www.dailyherald.com -
The recent flurry of findings on marijuana's health risks may have baby boomers wondering, "How can that be?" Chances of getting into legal trouble aside, is it possible their kids might be in danger of heart or mental health issues when they themselves turned out just fine? Researchers have learned plenty about pot in recent years, though there's much that is still not known and plenty that's hotly debated.
Parents may just want to listen up: The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among marijuana users over age 12, almost 35 percent used marijuana 20 or more days in the past month.
One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the '70s. Today's leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are "more plastic, more sensitive to being modified," are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. Teens' tendency toward experimentation is in part because of the fact that the frontal cortex, which helps drive judgment, isn't fully developed until the early 20s. And peer pressure to smoke doesn't help. The greater a person's exposure to THC, the greater the hit to brain metabolism, a reflection of brain function......
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=225423
