The Harmful Effects Of Marijuana On Black Men In America.

by Staff October 23, 2016 10 Comments Health News Opinion Weekly Columns

Like Love Haha Wow Sad Angry

(ThyBlackMan.com) I used to believe for many years that all marijuana used to be harmless, but when I did research on marijuana including synthetic weed (aka spice), I finally realized that marijuana isn’t as harmless as I initially thought it was.

Intro: Here are the actual negative side effects that marijuana including synthetic weed has on our community.

1. Severely Alters A Person’s Mind – I’ve seen people whose minds were severely altered sometimes for the worse. One example was back in 2007 when my older brother came home one night extremely high on weed and wanted to beat up somebody and he big-blunt-2015-blackman came and punched me for no apparent reason and I showed no fear, so I punched him back and by youngest brother Ricky broke up the scuffle.

2. Psychologically Kills A Person’s Motivation And Drive – I’ve seen many young black men that won’t get up, get out, and do something that is very productive with their lives because they listen to mostly corporate bastardized hip-hop that constantly tells them to sit around all day and stay high on weed.

3. Creates Potentially Inadequate Husbands And Fathers – I’ve seen many young black men become very incapable of providing for their families because for many of them, they have a very unhealthy and dangerous addiction to weed that’s hard to break so they can become good husbands and fathers.

4. Promoted By Corporate America Via Bastardized Urban Music – 9 times out of 10, when a young black man listens to the radio, he’s gonna hear messages that amounts to various forms of black male self-destruction and one of those messages is when puppet rappers like Lil Wayne and even local rappers encourage young black men to engage in a habit that will lead them down a dangerous path to self-destruction by staying high off weed as much as possible.

5. The American Prison Industrial Complex – Marijuana is very heavily connected to the prison industrial complex here in America because young black men get very egregious sentences of 20+ years for a bag of weed while Caucasoid guys get sentences 10x less. There are also thousands of brothers in prison right now for violent crimes they committed while they were high and they can’t even remember them.

6. Memory Loss – There are many guys particularly black guys in prison right now for violent crimes they committed while high that they themselves can’t even remember. An example of this is there was a 19 year old black man that tried one hit of spice (synthetic weed) and after he did, he went on a violent crime spree from carjacking someone to killing two people, all while being high on spice. And they’re gonna give him the death penalty for it.

The Conclusion – To Young Black Men, if you want a very healthy, positive, and productive life, make sure you stay away from not only alcohol, but definitely stay away from marijuana because those are systemic traps that lead to self-destruction.

Staff Writer; Joe Davis

FB Page; http://www.facebook.com/joe.davis.165470

10 Comments

James says:

May 2, 2017 at 2:45 pm

I’m literally speechless. I once was a heavy weed smoker. So glad to have seen the light. Free now, and marijuana does nothing for our people.

Reply
J. Ming says:

October 24, 2016 at 9:32 am

The PROHIBITION of cannabis is what has had the devastating effect on African-Americans.

Ending Prohibition of cannabis would eliminate a major tool of oppression used against African-Americans regularly by Law Enforcement and the criminal justice system.

Legalize. Tax. Regulate. Educate. Reduce harm.

Reply
Malcolm Kyle says:

October 24, 2016 at 7:22 am

Health concerns regarding cannabis/marijuana tend to come from a self-fueling group of discredited scientists funded by the pharmaceutical, prison, tobacco, and alcohol industries. They push non-peer-reviewed papers, fraught with conjecture and confounding variables, while relying upon reports issued by others in their own group to further support their own grossly misleading research and clearly biased agendas.

Here’s the real science:

Study: Cannabis/Marijuana Use Not Predictive Of Lower IQ, Poorer Educational Performance

“… to test the relationships between cumulative cannabis use and IQ at the age of 15 and educational performance at the age of 16. After full adjustment, those who had used cannabis more than 50 times did not differ from never-users on either IQ or educational performance. Adjusting for group differences in cigarette smoking dramatically attenuated the associations between cannabis use and both outcomes, and further analyses demonstrated robust associations between cigarette use and educational outcomes, even with cannabis users excluded. These findings suggest that adolescent cannabis use is not associated with IQ or educational performance once adjustment is made for potential confounds, in particular adolescent cigarette use.”

