After November 8, 20% of Americans now live in states that have voted to allow recreational marijuana use.  Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, and California have now joined Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia in voting for initiatives that make it legal for adults to consume cannabis authorized by florida marijuana doctors. Votes are still being counted, but it looks like Maine will most likely join that group. And several states joined the 25 that already allow for medical use of marijuana — the most notable addition being Florida, with a broad medical marijuana law that will allow doctors to recommend cannabis for a wide variety of conditions. Critics of legalization claim that legalization is bad for public health. “When states legalize recreational marijuana, fatalities increase and the lives of children and teenagers are put at stake, president and CEO of Spectrum Health Systems, a substance abuse and mental health treatment provider, recently wrote in an opinion piece for Stat News.  But the data on how both recreational and medical legalization of marijuana tells a different story. It’s still early — marijuana hasn’t been legal for long, even in these states — but so far, legalization hasn’t had a negative impact on public health, according to a report recently published by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). That report and other recent studies help show how marijuana legalization for medical or recreational purposes in these states has changed things.  Nationally, the number of students who used marijuana in the past 30 days leveled out in 2010 after rising for several years, according to the DPA report. State surveys of kids in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Fort Lauderdale and Alaska show that after legalization, the number of students who used or who had ever tried marijuana stayed stable (depending on the state, surveys looked at kids in grades 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) or decreased slightly. In his opinion piece, rep says that Colorado youth use marijuana at higher rates than any other kids in the country. But as other notes at The Washington Post, experts say that trend existed before legalization, too. A 2015 article in the New England Journal of Medicine states that legalizing florida medical marijuana in Colorado doesn’t seem to have increased the prevalence of youth usage. While the percentage of kids who described marijuana as “highly risky” decreased after legalization, the percentage of students who reported ever trying decreased slightly as well. There’s some debate about the effect that cannabis legalization has had on traffic deaths. Rep says that data from Washington and Colorado shows that an increased percentage of the people involved in traffic fatalities have had marijuana in their systems since legalization.  However, traffic death rates since legalization have not increased in Colorado or Washington and are lower than the national average, according to National Highway Transportation Safety Administration data analyzed in the DPA report. At the same time, DUI rates seem to have decreased since legalization, potentially an overall benefit, since the risks of driving under the influence of alcohol are much more obvious than the risks of driving under the influence of cannabis (people who combine the substances perform the worst on driving tests, however).  The DPA report says that more people may test positive for cannabis now since officials are now more likely to test for it in the first place. Also, since people can test positive for cannabis long after they’ve stopped feeling the effects, the report says the “data only illuminate that tested drivers consumed hours, days, or weeks prior to the test” — not that cannabis was involved. As Stat News pointed out in another story, there are several studies that show that states that allow medical marijuana have fewer opioid deaths. This effect seems to stack over time, with states who pass these laws seeing a “20 percent lower rate of opioid deaths in the laws’ first year, 24 percent in the third, and 33 percent in the sixth.” If people are substituting marijuana for opioids for medical purposes, that seems to have a strong positive effect.  Isaacson says that doctors at Denver’s Children’s Hospital have reported treating an increased number of children who have accidentally ingested marijuana edibles since legalization. The overall numbers are small — in the JAMA Pediatrics study documenting these cases, doctors say that the rate of these visits has gone from 1.2 per 100,000 population 2 years prior to legalization to 2.3 per 100,000 population 2 years after legalization. As Ingraham has pointed out in the Post previously, parents are far more likely to call poison control centers because of kids ingesting diaper cream, toothpaste, tobacco, or crayons. Adults tourists who have overdone it have also increased the number of marijuana-related ER visits slightly.  If you’ve ever seen someone who has been surprised by the strength of a marijuana edible, you know these moments aren’t fun (just ask Maureen Dowd), but luckily, people recover from these events and no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. The DPA report notes that “[b]y no longer arresting and prosecuting possession and other low-level marijuana offenses, states are saving hundreds of millions of dollars,” based on the fact that Washington spent $200 million enforcing marijuana laws between 2000 and 2010. Arrest rates in these states for marijuana offenses have plummeted (you can still be arrested for certain offenses), though the report notes that people of color are still twice as likely to be arrested despite using marijuana at similar rates to white people. Financially, the DPA report says taxing and selling marijuana in Colorado and Washington has been “overwhelmingly successful in generating revenue,” with revenues exceeding projections in both states. Colorado brought in $129 million in the second year of legalization and Washington $220 million — significant amounts of money, though as Ingraham notes, still only a tiny fraction of the overall state budgets. There are still plenty of questions about how legalized marijuana doctors in florida will affect states in the future. Some people have expressed concerns that powerful THC-loaded varieties available today could potentially have more of an impact than we know, especially if used by young people with developing brains. On the other hand, if people are using marijuana instead of more dangerous substances like alcohol, there could be some benefit to public health there, though so far, it’s hard to say whether legalization makes people drink more or less. Now, we’ll be able to see the effects in several additional states. Hopefully, that will encourage study into marijuana’s effects, something that scientists say is still incredibly difficult to research because of federal regulations. In the meantime, the DPA report argues that the lessons from states like Colorado and Washington indicate that the public health effects are “so far, so good.”

