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Marijuana use among pregnant women is rising, and so are concerns:
I'm relatively new to Oregon, but one of the ways I know I'm starting to settle in is my ability to recognize marijuana shops. Some are easy. But others, with names like The Agrestic and Mr. Nice Guy, are a little trickier to identify for someone who hasn't spent much time in a state that has legalized marijuana.
A growing number of states have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. At the same time, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are using the drug in increasing numbers. A 2017 JAMA study described both survey results and urine tests of nearly 280,000 pregnant women in Northern California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. The study showed that in 2009, about 4 percent of the women tested used marijuana. In 2016, about 7 percent of women did. Those California numbers may be even higher now, since recreational marijuana became legal there this year.
Some of those numbers may be due in part to women using marijuana to treat their morning sickness, a more recent study by some of the same researchers suggests. Their report, published August 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that pregnant women with severe nausea and vomiting were 3.8 times more likely to use marijuana than pregnant women without morning sickness.
So some pregnant women are definitely using the drug, and exposing their fetuses to it, too. Ingredients in marijuana are known to make their way to fetuses by crossing the placenta during pregnancy (and by entering breast milk after the baby is born). But what actually happens when those marijuana compounds arrive?
That's the question the American Academy of Pediatrics grapples with in a clinical report published in the August issue of Pediatrics. In an effort to provide guidance to caregivers and women, the AAP sums up the existing scientific literature on how marijuana affects mothers and babies.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:05AM (4 children)
What is rising, now that it's legal to smoke, are women willing to admit they smoke while preggers. Kinda like the sudden bump in baby boomers who are now trying weed for the first time in 40 years. They've all been smoking all along, but now they're willing to admit it.
This should be a huge hit for government credibility, keeping the evil weed schedule 1 meant nobody could research it to find out if it should, in fact, be schedule 1.
Then again, I'm a child of the 70s for whom the government hasn't had any credibility since high school, but damn, I wish more of my peers had half the brains I do.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1) by bussdriver on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:16PM (2 children)
Most likely, with heavy biased studies they will find something legitimately of concern (which in the end amounts to nothing significant.) But then the risks caused by tons of normal safe foods are likely no worse, just less studied.
It may sound like a big human experiment; but what isn't? We'll see... although we've heavily studied pot for decades with huge bias and a great deal of lying propaganda-- it's probably the most safe food out there. They've looked into pregnancy and pot for decades already and you know we would have had any slight risks hammered into us in school if they found anything they could twist it.
THE REAL PROBLEM: By making pot illegal and expensive we've funded the creation of many man-made mutant varieties of the plant much faster than would ever happen if it was legal all this time. As we've done with all other profitable plants, we've experimented on the population with variations with unpredictable side effects we are still not aware of; where the healthy skeptics are smeared as Luddites for wanting GMO labeling. We've created versions of the plant that are not healthy or safe; when it was literally just a cheap weed that you had to fight to kill off there was little incentive to mess around with it. Sure, it would happen but far more slowly and with results that could be responded to. Hell, we have expensive legal pills based upon pot with quite a list of side affects because we couldn't just use the natural plant (which has an anti-psychotic to balance itself out... unless you remove that by playing god thinking it's only the THC that matters.)
FYI: I have no interest in even trying pot or coffee. But I will defend your rights from being infringed upon. It is your right, nobody can take that away from you; only infringe upon you exercising them.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:17PM (1 child)
Sorry, but marijuana is specifically known (i.e., chosen because) it interferes with neuron function. So it's quite reasonable to suppose it might affect developing neurons. It's also been implicated in interfering with late neuron pruning towards the end of the teens and up until around 23 (varies with the individual). The proofs may not be robust, but the experimental conditions were quite constrained, so while you can't rely on them, they're the current best guess.
So I would rank marijuana as much more risky than, say, rhubarb.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:29AM
Know a guy in Portland who has numerous horror stories about teens and the far-stronger "new pot" -- says one of the more common bad reactions is to believe something is crawling under your skin, and take a knife to yourself to get rid of the imaginary worm. Or to suddenly believe some protruding part (fingers, ears, penis, etc.) isn't yours, and cut it off, leading to fun times in the emergency room. Also recall a study from an article hereabouts, that found pot may not harm normal folks, but tends to trigger latent psychosis. Considering how we've been celebrating mental disorders in recent decades, I wonder if this isn't all one thing.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:47PM
I'd suggest that the majority of the population is generally abides by the law most of the time, so now that it's legal, people's curiosity can be explored.
As an example, imagine if the travel ban to Cuba was lifted. Do you think that the sudden influx of tourists would be people who were "going there all along, but now they're willing to admit to it?"