Recent marijuana stories look at the increase in use (or return to use) of pot by the boomer generation. Also we discuss new laws regarding marijuana use and driving. Another recent study shows that using marijuana as a teen can permanently damage the brain structure, and potentially lead to mental illness like schizophrenia. And a New York law is compelling mentally ill people to seek treatment, and is going so far as to provide funding for it.
Transcript (edited):
Howard: Welcome to the CNS Podcast featuring Dr. Darryl Inaba, research director for CNS Productions, I am Howard La Mere. Today we’re going to take a look at some marijuana related issues that are in the news. Regulating and evaluating a driver’s marijuana intoxication is something Colorado and Washington is dealing with ever since the drug became legal for recreational use. Police are deciding how to identify someone who is too high to drive safely. Also there is a recent study about how smoking marijuana as a teen can permanently alter or damage the brain structure, and from the “The Fix” magazine comes an article titled “America’s Baby Boomer Potheads” It seems people in their late 50’s, early 60’s are returning to marijuana …these are people who used it perhaps in college or as a young adult but gave it up to deal with families, jobs, and those kinds of things. I found the numbers smaller than I might have anticipated. In 2011 the survey says 6.3% of Americans between 50 and 60 reported using marijuana. But that’s up from 2.5% or 2.7 in 2002, I thought those numbers were kind of interesting. Darryl, what’s your perspective on this? What are you seeing in the local treatment community and hearing at conferences?
Darryl: Well, that news is sort of “duh” Of course the baby boomers are more likely to smoke marijuana because they came of age during the time of drug experimentation…turn on, tune in, and drop out as Tim Leary used to say. And although I like it as a barometer, I always have to question the absolute numbers produced by that survey. You said you were surprised at the low numbers – well if you were a senior citizen or a teenager or indeed – anybody in America and the government gave you a form, a questionnaire and asked you to honestly fill it out – even though it was anonymous with no intent to track you down … asking you how much dope you use and how often do you use it and things like that…I’m not so sure they’re going to get accurate results.
Howard: Right. And these numbers do come from that national survey of drug use and health.
Darryl: Exactly….so as we said, those numbers are always smaller than those from the Partnership for Drug Free America study or other tracking survey studies. So I suspect that the actual numbers are much higher because definitely there is a feeling that marijuana was non-consequential, it was the drug of that generation – the baby boomers. That was their statement to the world – they were turning on to pot and they were going foster peace, love, and a whole different generation. So, I would guess the numbers are higher. That’s what everybody has been expecting and what we’re seeing – the baby boomers are now officially senior citizens, and in this study they were surveying the dead center of the boomer generation – as well as people between 50 and 59 who have higher incidents of previous drug use and current drug use. There is no age discrimination when it comes to developing addiction – it is all based upon a person’s genetics, the availability of drugs and their level of stress and everything that has happened in their life. Some people develop an addiction immediately and some people don’t develop an addiction until later in life. But the boomer generation was exposed to drugs and they have a higher rate of addiction – especially marijuana use. Now, we must temper this information with the other factors. This was a generation that explored and thought drugs were less harmful so they tried more drugs than any other previous generation and were into designer drugs as well. This group has an adult senior lifestyle with a different view of marijuana. More than a dozen states now have some sort of …medical use of marijuana and 2 states – Colorado and Washington – have legalized the recreational use of marijuana.
Howard: Right and that’s all referendum driven. People voted that in.
Darryl: Absolutely and several presidents have admitted that they might have tried it so that population definitely is from an era that looked at drugs in a different way and they are bringing those perceptions with them. But this is also a time in which marijuana is viewed as less problematic. Some states are legalizing it for recreational use. Many states are legalizing it for medical use. And because the boomer generation now has actual medical needs.. they’re feeling they need marijuana to ease many of the ills that start to set in as people age – people start noticing that they’ve got aches and pains every day and are not as spry as they once were. Even if they used it in their youth and remained abstinent during most of their adult life – as they retire and experience conditions like glaucoma and other age related things …they need to deal with their medical problems, so all that conspires to make this population use not just marijuana, but other illicit drug in higher numbers than we’ve ever had in this country. So I don’t see this as new and I see it as a natural evolution.
Howard: That brings us directly to another story and that is the discussion about how to evaluate whether or not a person is too high to drive. This conversation is going on in both Colorado and Washington and as we’ve seen in some of the articles the numbers they’ve come up with are remarkably low in terms of the amount of cannabonal…THC.. in a person’s blood stream.
Darryl: Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use of marijuana without having first decided how they’re going to determine who is an impaired driver or who is so stoned that they can’t operate a school bus or a nuclear energy plant or engage in other activities that could endanger the general public. This has been a major issue in states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes “yes we allow you to use medical marijuana but we’re also concerned about your ability to drive a car”. Many of those states have a zero tolerance policy meaning that if tests show that you have any level of marijuana in your blood or saliva you’ve broken the law…you’re driving under the influence of drugs and they consider you impaired. Nobody has done enough testing to know how much it affects a person and the level of impairment it creates.