Source: C Mokrysz, et al. Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, University College London. Published January 6, 2016 in Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Daily Cannabis/Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults

“No statistically significant differences were found between daily users and nonusers on volume or shape in the regions of interest. Effect sizes suggest that the failure to find differences was not due to a lack of statistical power, but rather was due to the lack of even a modest effect. In sum, the results indicate that, when carefully controlling for alcohol use, gender, age, and other variables, there is no association between marijuana use and standard volumetric or shape measurements of subcortical structures.”

The Journal of Neuroscience, 28 January 2015, 35(4): 1505-1512; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2946-14.2015?

The Duke University (New Zealand) Dunedin study, the one which claimed that smoking cannabis/marijuana in your teens leads to a long-term drop in IQ, has been utterly rebuked by a later paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They examined the research and found its methodology to be flawed.

“…existing research suggests an alternative confounding model based on time-varying effects of socioeconomic status on IQ. A simulation of the confounding model reproduces the reported associations from the [August 2012 study], suggesting that the causal effects estimated in Meier et al. are likely to be overestimates, and that the true effect could be zero”.
—Ole Rogeberg.

“The conclusions were modest in the paper. we never said cannabis/marijuana caused these changes. The media may have given that impression in headlines, but the study doesn’t show causation. I think I saw one headline that was ‘Marijuana reshapes the brain’ and I groaned –that’s not what we did,”

— Dr. Jodi Gilman, 31, author of the Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital study on marijuana’s effects, in an interview with PolicyMic.

Reply
Malcolm Kyle says:

October 24, 2016 at 7:22 am

Health concerns regarding cannabis/marijuana tend to come from a self-fueling group of discredited scientists funded by the pharmaceutical, prison, tobacco, and alcohol industries. They push non-peer-reviewed papers, fraught with conjecture and confounding variables, while relying upon reports issued by others in their own group to further support their own grossly misleading research and clearly biased agendas.

Here’s the real science:

Study: Cannabis/Marijuana Use Not Predictive Of Lower IQ, Poorer Educational Performance

“… to test the relationships between cumulative cannabis use and IQ at the age of 15 and educational performance at the age of 16. After full adjustment, those who had used cannabis more than 50 times did not differ from never-users on either IQ or educational performance. Adjusting for group differences in cigarette smoking dramatically attenuated the associations between cannabis use and both outcomes, and further analyses demonstrated robust associations between cigarette use and educational outcomes, even with cannabis users excluded. These findings suggest that adolescent cannabis use is not associated with IQ or educational performance once adjustment is made for potential confounds, in particular adolescent cigarette use.”

Source: C Mokrysz, et al. Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, University College London. Published January 6, 2016 in Journal of Psychopharmacology.

http://intl-jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/06/0269881115622241.full

Daily Cannabis/Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults

“No statistically significant differences were found between daily users and nonusers on volume or shape in the regions of interest. Effect sizes suggest that the failure to find differences was not due to a lack of statistical power, but rather was due to the lack of even a modest effect. In sum, the results indicate that, when carefully controlling for alcohol use, gender, age, and other variables, there is no association between marijuana use and standard volumetric or shape measurements of subcortical structures.”

The Journal of Neuroscience, 28 January 2015, 35(4): 1505-1512; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2946-14.2015?
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25634572

The Duke University (New Zealand) Dunedin study, the one which claimed that smoking cannabis/marijuana in your teens leads to a long-term drop in IQ, has been utterly rebuked by a later paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They examined the research and found its methodology to be flawed.

“…existing research suggests an alternative confounding model based on time-varying effects of socioeconomic status on IQ. A simulation of the confounding model reproduces the reported associations from the [August 2012 study], suggesting that the causal effects estimated in Meier et al. are likely to be overestimates, and that the true effect could be zero”.
—Ole Rogeberg.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/actually_pot_may_not_lower_iq_after_all/

“The conclusions were modest in the paper. we never said cannabis/marijuana caused these changes. The media may have given that impression in headlines, but the study doesn’t show causation. I think I saw one headline that was ‘Marijuana reshapes the brain’ and I groaned –that’s not what we did,”

— Dr. Jodi Gilman, 31, author of the Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital study on marijuana’s effects, in an interview with PolicyMic.

