What are the REAL long term health effects of weed on a person's body and mind?

Answer 1

I'm kind of curious about this. I don't smoke pot and hardly think it is advisable to do because of risk of incarceration in owning/selling/smoking it. That being said, how well controlled are the studies or people's personal clinical experience for the causative effect of smoking cannabis and how sure are they that these latent problems were not present before people smoked. The challenges to this I can see are as follows:

It is well known that people suffering from a variety of mental illnesses tend to self-medicate in an attempt to feel better or normal. Isn't it possible that people who are bipolar, schizophrenic smoke weed BECAUSE they are ill to feel better? I ask also because many mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, have considerable genetic elements, while obviously smoking of cannabis is extremely widespread.

It may be difficult to determine causality because many teenagers experiment with weed and a lot of mental disorders in life appear around this time, so it seem possible that these individuals will fall back on this thing that is famililar and comforting to them as they feel different and wrong. That is, the drug use will emerge parallel and secondary to the emerging illness, not contributing to the illness (although I bet it couldn't help much). Statistical analysis and observation would strongly but erroneously correlate drug use with said mental problems.

Cannabis is a rather anxiolytic drug so isn't it likely that people wouldn't feel comfortable talking about their mental problems until they start smoking? This would also seem like the problems emerge with the drug use.

Academic life science is overwhelmingly funded by government grants, mainly the National Institute of Health. I have read time and again about the preferential funding of grants to projects highlighting the detrimental effects of drugs (mainly cannabis) and passing over clinical uses of these drugs for other projects. So an aim to show cannabis smoking alleviates diabetic symptoms (I just made that up) will not get funded but "Cannabis Smoke Sensitized Subjects to Bipolar Disorders) will get funded. It is a strong political interest.

Smoking cannabis very well may do every single negative effect they say, but I, for one, am unconvinced by the very poorly controlled experiments and sloppy work I've seen. I believe in transparency in science and that these experiments should be approached from a completely level and unbiased ground.

What do people think of this?

Answer 2

lung damage from the smoke, possibly some effect on hormone changes because THC mimics estrogen a little,(man t!ts). The comments on mental health do not consider under reported or under noticed conditions or that many drug addictions are cases of self medicating to deal with disorders that are presenting sub acutely.
There is some memory(short term) impairment but this disappears as the drug level in the body drops and is back to normal in about a month in most cases.

Answer 3

Hi,
To my knowledge, the long term effects of Cannabis are not fully known. The short term effects however, are very strongly known!

There are several long-term effects which are 'expected' to occur though:

- Increased Chances of Lung Disease
- Damage to the respiratory system
- Damage to the brain
- Possible damage to other parts of the body as drugs can alter the way things work (eg: the blood chemistry)

Hope this helps,
Tom

Answer 4

Panacea is full of sh**! There has been absolutely NO documented evidence that cannabis use has caused ANY of the conditions he has mentioned! Many of the conditions he has cited have DEFINITIVE links to inherited traits. The fact that the folks who suffer from these conditions may have smoked pot in their life is absolutely no indicator that pot contributed to those conditions. The latest and most exhaustive study found NO correlation between regular, daily, pot smoking and ANY types of mental or physical illness. Anyone who tells you otherwise has an agenda.

Answer 5

I worked as a trainee psychiatrist a few years ago before changing speciality and there was a STRONG correlation between patients who were chronically psychotic (not just acute drug induced) and cannabis use.

The only surprise is that it has taken so long to prove it.

Panacea below knows what he is talking about

Answer 6

I saw a hell of alot of people with serious mental illness that simply wasn't present before they started using pot. Of course, I worked inpatient community mental health. Still, I would say at least half of the patients had no mental illness at all before they started smoking. Interestingly enough, pointing this out to them was completely ineffective in getting them to stop. Alot of these people had SERIOUS mental illness......schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar, were all very common.....as were people taking various anti-seizure meds. This makes me wonder if there aren't a huge number of people with more mild mental illness who simply don't seek treatment. The most common mental illnesses are depression, anxiety disorder and eating disorders. I know of at least one girlfriend who smoking pot was a major factor in her bulemia. I bet many, if not most of these people simply don't seek treatment.

BTW, pot is the number one drug for which people seek treatment for addiction for and it is also the number one drug people end up in prison for a drug related violent crime for.

Remember all this the next time some jackhole tells you pot is safe or even good for you. It definitely is not, in my experience (which is extensive).

Answer 7

maybe slower thought reaction, mild memory loss,....i just read an article in the Denver post that said it doesn't cause cancer.....the long term health effects aren't all that serious though.

Answer 8

Emphysema (sp?). The rest of it goes away if you quit for long enough.

Answer 9

It makes you respond to "Hey, Stupid!" about 10 seconds slower...

Answer 10

increased chances of lung cancer