A recent research study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology suggests that marijuana use might more than triple your risk of death from hypertension.
The study doesn’t pretend to be conclusive. It’s a small “retrospective follow-up study” of 1200 people, based on a 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Lead author Barbara A. Yankey, a PhD student in the School of Public Health, Georgia State University, Atlanta, calls it “an exploratory study” and wants more and better studies.
“With the impending increase in recreational marijuana use,” Yankey says, “it is important to establish whether any health benefits outweigh the potential health, social and economic risks.”
Those types of studies are just what Attorney General Jeff Sessions is attempting to prevent in rolling back a Drug Enforcement Agency decision to permit more labs to cultivate marijuana for research. There is currently only one, greatly limiting our ability to study the health effects of cannabis use in the short- or long-term.
Marijuana has long been touted for being less harmful than alcohol or tobacco – no one has ever been confirmed to die from an overdose of cannabis – less addictive than opioids – in fact, opioid use and overdoses go down in states with legal marijuana – and with potential pain-killing attributes for people with fibromyalgia and other forms of chronic pain.
It’s reputation as a gateway drug that sets people on a course of greater and worse addictions is contested, although there is evidence that young brains can be cognitively affected.
What few people can defend or explain is why marijuana is on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act – no health benefits, no safe use – while cocaine and the prescription painkillers (such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin) causing the opioid epidemic are on the more lenient Schedule 2.
Sessions has long had an animus towards marijuana that seems to go beyond science or reason. Any inconvenient facts that would encourage wider or federal decriminalization or legalization is seen as flawed or incorrect or propaganda. Meanwhile legalization at the state level may have passed the tipping point. More than half the states and half the population now allow at least medical marijuana.
Rather than try to lock the barn door after the horses have escaped, the AG should encourage scientific research into the health effects of marijuana. Even if marijuana is harmful, cannabidiol — a non-euphoric component — may be safer. A synthetic form of THC — the chief euphoric component of cannabis — already is legal for prescription under federal law. It’s better we have all the information, good or bad.