Howard: Even thought a person could have used days or weeks ago?
Darryl: Absolutely. And so they’ve gone to zero tolerance. The new information you’re talking about and the new research that’s going on is directly related to Colorado and Washington – they are developing field sobriety tests … and they claim they can actually measure impairment the same way they measure drunk driving – coordination, standing on one foot, reciting the alphabet backwards, walking a straight line. But those tests – even for impaired driving are questionable. You can be old and not be able to walk a line. You can be affected by weather. You can have all kinds of medical issues. There are all kinds of issues that make a person fail a field sobriety test. Basically those tests are aimed at making you fail so that they can take you in and book you and then evaluate you using breath tests or blood tests or whatever to see if you’re impaired. This is done to protect enforcement officers – they can say “well they failed the field sobriety tests so we had justifiable cause to bring them in”. I don’t trust any field sobriety test for marijuana even though Colorado maintains they’ve come up with a good one. Once someone fails the sobriety test or whatever…they have to determine how much they’re impaired and what they’ve come up with is a five nanograms roof. Five nanograms is a miniscule amount. For example, 2 to 300, 400 nanograms would likely be found in people who got high at a party, 5 nanograms is 1/100th’s of that amount. Those low levels could register due to so many external contaminants and of how the testing is done – so many different things can contribute to an inaccurate test. Getting down to 5 nanograms seems questionable . I’m not sure how they’ve come up with that because as you said, a person may have been at a party a week ago and smoked a lot of dope and if they are stopped for a traffic violation – they aren’t under the influence but their blood level may still be at 10 nanograms or 20 nanograms and they are considered in violation of the law and risk losing their license as well as being subjected to a whole bunch of other consequences. In the 1970’s, one of my professors at the University of California did studies on marijuana impairment because there was a thought that marijuana would become the next alcohol-like substance and be available legally all over the country. Now this is beginning to happen so, we’re going to have to develop accurate tests to determine whether someone is ok to drive. I remember the early tests from the 70’s showed that there was no safe level – that all levels of marijuana use..even the bammer ditch skunk weed, backyard, homegrown stuff that was no good, could impair your judgment, your thinking and the ability to multitask…when you drive you have to juggle a lot of tasks at the same time. The researchers couldn’t come up with a Log rhythm that determined what was safe and what was not. That’s bolstered by a recent Australian study that examined THC in the blood stream – they found that drivers with any level of THC in their blood stream are twice as likely as those with no THC to be involved in a fatal accident and 6.6 times more likely to be involved in any type of accident…even those with a low THC number. So maybe there is justification for zero tolerance. But that would not take into account the environmental exposure. You could be at a party and everybody is smoking dope. It smells like skunk the room. You’re not smoking. You don’t want to be impaired, but you’re breathing that air. Sort of like what we’re suffering now in southern Oregon with these forest fires all around us. No one wants to be inhaling the smoke in the air – it makes our eyes sting, complicates asthma – but we can’t get away from it. It’s just one of the environmental hazards of living in this area. Well, being exposed to somebody else’s smoke is an environmental hazard …say you go to a music concert because you love the music and everybody is smoking dope at that concert, you’d probably test above the 5 nanogram level of marijuana. This is a difficult situation -cops could bust everybody coming out of a rock concert – bust them all for driving or for being under the toxic influences of marijuana because they have over 5 nanograms of THC in their system.
Howard: I don’t want to pick on the law enforcement community, but there does seem to be a rash of activity designed to bolster the local and state budgets along those lines. But like I said, not going to pick on them. We’re going to have to see how this plays out because it is very hard to figure out. The story that ran in “The Fix” magazine quoted someone as saying that people on marijuana drive too slowly rather than too fast and carelessly. ‘
Darryl: Right…
Howard: But the point about multitasking is still true.
Darryl: And you must understand, these are people who are very conservative and follow the letter of the law – and basically they’re saying that in the eyes of the law, nobody really cares if you’re truly impaired by what you have taken – it’s whether you test at whatever level the law considers ok or not ok. If you have abused or used something that has a potential, then you’re violating the law. And so it’s big brother… but there are both sides of this argument. There is impairment but we’re not sure how much marijuana is going to greatly impair a particular individual. The waters have become muddy now that marijuana is legal so we have to come up with a way to measure impairment and left in the hands of administrators and legislators and politicians, I fear they will come up with all kinds of crazy things rather than what in reality needs to be addressed.