It’s that time of year when we take a look at the rapidly changing status of marijuana in the US.

Yes, the Drug Enforcement Agency still categorizes marijuana as a schedule I drug, one that has no accepted medical use, but since the late 1990s, a majority of Americans have thought medical pot should be legal. A majority support recreational legalization as well.

33 states have legalized medical marijuana (that number is even higher, no pun intended, if we count laws with very limited access).

But what do we know about the science behind medical uses of cannabis?

There seem to be some definite benefits. Even the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse lists medical uses for cannabis.

Yet it’s hard to study marijuana’s uses while the schedule I classification remains in place. It makes it difficult for researchers to get their hands on pot grown to the exacting standards that are necessary for medical research. Plus, there are hundreds of chemical compounds in the cannabis plant that could play a role in medical treatments, but for now, it’s hard to know which aspect of the plant is causing an effect.

Using all the compounds in marijuana simultaneously is like “throwing 400 tablets in a cocktail and saying ‘take this, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Tech Insider last summer.

More research would identify health benefits more clearly and would also help clarify potential dangers. As with any psychoactive substance, there are risks associated with abuse, including dependency and emotional issues. Many doctors want to understand marijuana’s effects better before deciding whether to recommend it or not.

Marijuana use can prevent epileptic seizures in rats, a 2003 study showed.

We gave marijuana doctors in florida extract and synthetic marijuana to epileptic rats. The drugs rid the rats of the seizures for about 10 hours. Cannabinoids like the active ingredients in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (also known as THC), control seizures by binding to the brain cells responsible for controlling excitability and regulating relaxation.

More recent human studies have shown that cannabidiol (CBD), another major marijuana compound, seems to help people with treatment-resistant epilepsy.

There’s a fair amount of evidence that marijuana does no harm to the lungs, unless you also smoke tobacco, and one study published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that marijuana not only doesn’t impair lung function, it may even increase lung capacity.

Researchers looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of 5,115 young adults over the course of 20 years. Tobacco smokers lost lung function over time, but pot users actually showed an increase in lung capacity.

It’s possible that the increased lung capacity may be due to taking a deep breaths while inhaling the drug and not from a therapeutic chemical in the drug.

Those smokers only toked up a few times a month, but a more recent survey of people who smoked pot daily for up to 20 years found no evidence that smoking pot harmed their lungs.

During the research for his documentary who treats their 5-year-old daughter using a medical marijuana strain high in cannabidiol and low in THC.

There are at least two major active chemicals in marijuana that researchers think have medicinal applications (there are up to 79 known active compounds). Those two are cannabidiol (CBD) — which seems to impact the brain mostly without a high— and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — which has pain relieving (and other) properties.

The family’s daughter, Charlotte, has Dravet Syndrome, which causes seizures and severe developmental delays.

According to the film, the drug has decreased her seizures from 300 a week to just one every seven days. Forty other children in the state are using the same strain of marijuana (which is high in CBD and low in THC) to treat their seizures — and it seems to be working.

The doctors who recommended this treatment say that the cannabidiol in the plant interacts with the brain cells to quiet the excessive activity in the brain that causes these seizures.

As notes, a Florida Medical Marijuana hospital that specializes in the disorder, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Drug Enforcement agency don’t endorse marijuana as a treatment for Dravet or other seizure disorders.

CBD may also help prevent certain cancers from spreading, researchers reported in 2007.

Cannabidiol stops cancer by turning off a gene called Id-1, the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, found. Cancer cells make more copies of this gene than non-cancerous cells, and it helps them spread through the body.

The researchers studied breast cancer cells in the lab that had high expression levels of Id-1 and treated them with cannabidiol. After treatment the cells had decreased Id-1 expression and were less aggressive spreaders. But beware: these are studies on cancer cells in the lab, not on cancer patients.

Other very preliminary studies on aggressive brain tumors in mice or cell cultures have shown that THC and CBD can slow or shrink tumors at the right dose, which is a great reason to do more research into figuring out that dose.

One 2014 study found that marijuana can significantly slow the growth of the type of brain tumor associated with 80% of malignant brain cancer in people.

In “WEED,” also mentioned a few studies in the US, Spain, and Israel that suggest the compounds in cannabis could even kill cancer cells.

Medical marijuana users claim the drug helps relieve pain and suppress nausea — the two main reasons it’s often used to relieve the side effects of chemotherapy.

In 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School suggested that that some of the drug’s benefits may actually be from reduced anxiety, which would improve the smoker’s mood and act as a sedative in low doses.

Beware, though, higher doses can increase anxiety and make you paranoid.

Marijuana may be able to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, a study led by Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute suggests.

