Marijuana

Marijuana Rehab Treatment
Marijuana Addiction and Abuse.

There were many who felt that the use of marijuana, the drug of choice for the Baby Boomer Generation, was no longer the danger it once had been. From its peak in 1979, when studies found that more than 60 percent of 12th graders had tried marijuana at least once in their lives, the percentage of 12th graders who had ever used the drug dropped to 33 percent in 1992.

Still, there are a number of reasons to be concerned. Marijuana continues to be a drug of entry for many Americans. Reports indicate that the marijuana available today can be five times more potent than the marijuana of the 1970s and that teenagers can often obtain marijuana more easily than alcohol.

Whatever you call it - pot, grass, reefer, weed, herb, mary jane, mj - marijuana is a greenish-gray mixture of the dried, shredded leaves, stems, seeds and flowers of Cannabis sativa, the hemp plant. Most users smoke marijuana in hand-rolled cigarettes called 'joints.' Some use pipes or water pipes called bongs. Also becoming popular are marijuana cigars, called blunts, where the tobacco in cigars is replaced with marijuana and often combined with another drug, such as crack cocaine.

But whatever it's called, and however it's used, marijuana can produce adverse physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral changes. Contrary to popular belief, it can be addictive. Marijuana smoke, like cigarette smoke, can harm the lungs. The use of marijuana can impair short-term memory, verbal skills, and judgment and distort perception. It also may weaken the immune system and may even increase a user's likelihood of developing cancer. Studies also show that the increasing use of marijuana by very young teens may have a profoundly negative effect upon their development.

However, there can be far more sinister effects. In a study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a moderate dose of marijuana alone was shown to impair driving performance. Even more significant were findings that the effects of even a low dose of marijuana combined with alcohol - on such activities as reaction time, visual search frequency, and the ability to perceive and/or respond to changes in the relative velocity of other vehicles - were markedly greater than for either drug alone.

Marijuana users who have taken high doses of the drug may also experience acute toxic psychosis, which includes hallucinations, delusions, and depersonalization -- a loss of the sense of personal identity, or self-recognition. Although the specific causes of these symptoms remain unknown, they appear to occur more frequently when a high dose of cannabis is consumed in food or drink rather than smoked.

Addiction to marijuana reflects an uncontrollable urge to possess and use the drug. Without the kind of treatment available at Sunrise Recovery Ranch, those addicted to it are generally unable to halt their addiction even if they wanted to.

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