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So to put in layman’s terms- THC is bad for your brain, there’s not enough studies to say exactly how bad, but it causes a dopamine deficiency(which would explain the depression-like symptoms of heavy marijuana use), and non-THC ingredients are especially not studied but what evidence exists mostly points to them being bad too. The recent rise in THC content in street level weed probably makes it a lot worse from a mental effects perspective.
Do I have that right?
yes you got it right but as usual, nothing is poison, everything is poison, it is the dose (and frequency) that makes the poison. Also hormesis can be a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis Anyway my speculation is that taking frequent weed before the age of 18 (or maybe up to the twenties) is a scary risk factor to permanent brain damage/altered development
The legalization or de-demonization of thc might accelerate the reversal of the flynn effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect and accelerate the downfall of society. Or maybe not? Anyway I don't believe that infrequent use at adult age is a big deal, especially when concomittant with e.g. skq1 But the greater point is that we are very lucky to have drugs that have in large parts, observable toxicity.
We could very well live in a world where people take drug X and the toxicity is only revealed by e.g. a sudden death rate of 70%, 30 years later. Many kinds of toxicities are non-observable (except in a lab) or low observable, which are so called, subchronic toxicities. Neuron death, dysregulation, oxidative stress and teratogeny (mutations) are in large parts non-observable. In addition to those, the popular drugs just so happen to have observable toxicities too.
Given that we live in a era of contingent extreme ignorance (no standard database to correlate human's diseases rates with the prescriptions and drugs they take in their lifetimes) It is a fact that some horryfing quality of life reductions are happening silently for many people because of subchronic toxicities. E.g. IIRC chronic coffee use leads to white matter shrinkage (but conversely considerably reduce the rate of neurodegenerative diseases)
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Seems correct. Honestly I think it will be seen as a huge mistake not to cap legal weed at a low THC potency. ‘70s weed was like 2%, modern US legal weed is shooting past 23%, there’s substantial evidence that psychosis risk goes up several-fold with higher strength stuff. There’s an ingrained societal knowledge that liquor and beer have very difference alcohol content, the same isn’t true for weed which often looks the same regardless of potency.
As it is, it’s all legal and mostly taxed the same way. New York was moderately smart and has a potency-based tax system, but it’s not enough to make a big difference in purchase decisions.
Indeed toxicity can be non-linear with the dose. Btw I made this comment on the point that thc has less observable toxicity than alcohol https://www.themotte.org/post/658/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-3/136506?context=8#context
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