Pubdate: Sun, 27 Dec 2015
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)
Copyright: 2015 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SendLetter/
Website: http://www.santafenewmexican.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Richard Dean Jacob

TIME TO RETHINK CONSEQUENCES OF NEW MARIJUANA ERA

The classic 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness 
revolved around very melodramatic events where high school students, 
lured by pushers to try marijuana, descended into a sensational 
multitude of drug-induced depravities. In decades hence, this 
cautionary tale of a drug menace gone mad has been rightfully seen as 
an extremely exaggerated take on the use of marijuana.

Today the pendulum has swung to quite another extreme.

Recently a Gas & Grass (combination gas station and marijuana 
dispensary) has opened in Colorado Springs so customers can get a 
variety of errands done in the same place for their unprecedented 
convenience - including the purchase of lottery tickets, beverages 
and cigarettes. The March 2014 issue of Psychology Today published an 
article titled, "It's Time to Address the Marijuana Issue: To put it 
simply, What are we thinking?" In it, the author, Dr. Robert Berezin, 
writes that "the substance abuse epidemic is so incredibly 
destructive to the well-being of our society ... it's problematic 
enough to deal with the hard drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals." 
He furthers that marijuana is a psychoactive drug, and while not 
physically addictive, it is powerfully habituating. Dr. Berezin says 
that he has treated all the addictions and that marijuana usage has 
gotten a "pass" - a substance whose habitual use negatively affects 
the brain and can be distorting and destructive to the personality 
and optimum functioning in life.

Kyle Grimshaw-Jones of Conscioushealing.com has compiled a list of 
negative energetic/spiritual effects of habitual marijuana usage - 
all detrimental to our consciousness and being.

The inventory includes but is not limited to: marijuana overexpands 
and weakens our etheric field that is the blueprint/ plan for our 
physical body (worked on, for example, in acupuncture and human 
energy field work); this overexpansion may cause energy leakage 
through breaks in our etheric field (which can become sites of 
physical disease and entity attachment); this weakening of the 
grid-like etheric field can allow an increase in the loss of our 
self-efficacy and our making decisions based on lower instincts 
rather than true intuition, right livelihood, and constructive 
activity; the marijuana high takes us into the astral plane that is 
not the goal of spiritual evolution (even while facilitating 
creativeness this can disconnect us from our higher self and result 
in mental fragmentation, delusionary thinking and dependency); the 
chronic marijuana user can be eventually induced into remarkable 
degrees of denial.

Today I'm amazed at middle-age and older individuals still heavily 
reefing away who so conveniently forget how, as teens, stoners would 
develop "burn out" - dark circles under their eyes, short-term memory 
loss, lethargy and lack of initiative.

In this discourse, I am not making a case for or against the legality 
of cannabis but rather for an expanded base of enlightenment and 
choice. It's a problem for many of us that marijuana legalization 
fosters a public perception that pot is a benign and harmless drug or 
even beneficial.

Something overlooked nowadays in the touting of the therapeutic 
benefits of medical marijuana is the fact that any possible 
advantageous credits from psychoactive THC (which the marijuana plant 
contains) does not outweigh its inherent risks - that it's actually 
CBD (the non-psychoactive component cannabinoid in cannabis) that is 
the real champion in today's medical marijuana world for its 
therapeutic wonders.

It's been scientifically validated that CBD works to cancel out the 
detrimental effects of THC. Oftentimes, CBD is almost totally absent 
in high-THC recreational marijuana that research studies continue to 
show results in neural damage and lifelong impairment and especially 
hinders the proper development of the adolescent brain.

In a time of high-alcohol craft beer becoming commonplace while 
states pass tougher drunken-driving laws by lowering blood-alcohol 
concentration limits, and texting-while-stoned fatalities make news, 
it's time for ever-clearer assessments and reality checks concerning 
the substances we use and the choices we make.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom