Im Only Smoking Pot
By Rebecca J. Stigall
There's been so much grassroots (pun intended) support for the legalization of marijuana in recent months that far too many people forget that pot is a drug. There are already so many legal drugs that people use on a daily basis that we tend to think of many drugs as being relatively harmless.
But pot is not harmless.
Smoking pot is not like smoking cigarettes. It's much worse. The chemical in pot, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, called THC for short, gets absorbed into the bloodstream quickly through the lungs. THC travels to the brain where it finds the pleasure receptors. This connection with the pleasure centers of the brain is what makes pot fun to smoke. But THC also makes connections with the areas of the brain that affect memory, your concept of time, concentration, and even your ability to walk and talk.
Sure, you might think it's funny now to get the giggles and the munchies, but when being high tricks your brain into thinking that the car approaching is far enough away so that you can cross the street in safety and it turns out that it isn't, it won't be laughable at all.
Ultimately, what the chemicals in pot do is to take up space in the brain where good chemicals are supposed to be. This means that the good chemicals, the ones that make your brain function like it's supposed to, can't find room. So instead of helping you think, learn, communicate, and function, they have to hang around until the partygoers go home and there's room in your brain for them to do their work again.
It's so hard to think and learn during and after smoking pot that, by the time you figure out that you're not doing yourself any good by lighting up, it's too late. You've already finished school and learned nothing but how to smoke a joint. Now, there’s a productive skill.
If pot’s effects on your brain aren’t bad enough for you, consider these facts:
- Pot is addictive. And when you're not getting as high as you used to, you might look into getting higher by using harder drugs.
- Pot mixed with tobacco, called a blunt, causes the chemicals in pot to mix with other chemicals, making your body's reaction to the mix even more dangerous.
- Marijuana use is associated with major mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and even suicide. Although it's not clear which comes first, marijuana use or mental illness, it is clear that smoking pot can make the symptoms of these disorders worse.
- For the first hour after smoking a joint, your blood pressure increases, your heart beats faster, and your blood carries less oxygen to the brain. These factors put the pot smoker at risk for a heart attack.
- Pot has more than twice the amount of cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco. And since pot smokers hold the smoke in their lungs longer than cigarette smokers, there could be an increased risk of cancer.
Ultimately, smoking pot is illegal. It's not worth risking your health or your education, and it's not worth being stuck with a criminal record for the rest of your life. So when you say, "I'm only smoking pot," think again. When you think that smoking pot is no big deal, it is. And when people you know want you to take a hit, say no.
