Does cannabis damage the brain...?

[SzAdmin]

@san_pedro

does cannabis damage the brain…?

It sure seems likely:

Smoking skunk cannabis triples risk of serious psychotic episode, says research

Smoking powerful skunk cannabis triples the risk of suffering a serious psychotic episode, scientists have found. In the population studied by the researchers in South London, where cannabis use is widespread, the drug is linked to one quarter of all new cases of psychosis, the team found. The findings add to a compelling body of evidence that smoking strong cannabis “tilts the odds” towards a person developing psychosis, which leads to schizophrenia in about half of cases. The study found that those who smoked skunk every day had five times the normal risk of experiencing extended episodes in which they heard voices, suffered delusions or demonstrated erratic behaviour. Sir Robin Murray…

and

Cannabis and memory loss

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/jan/17/cannabis-memory-loss-cbd It isn’t often that science and pop culture overlap, but the two fields are in agreement when it comes to the familiar trope of the forgetful stoner. A recent study published in Schizophrenia Bulletin is the latest to reveal the detrimental effects that cannabis can have on memory. The authors report that people dependent on the drug – both healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia – show impairments in memory compared with healthy volunteers and non-smoking schizophrenia patients. Even more striking, the cannabis-using groups had significant decreases in the volume of two brain areas that are important…