Tokyo Starfish

Original article published to The Washington Post Jan. 18, 2016 by Christopher Ingraham You might have heard that smoking marijuana makes you stupid. If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, that was more or less the take-home message of countless  anti-drug PSAs . In more recent years, it’s a message we’ve heard — albeit in more nuanced form — from Republican candidates on the campaign trail and from  marijuana opponents at the state-level . The contemporary version of argument can be traced to  a 2012 Duke University study , which found that persistent, heavy marijuana use through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ. Other researchers have since  criticized that study’s methods . A  follow-up study in the same journal found that the original research failed to account for a number of confounding factors that could also affect cognitive development, such as cigarette and alcohol use, mental illn...

Medical Marijuana has been used for healing for thousands of years. In ancient China, India, the Middle East and even America the herb had been identified as having medicinal properties. Even in more modern times Queen Victoria and her personal physician did some groundbreaking work into the medical application of marijuana.   The herb had also been in common use in the United States prior to the passing of the Stamp Act in the 1920s and other marijuana laws. Today patients suffering with asthma, A.I.D.S, cancer and many other illnesses extol the virtues of marijuana use. The History Marijuana, or Cannabis Sativa as it is known scientifically, is an herb that grows wild in temperate climates. Long before teenagers and counter culture activists were experimenting with cannabis many Asian countries had long since included medicinal marijuana on their list of healing herbs. The earliest documented use of this medicinal weed is among the Chinese. The therapeutic use of medicinal mariju...