JLY 1977 a Pocketful of Thrills Hunting for a Mushroom Hig My
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JLY 1977 A JOURNAL OF BETTER LIVING A Pocketful of Thrills Hunting for a Mushroom Hig My Family's Too Busy for Me What Marijuana LISTEN talks to Hardin B. Jones Professor of Medical Physics and Physiology University of California, Berkeley "Listen" interviews Dr. Hardin Jones in his office on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley. Left to right: Leon Cornforth, associate circulation manager; Francis A. Soper, editor; Dr, Jones; William N. Plymat, counselor, Preferred Risk Mutual Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Doctor, what started your interest in marijuana? more than 2000 young people who have used marijuana. My real interest in the drugs that are being abused by This sample comes from all around the world.) I've talked young people began in January 1965 here on this campus with students in various parts of America. I've worked with when some colleagues of mine began urging students to the Army in Germany and Vietnam and Thailand. I've had use drugs for mind-expanding purposes. LSD was being conversations with young people in jail. I feel that I know pushed on campus by intellectuals, but marijuana was the the general profile of the drug user. This has enabled me drug most readily available. to write a book on the brain—how it functions and how I immediately offered my services to the campus by drugs modify that function, particularly the long-term ef- advertising public lectures on the subject of drugs. As a fects. medical physiologist, I knew enough about drugs at least Did you start with a hypothesis that there is a grave to hold off some of the propagandists, and I just kept at it. danger in using marijuana? Now I've become an expert. I did some of the early work on the effects of alcohol and What I did is typical of a researcher in my field. I ordinar- tobacco. That goes back 30 years, so I have a substantial ily grasp the total aspects of a given field, so during the basis for speculating about the long-term effects of first few weeks of my study of the marijuana problem, I marijuana and LSD. read the entire known medical literature at that time. It wasn't much. I evaluated the thinking of all the scholars You specialize in counseling students with drug prob- who had looked at the problem over the last several cen- lems, don't you? Is that part of your regular work? turies. I chose the position that seemed to fit, and I haven't No, that's not a part of my university assignment by any had to change that position since. means, but I've been finding out the effects of marijuana Right away I took a major step—I was the first in modern on young people by interviewing them. (I have interviewed times to theorize that the effects of marijuana accumulate Really Does in the user, and therefore the drug itself probably accumu- circulatory system—will turn deep red at the slightest em- lates. That was in 1965. Now we know by careful chemical barrassment. measurements taken in the bodies of marijuana users that Blushing is controlled from within the brain, and it's the the drug actually accumulates in a linear way. link between the thinking process and some of the emo- tional centers. The use of marijuana interrupts this link. Would you explain that a bit more? What do you mean by accumulation? How much accumulates and over how There are other clues too. You never see a marijuana long a period of time? user who is bright-eyed. When I see a bright-eyed student who can click his eyes onto me, hold me in focus, and The active ingredient of marijuana is a cannabinoil. The reveal in the eye movement some of his thinking, I know principal one is tetrahydrocannabinol, but there are about he's not smoking pot. 40 to 50 others in marijuana, each having different effects It's also typical for a user to have a change in his walking on the body cells and nervous tissue. When the substance style and gait. A user has a bit of extra wobble to his walk. is labeled with radioactive carbon or hydrogen, we can It's not the walk of a person who's intoxicated; rather it's a trace its retention in the body, its distribution, and its walk of a person whose nervous stystem is not working as excretion. smoothly as it ought. A week after a person smokes marijuana, 30 percent is still in the body in the active form. There is no other drug or Doctor, do you find that marijuana produces merely a medication that I know of that lingers in the body so long. psychological dependency, or is there what might be Of the portion that remains, the body retains 70 percent of called a physical addiction as there is with heroin, for that longer than the second week. It gets rid of only 10 example? percent a month thereafter, so the burden stays in the Well, there is the possibility of real addiction to body for a long period, and as the person uses more and marijuana, but most marijuana users aren't addicted. To more, it accumulates. become addicted to marijuana, a person must use it about Does this retention have a disadvantageous effect? as often as the heroin addict uses heroin—a minimal fre- quency of four times a day and up to eight and ten times Oh, yes. Most of the scientific attention to marijuana has daily. been directed to its immediate effect, the so-called intox- The few who are addicted, though, are using marijuana icative high, which the user gets over, but not because daily, and usually those who are using it less often than marijuana is dumped out of the brain or the blood. It's daily don't have typical withdrawal symptoms. Only about simply transferred to the fat, but then some of it recircu- one in ten of the students I see are actually addicted to lates and gets back into the cells. marijuana. When a young person begins to smoke marijuana, he doesn't get much effect the first few times. But after five or Is there a level of marijuana use where a person settles six times, suddenly he gets intoxicated. That happens into a particular usage pattern such as cigarette smokers because enough of the stuff has accumulated in the sur- have-you know, a two-pack-a-day smoker-is there a face membrane of the brain cells so that it can kick off an two-joint-a-week user? intoxicative experience. The body has to have a sufficient There's wide variance. In the beginning most students accumulation before the user gets that effect. were using marijuana a few times a month, but that has What is not realized is that the marijuana user is never quickly changed. The average use on campus is now a few completely free of some of these low-grade intoxicative times a week. Some are using it daily. Users may take big effects. The brain makes adjustments to drug burdens. A jumps in frequency. person can take alcohol or barbiturates or other sub- stances that are intoxicating, and the brain will adapt so Does one get withdrawal symptoms from marijuana similar to withdrawal from alcohol, nicotine, and heroin? that it will get along in spite of the effect. Likewise, the brains of marijuana users make the best Similar, but not exactly the same. The symptoms of adjustment they can, but they can't get around all the marijuana withdrawal are milder than the other drugs effects. I can see some effects in all marijuana users any you've mentioned, and this has been part of the reason time I examine them, even though they haven't used why many people have denied that there are withdrawal marijuana for hours, days, or weeks. symptoms. But they are typical and predictable—malaise, How about years? headache, restlessness, sleeplessness, and some kind of gastrointestinal disturbances. I'm not sure about that. But days and weeks and some- times months I can pick up. Memories seem to vary a great deal between individu- What are the symptoms that are visible in a person als and at different age levels. Does marijuana affect the memory? perhaps a month after he's quit marijuana? I have a whole battery of symptoms and signs that I use Because marijuana has an effect on the short-term to decide how long a person has used marijuana, how memory and also the transfer process between the short- much he has used, when he last used it, etc. The most term and the long-term memory, heavily affected spectacular sign is the color of a person's face. Marijuana marijuana users behave much like senile individuals. They users don't have a variation in blood flow to the face. You can't remember from one five-minute period to the next can embarrass them, and they don't blush. In contrast, the what they were intending to do. That's an inconvenience. average nonusing student—with the youth and vigor of his But it's also an inconvenience that they don't get as much LISTEN • July 1977 • 3 filed away in their permanent memory as people ordinarily Speaking of the emotional impact, in your book Sen- do. sual Drugs you say that an individual comes to the place where he simply is not normal in his interpersonal rela- In the case of an alcoholic the association of the drug tionships.