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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-high-on-life dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:17PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:17PM (#733720) Journal

    There is a legitimate concern about the rise of marijuana smoking.

    Those people could be smoking tobacco products instead.

    This message brought to you by the tobacco industry which believes that smoking tobacco does not cause lung cancer.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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