I know this is going to get me a bunch of hate-mail, but I just could not resist this headline after reading this article:
I find most marijuana-legalization advocates particularly annoying when they try to say that something that messes with your brain chemistry is somehow healthy and harmless. Any time you mess with brain chemistry, you are increasing the odds of causing lasting damage. The brain is not meant to be tampered with, and even well-meaning attempts to regulate brain chemistry backfire with horrendous results: just ask someone who has gone through difficulties with depression medication.
Mental health professions who work with schizophrenics are often the loudest critics of marijuana usage, because they see how bad it is for schizophrenics. It can make someone with borderline schizophrenia go full on, and take someone with full-blown schizophrenia and make them totally untreatable. Marijuana usage is guaranteed to make psychotropic medications totally ineffective, as well as worsen the condition.
Because THC, the active ingredient in marijuana besides all the nasty chemicals that make cigarettes look like a healthy alternative (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9311783/drugs-cannabis-lung-cancer-BLF.html), is naturally occurring in the body, its effects are different from all other drugs. It is, indeed, 'natural' but not the quantities that cannabis provides. So, the body does not have the 'fight mechanism' it has with other drugs.
I think this is why it does the damage that it does to a developing brain, which the study proves is the case. Here's another report on the same study:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/teen-cannabis-use-may-damage-brain-for-life-warns-major-study-8082533.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/teen-cannabis-use-may-damage-brain-for-life-warns-major-study-8082533.html
What is more annoying are the people who say it is 'non-addictive.' I think I can prove that just about anything is addictive. If you can get addicted to food or sex, then getting addicted to smoking pot should not be too difficult...
Marijuana being natural is an argument that many users and advocates use. I want to add a bit of Orthodox understanding to this. It is very true that all plants were made by God with a good purpose. Absolutely all of them were meant to be a delight to man. However, because of the fall into sin, man has lost God's Grace in many ways, and has fallen very much under the physical elements, who are no longer working with man, but many times, against him. Man was intended to be much like the angels, and experience the created world on a very high level, very different that what we now experience. Right now, we are no longer the masters of our environment. To give an example, fire did not burn and water did not drown Adam before the fall. One can only imagine what the interaction with plants and fruits would have been. So, having lost God's Grace(direct Presence, Touch), our world functions on very mechanical level. We experience pain, we get drowned, burned, we get thirsty, hungry, sleepy, etc. Another thing that happens is that what enters our body (food, meds) ends up modifying the body in a very heavy way, and many times, permanent and irreparable. The body has ways to cope, but it really was never intended to function in such a "dead" way. God was meant to be fully present and to be the Life of man, a life that we can't even imagine how great. So, now, to say that all things are good, it is true, but because of us functioning on a low level as humans, we have to study how the things we ingest modify us and what things are definitely not working for us anymore, and many other such things, such as allergies and illnesses that we inherit or develop since the fall. Marijuana is clearly a plant that does not get handled well because it modifies the brain in a risky way, and it was never intended by God to be used as a drug, nor smoked or eaten, anyway. (only He knows how to administer its properties). The goal of Orthodoxy is to heal man from sin and to bring him back to direct communion with God. By identifying the poor state that man is in right now, Orthodoxy can never afford to advocate plants or substances that are dangerous, not even those that are controversial, only those that clearly heal and feed and are necessary for a basic life. To conclude: it really is a shame that we can no longer experience life and all the things in our world in a full manner, but we can always turn to God and ask Him to heal us.
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