The University of Michigan researchers have released a new study suggesting that the use of marijuana tampers with the area of the brain’s reward system. Researchers established that the use of marijuana serves to shift the brain’s reward system so that a person seeks more of the substance to achieve the satisfaction they would normally get from “natural rewards,” such as food.
According to Professor Mary Heitzeg, the study’s Senior Researcher and UM Assistant, when a person smokes marijuana, THC moves from the lungs into the bloodstream, which carries the THC to the brain and other organs. One effect of THC on the brain is a release of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens, which is a brain structure dealing with motivational processes. The study consisted of 108 young adults labeled as at high risk for substance use disorder, self-reporting on their marijuana use once a year and receiving 3 MRI brain scans over a four-year period. Researchers in the study were curious to find the effects that marijuana has on the brain’s mechanisms, concluding that it may lead to the user having addiction problems later in life. Rich Birkett, who was an organizer of Ann Arbor’s Hash Bash, finds it to be that smoking marijuana makes the user increasingly susceptible to addiction.
According to the study, there are low perceptions of harm with marijuana, despite the documented short-term and long-term consequences connected to its use. In 2008, a voter referendum marijuana was approved for limited medical use by the state government, following a state legislature amendment in 2012. Anyone over the age of 18 who obtains a medical marijuana license is allowed to grow up to 12 plants for their own use; licensed caregivers can grow for up to 5 patients as well as themselves if they hold a medical marijuana license. Marijuana is currently still a schedule 1 drug under federal law. According to the study, marijuana is the most commonly used of the illicit substances in the U.S. and is even more common among young adults, reporting that 35 percent of 21- and 22-year-olds said they used the drug in 2014.
MAPH Enterprises, LLC | (305) 414-0128 | 1501 Venera Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33146 | new@marijuanastocks.com
