09 October 2006

So smoking pot does make you smarter*

When I was younger, and bear in mind we're going back 30 something years here, I had a friend who insisted that smoking dope made you smarter.

Trouble is, he didn't have ready access to a gazillion dollars worth of lab equipment and a dedicated cadre of grad students who could make that hypothesis scientifically credible.

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time.
THC, the key compound in marijuana, may also be the key to new drugs for Alzheimer's disease. That's because the marijuana compound blocks the formation of brain-clogging Alzheimer's plaques better than current Alzheimer's drugs.

The finding — in test-tube studies — comes from the lab of Kim Janda, Ph.D.
What I remember about smoking dope was that it made you loll around on that dusty old couch in somebody's partially finished basement... listening endlessly to the same Steppenwolf 8-track tape, on a stereo cranked up so high it would've sterilised a labrador retriever.

I also remember incredible munchies (a stupid word, dreamed up by a stoner, no doubt)... the undeniable need to pound back vast quantities of pizza, or anything even remotely resembling a foodstuff, like a herd of angry, starving locusts.

Now, truth be told, and I'm hoping my pre-adolescent son doesn't read this for at least another ten years, in my teens and twenties, I had a fairly casual relationship with recreational pharmaceuticals, and it did make me feel smarter... for a while.

Trouble is, thirty years and ten million less brain cells later, I'm not really sure if I'm really remembering it correctly at all.

Oh-oh.

*I was a no-show at the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the high school I once infrequently attended... so this post goes out to all the people I haven't talked to since the bad old days.

UPDATE 13 Oct 2006 - Marijuana Party makes big score
Canada's small political parties will share around $500,000 after an Ontario Superior Court judge struck down a law that allowed federal parties to be paid $1.75 per vote they received only if they took more than two per cent of the vote.

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