Godfrey Pearlson
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Godfrey Pearlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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About 15% of the US population have used in the last week. and about 45 to 50 percent of adults, we're talking about adults here in both cases, say they've tried at some point in their life. It's the most commonly used illicit substance in the U.S. and Europe at the moment.
Cannabis is a plant, cannabis sativa. that grows in the wild but has been cultivated by humans for thousands of years initially for food then for fibers hemp to make ropes strong ropes and then later as an intoxicant marijuana is something that was first used in the early part of the 20th century.
And marijuana is a slang word that was used by Mexicans spelt with an H rather than a J. And it was re-spelt with a J and used in a pejorative sense, like these evil marijuana users are corrupting our youth. So because of those connotations, A lot of people in the cannabis research field prefer to use the term cannabis rather than marijuana.
The way this progressed is that Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt around 1810. Alcohol was not available because of the culture, but cannabis was. So Napoleon's soldiers began using it. Some of them brought it back to France. So it spread among the elites in Europe as a kind of drug for...
upper-class people to use for amusement at parties, and then gradually spread to some individuals in the U.S. It wasn't until around 1900, when waves of Mexican immigrants came to the country as laborers, that they introduced it as a drug that was used by working-class individuals for recreation, and that spread to American youth gradually.
About 15% of the U.S. population have used in the last week and about 45 to 50% of adults haven't. we're talking about adults here in both cases, say they've tried at some point in their life. So this is a very prevalent drug. It's the most commonly used illicit substance in the US and Europe at the moment.
I'd say I'm down the middle. I grew up in the 60s, so I was... exposed both to the drug and the propaganda from both sides about it. And I'm a naturally skeptical person. So if something has a good side and a bad side, I'm not going to try and minimize one or exaggerate the other.
You're correct. A plurality of the U.S. adult population now supports legalizing recreational cannabis. More people, in fact, support same-sex marriage. So that's been quite a journey from Nixon in the 70s to the present. And I'd attribute that to a few reasons. One is that people have used it and tried it and found that it had few ill effects.
A second thing is that the anti-cannabis movement and Just Say No and DARE and similar initiatives so overstated the case against cannabis and demonized it to such an extent that it was clear that much of what they were saying was incorrect. So people became skeptical of the marijuana is bad message.
The other thing is adequacy, first of all, on the part of users, but secondly, on on the part of business in terms of companies that want to make a profit from selling cannabis, what people call cannabis or big cannabis analogous to big tobacco. And the other is states in the U.S. that want to have a sin tax and balance their budgets by selling cannabis in dispensaries that they can tax.
So I think it's a combination of all of those things.
Well, some are clearly known and others are suspected, but unclear because not enough research has been done. But the real risks are cannabis use disorder. Basically, people become addicted to the drug and suffer moderately severe withdrawal symptoms when they quit. So they find it difficult to quit. For teens, the main risk is psychosis.
So teenage individuals who smoke high potency cannabis that contains a lot of THC and smoke it often have an increased risk for developing schizophrenia and allied psychotic illnesses. And it's not exactly clear what the magnitude of that risk is, but may raise the odds to maybe three or four times what you'd expect in the population. Then there are risks from motor vehicle accidents and drivers.
Again, compared to alcohol, those risks are not huge, but they're significant. And probably in older people, there are risks of falls just because cannabis does lead to gait instability. then there are suggestions that it may raise the risk for heart attack and stroke in older individuals and possibly raise the risk for certain kinds of cancers.
But that's very, very uncertain, in part because people tend, in some cases, to smoke cannabis alongside tobacco or use it with other substances. And it's hard from an epidemiologic point of view to separate those things.
That is a fair statement. So the cannabis we have today is a triumph of selective breeding. Essentially, growers, mainly in California, develop stronger and stronger strains of of cannabis to contain more and more THC.
And as part of the genetics of the cannabis plant, the more THC you produce, the less CBD there is in there to counterbalance it so that we have more tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical in the cannabis plant that is mostly responsible for getting us high, and less of the CBD that may offset THC's effects.
But just as a caveat, if people switch from near beer to whiskey, they don't drink pints of near beer. So they want to get high, so they smoke enough of the cannabis to get them high. So if there's more THC in the plant, then they'll smoke less of it.
Many of them are analogous to cannabis in that they have a good side and a dark side. So opioids are still used widely for pain control. In fact, they're the go-to drug for severe acute pain, even in hospitals and orthopedic clinics. And cocaine is still used in eye drops and as an anesthetic drug.
so the the fact that a substance is abused in some cases and has ill effects isn't to say that it doesn't also have good effects and there is a medicinal side to cannabis and cannabis derivatives so for example cbd that we spoke about one of the main constituents of the cannabis plant It doesn't get people high, but it does have psychoactive effects and calming anxiety.
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