment of ailments and a lack of scientific knowledge on its effects, has been somewhat exacerbated in recent times by a drive toward legalization.

Thirty Three states plus the District of Columbia have now made marijuana available for medical — and, in some states, recreational — purposes.

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WebMD: Medical Marijuana FAQs

What is medical marijuana?

Medical marijuana uses the marijuana plant or chemicals in it to treat diseases or conditions. It's basically the same product as recreational marijuana, but it's taken for medical purposes. 

The marijuana plant contains more than 100 different chemicals called cannabinoids. Each one has a different effect on the body. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) are the main chemicals used in medicine. THC also produces the "high" people feel when they smoke marijuana or eat foods containing it. 

What is medical marijuana used for? 

Medical Marijuana: What Does It Treat?

Medical marijuana is used to treat a number of different conditions, including: 

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Video Transcript: The Anti-Cancer Properties of Cannabis

Video Transcript: The Anti-Cancer Properties of Cannabis

Ty Bollinger: One thing. And thank you for sharing all that about hemp, cannabis, because that’s kind of a little bit of our hidden history. People don’t realize that. They think—they hear the word marijuana, which is actually a slang for the hemp or the cannabis plant, and they think, “Oh, you must be a pothead.”

Dr. Patrick Quillin: Yeah.

Ty Bollinger: Right? They don’t realize the thousands of medicinal and therapeutic uses for this plant. And so I think that’s really important for people that are watching to know that this is a medicinal plant. And so, thank you for sharing in those details.

Dr. Patrick Quillin: It’s an industrial plant. I mean, instead of—one of the beauties of hemp is you don’t have to, there’s no insect that will eat the plant, and so you don’t have to spray it. And so, instead of cutting down trees to make paper, we could grow hemp and use that to make paper. You can use it to make materials, canvas, clothing; it’s an industrial material. It’s a nutritive material, and it’s a medicinal substance.
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How Cannabis Helped Me Beat My Alcoholism

  Ask anyone in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to read that headline and I’d bet you a bag of nickels that their reaction would be one of extreme fear coupled with a sense of creeping self-doubt.

  I’m proud of who I am. I’m a halfie — half Puerto Rican and half Brooklyn Italian. I get my soul / connection to my Taino ancestors from my Rican side, and I get my addictions and legacy of dysfunction from that side as well.

  From the beginning I knew life was going to be hard. I accepted it and was fortunate to glean a lifetime of knowledge on what it was like to struggle — -and struggle I did — hardcore.