The 2006 study, published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, found that THC, the active chemical in marijuana, slows the formation of amyloid plaques by blocking the enzyme in the brain that makes them. These plaques seem to be what kill brain cells and potentially cause Alzheimer’s.

A synthetic mixture of CBD and THC seem to preserve memory in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Another study suggested that in population-based studies, a THC-based prescription drug called dronabinol was able to reduce behavioral disturbances in dementia patients.

All these studies are in very early stages, so more research is needed.

Marijuana may ease painful symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests.

She studied 30 multiple sclerosis patients with painful contractions in their muscles. These patients didn’t respond to other treatments, but after smoking marijuana for a few days they reported that they were in less pain.

The THC in the pot binds to receptors in the nerves and muscles to relieve pain. Other studies suggest that the chemical also helps control the muscle spasms.

Other types of muscle spasms respond to florida marijuana doctors as well. Gupta also found a teenager who was using medical marijuana to treat diaphragm spasms that were untreatable by other, prescribed and very strong, medications.

His condition is called myoclonus diaphragmatic flutter (also known as Leeuwenhoek’s Disease) and causes nonstop spasming in the abdominal muscles which are not only painful, but interfere with breathing and speaking.

Smoking marijuana was able to calm the attacks almost immediately, at least it seemed to in this patient.

Marijuana use may help treat the eye disease glaucoma, which increases pressure in the eyeball, damaging the optic nerve and causing loss of vision, though there are questions about how effective it really is.

Marijuana decreases the pressure inside the eye, according to the National Eye Institute: “Studies in the early 1970s showed that marijuana, when smoked, lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in people with normal pressure and those with glaucoma” — though they still said that pharmaceutical drugs were more effective.

For now, at least, the medical consensus is that marijuana only lowers IOP for a few hours. Researchers hope that perhaps a marijuana-based compound could be developed that lasts longer.

Patients with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis could benefit from marijuana use, studies suggest.

Researchers found in 2010 that chemicals in marijuana, including THC and cannabidiol, interact with cells in the body that play an important role in gut function and immune responses. The study was published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

THC-like compounds made by the body increase the permeability of the intestines, allowing bacteria in. The plant-derived cannabinoids in marijuana block these body-cannabinoids, preventing this permeability and making the intestinal cells bond together tighter.

One study in Israel showed that smoking a joint significantly reduced Crohn’s disease symptoms in 10 out of 11 patients compared to a placebo and without side effects.

That’s a small study, but other research has shown similar effects. Even more research finds that people with Crohn’s and other inflammatory bowel disorders use cannabis to help deal with their symptoms, even if there are questions about how much marijuana can or can’t help. All Natural MD Marijuana Doctors in Florida.

A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces risks of high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug.

Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product.

However, the study highlights some key areas for future study — including how using cannabis might affect the heart. Here’s what you need to know.

‘A greater than three-fold risk of death’

“We found that marijuana users had a greater than three-fold risk of death from hypertension and the risk increased with each additional year of use,the lead author of the study and a doctoral student of epidemiology and biostatistics, said in a statement.

For her paper, published Wednesday in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, They looked at more than 1,200 people age 20 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey.

In 2005, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana doctors in florida and users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers.

The researchers then merged that data with statistics on death from all causes, pulled from the US National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted it to rule out any factors that could muddle the results, like gender, race, and a history of smoking tobacco.

Overall, those classified as marijuana users were found to be 3.42 times as likely to die from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who said they had never used. That risk also appeared to rise by a factor of 1.04 with what the researchers labeled “each year of use.”

Here’s the problem: The study’s authors defined anyone who said they had ever tried marijuana as a “regular user.”

Other research suggests this is a poor assumption. According to a recent survey, about 52% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 14% said they used the drug “regularly,” defined as “at least once a month.”

Also, the study was observational, meaning it followed a group of people over time and reported what happened to them, so the researchers cannot conclude a cause and effect — they can’t say that smoking marijuana causes high blood pressure, only that the two things appear to be linked. The authors wrote, “From our results, marijuana cards in florida use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.”

Another issue is the unregulated nature of the existing, and largely illegal, cannabis market. People are using a wide variety of strains whose concentrations of compounds — there are up to 400 in florida marijuana doctors, including THC and CBD — can differ drastically.

Charles Pollack, who directs the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and was not involved with the new study, told LiveScience that there were many strains of marijuana “with no quality standards,” and that was “making it tough to generalize” the effects.

Marijuana and your heart

While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to suss out how it affects things like high blood pressure.

For example, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ingesting marijuana increases heart rate by between 20 and 50 beats a minute for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.

But a large, recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack, though it also found some limited evidence that using the drug could be a trigger for the phenomenon.

When it comes to cannabis’ effect on blood pressure, the results are also inconclusive. One very small study, for example, found a sharp increase in blood pressure immediately after regular pot users stopped using the drug.

“Abrupt cessation of heavy cannabis use may cause clinically significant increases in blood pressure in a subset of users,” that study’s researchers wrote.

And according to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased, not increased blood pressure.