Howard: Right. That kind of leads us into the third story on marijuana – recent research suggests that marijuana use as a teenager can greatly impair or damage the function of your brain…the evolution, the growth of your brain. And is this new information Darryl or is it just confirming something that has been believed?
Darryl: No, it’s heating up the waters. I mean for years and years people said that marijuana use is really non-consequential…it’s safer than taking aspirin…it doesn’t cause any permanent damage, but in the last 10 years or so, Dr. Asaf Keller, a professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine has been studying marijuana with a group of graduate students and they came up with a very stunning and controversial statement that so far no one has been able to refute – that marijuana, especially the new high dose marijuana and the high potency marijuana …is capable of impairing the brain and could lead to things like thought disorder or schizophrenia, especially in those people prone to schizophrenia. There isn’t a lot of evidence showing that you can have drug induced major permanent mental disorders. You can have preexisting disorders that are activated by drugs, but in terms of a link between smoking a drug and permanent mental illness or drugs activating a permanent disorder – there is little research to support that.
However, recent studies of brain scans and evidence from other imaging techniques does confirm that adolescent and early marijuana use impairs cognition and makes someone more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia, than people who don’t smoke marijuana. So, this is not good news for the pro-marijuana advocates. It’s information from some pretty good scientists with pretty good control studies that nobody has been able to overturn yet except for the comments like “hey, my dad smoked his whole life and he wasn’t schizophrenic” or “my aunt smokes marijuana every day and she seems to be a lot sharper and brighter than everybody else around her!” And we know that there are studies that profile valedictorians, geniuses, and high achievers in many fields who smoked marijuana their whole life without showing any signs of mental or cognitive impairment so that has muddied the water. Research continues and it does prove that early use of marijuana may greatly impair the brain’s function and lead to permanent cognitive deficits where you’re attention span, your ability to process problems, your ability to understand temporal situations, your ability to just understand what’s being put in front of you…the meaning of words and how to construct sentences may be greatly impaired. So that’s where they’re coming from…this idea of schizophrenia, they’re getting more and more support from other researchers and clinicians reporting around the country that yes they have seen use of early marijuana that resulted in what looks like permanent schizophrenic or thought disorders and emotional depression in people who have no seemingly genetic predisposition to these conditions.
Howard: But we don’t really know where schizophrenia comes from. All we can see are the symptoms. Is that correct?
Darryl: Well, there are some current findings which still remain controversial because we don’t see the results in every case, but there certainly are a number of valid studies that via brain imaging see enlarged ventricles. An enlarged ventricle that goes past a normal size seems to be indicative of a potential for schizophrenia. There has been a full assault on schizophrenia in terms of treating it with the use of substances or medications that block the chemical dopamine. Many psychiatrists and neuroscientists believe that schizophrenia is a dopanergic overdose…that you’re basically on a dopanergic high all the time which gives you hallucinations, gives you paranoia, creates the voices in your head and all the symptoms of schizophrenia, ambivalence, Autism, detachment, all that we see…researchers think is due to an overload of dopamine and so all the medications that we use and are being developed for the most part, are targeting ways to block dopamine and to minimize its effect on the brain and they seem to help normalize a person’s thinking so they can function. So, we do have some understanding or a better understanding of schizophrenia and this study, along with others presents the possibility that you can impair the brain psychically, neurochemically in terms of its functionality with early use of marijuana because it sets the brain up to develop mental impairment like cognitive deficits and schizophrenia.
Howard: Hmmm….interesting.
Darryl: That just brought up something that was in the New York Times that talks about a New York law, Connecticut, and other states that have come up with evidence showing that when they compel or force people with major mental illnesses like schizophrenia, into treatment there are positive outcomes for the state in terms of lowering the use of emergency rooms and fewer incidents of inappropriate public behavior issues.
Howard: There is the ongoing connection between drugs and drug abuse and mental illness.
Darryl: You know, I should mention and I meant to mention this when we started .. it’s working in New York because New York put money into treatment. So not only do they say you have to get treatment for mental illness….
Howard: Well, that’s one of the keys isn’t it?
Darryl: Absolutely! Because when they mandate people into treatment provide the resources. “Contact these people and you can get into a treatment program and have medications and support … that works. Other states agree with that philosophy but decide only to compel them into treatment – but provide no funds for treatment, give no expansion of care, so a person says…”okay, where do I go?” The courts say ” sorry – figure it out yourself” People then contact tons of places only to be told there’s no place that is open or they have waiting lists that are so long they will be lucky to ever get in. It’s one of those catch 22 laws that we seem to be good at developing in this country.
Howard: …and of course catch 22 is all about being crazy. Okay, that’s all the time we have for today – thanks for listening. Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome. Stop by the website, cnsproductions.com and leave us a note. Thanks, Darryl.
Darryl: Hey, thank you, Howard.
Howard: That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS Podcast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website, www.cnsproductions.com