Settled science hates pot

My psychotic friend Mike from high school calls me every now and then to say hello. Mike was the smartest kid I ever knew – and also the most pot-smoking, acid-dropping, high-all-the-time kid. Vulnerable boys usually have their first psychotic breaks around age 20, and Mike has had about one hospitalization every year. He's incurable and can't hold a job or have a family, and his friendly phone calls are always the same weird word salad. He's schizophrenic, but he wants to say he loves me, and I tell him the same. His learning ability seems frozen. To learn any new information, you need your hippocampus, a large double-horned structure embedded in your brain. A healthy hippocampus uses a huge amount of blood carrying brain fuel, glucose and oxygen.

Medical scientists have known for decades that smoking pot can trigger lifelong psychosis in vulnerable teenage boys. If you smoke it in a joint, it's also a lung cancer risk, because plant burn particles can cause cancer. Just in time for Governor Jerry Brown's California pot legalization, we get a huge study from UCSF showing that chronic potheads have marked loss of "blood perfusion" in the right horn of the hippocampus. Pot-smoking now looks like a risk factor for Alzheimer's dementia, too. But Jerry is too far gone to grok this weird idea. Another medical article starts by telling us that the "association of marijuana use and psychosis has been known for more than a thousand years." The medical database PubMed.com has more than 3,500 articles for "(cannabis) AND risk." There's evidence for testicular cancer, A.D., psychosis, on and on. Because potheads also do other street drugs, drink alcohol, and stick their heads up their innards, the scientific debate is which one causes which. Frankly, I don't care. I'm sorry: the link between Jerry Brown's kind of madness and street dope is settled science, much more settled than global warping, or whatever they call it today. (It's hard to remember words when your brain is pickled on all those bathtub drugs, which explains Jerry Brown and the California legislature, Barack H. Obama, and much of the Looneyversity of California.) The next time a liberal tells you global Armageddon is settled science, just send him the links. Chances are that your friend can't even have a novel thought anymore. Keep the grass away from kids if you can. Their brains are still healthy, and they can be saved. But don't ask Jerry Brown for help. He's done.