Marijuana

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crowding out neighboring grasses and reaching heights of three to twenty feet at full growth. has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years; it is one of the oldest agricultural commodities not grown for food. The stalks of the plant contain fibers that have been woven for years to make rope, canvas, and paper. Cannabis is dioecious, spawning male and female plants at an equal rate. The flowering buds of the female secrete a sticky yellow resin rich with cannabinoids, the more than sixty compounds unique to . Several of the chemicals are psychoactive, most prominently delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical school, wrote a book called , the Forbidden Medicine (1993). In his book, Grinspoon provides evidence that smoking can relieve the nausea associated with chemotherapy, prevent blindness induced by glaucoma, serve as a appetite stimulant for AIDS patients, act as an anti-epileptic, ward off asthma ...

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the end of use. Well-publicized horror stories form the 1970's that kills brain cells, damages chromosomes, and prompts men to grow breasts, were based on faulty research.
Smoking does seem to damage the pulmonary system, in some of the ways that inhaling tobacco smoke does. In a study of people who have smoked four or five joints a day for more than ten years, the physician Donald P. Tashkin, of the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, has found evidence that smoke can cause chronic bronchitis, changes in cells of the central airway which are potentially pre-cancerous, and an impairment in scavenger-cell function which could lead to greater risk of respiratory ...

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