Reply
Malcolm Kyle says:

October 24, 2016 at 7:20 am

Synthetic forms of weed have absolutely nothing in common with cannabis. If you’re going to write something on cannabis/marijuana then at least do the proper research.

The discovery of the endocannabinoid system (ECS) is the single most important scientific medical discovery since the recognition of sterile surgical technique. As our knowledge expands, we are coming to realize that the ECS is a master control system of virtually all physiology. The total effect of the ECS is to regulate homeostasis and prevent disease and aging. The more we learn, the more we realize that we are in the infancy of this scientific field of study. The ECS is a control system which involves tissue receptor proteins, cellular communication and control, molecular anatomy and the scavenging of oxygen free radicals. This new field of science will change medicine forever and prove cannabis the gold standard for many disease processes. Its effect on scavenging oxygen free radicals is applicable to all disease processes and this is why it has such wide medical application and is considered a cure-all by many.

The discovery of the ECS will replace the current medical system of managing and treating disease. Instead of management of symptoms after disease has occurred, we will prevent disease and cancer by manipulation of the ECS.

Research and education of medical students involving the ECS is being intentionally restricted by politics. No justification can be made for the restriction of the scientific study of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system. What is the danger of providing government-grown and tested cannabis to researchers? Diversion of research cannabis for non-scientific or recreational purposes does not seem to be a serious threat to national security.

By Dr David Allen

Reply
Marque Anthony says:

October 24, 2016 at 4:04 am

Good article. I have additional research so email me at brainstormonline@yahoo.com. I wrote an article on this last year and people tried to tear me apart.

Reply
Sergio Ramos says:

October 24, 2016 at 2:58 am

And regarding “nobody special’s” reaponse about marijuana being a soothing drug, that is partly false. There are 3 types of marijuna. A stimulant, depressant, and a hybrid. I ended my “pot-head phase” after two years because all that was available was the stimulant and it was causing me to have panick attacks. I can testify that I did get quite aggressive and ultimately stopped because I couldn’t handle being that aggressive while high.

Reply
Sergio Ramos says:

October 24, 2016 at 2:51 am

I can relate to a lot of what is being said here as I’ve acted like this myself when I was in my “pot-head” days which luckily only lasted two years. That was 16 years ago. Unfortunately, people like my year-older sister never grew out of their “lifestyle” and are now deadbeats without a job and expect for others to pay their bills while they find ways to justify scoring another bag for a day instead of looking for a job. If there is a downside to marijuana, I will admit that everything said in this article is true. So long as nobody tries to claim it’s any more harmful than making one too stupid to function in society.

Reply
Christine says:

October 23, 2016 at 5:47 pm

As a neuroscientist, I can confirm that it severely alters a person’s mind, triggering chronic psychotic disorders in about 5% of users whether they have a family history of mental illness or not (do a search on Marta DiForti, 2015 publication in Lancet Psychiatry). At least 15% experience transient psychotic symptoms that can resolve, but while they are psychotic (paranoia, racing thoughts, delusions of grandeur, hallucinations), they are definitely more likely to be violent.

It is definitely the last thing young black men need and no more eloquent speaker can be found on that topic than Bishop Ron Allen in California – check out some of his speeches.

Reply
Nobody Special says:

October 23, 2016 at 4:08 pm

Sounds like you have a problem against spice, not marijuana. And blaming marijuana for a fight with your brother? You do realize it calms people down right? Your brother wanted a fight for other reasons too great for marijuana to stop. And people not remembering their crimes while high on marijuana? How convenient. People who are in prison blame their incarceration on ANYTHING so they can get sympathy and possibly an early parole. I’ve smoked marijuana for close to a decade now and I have a better memory than most. You’re trying to excuse laziness and violence with a scapegoat. Marijuana doesn’t make you crazy and doesn’t make you lazy. It’s a symptom of character. Ask yourself, do those people sitting on their couches aspire to any serious goals or dreams? Did they ever? Doubtful.

Reply