BLM & Brain Damage: Marijuana & the leaders of Black Lives Matter.

so my hope is to engage us in a deeper
conversation about race racism society in our future but really I also want to challenge us to understand the deeper implications of black lives matter because many people know my you know my work as a co-founder of black lives matter it's time for se of all the conversation as we know from one that dispels the myths and the rumors about marijuana being a menace in our society to one that reminds us about the medicine that marijuana is the power and the ability to transform our lives and we know that all communities love and benefits we love it when we're talking about I mean literally we've spoken all day about this and we've talked about the myriad benefits right from the healing aspects to the access a deal with anxiety we talked also about the potential right we talked about flow state and the ability we have to transform our very beings to to perform at our optimal state and that is I feel so profound so necessary and where I hope that we can all move you've just heard the co-founder of black lives matter making the statement that marijuana is a crucial part of the progress of democracy and social justice in our times you heard her make a statement that it's a necessary precondition for achieving your optimal state as a human being whatever that means whatever that may mean to her I can't imagine who we just pause and reflect on how ridiculous this would sound if we've replaced marijuana with the name of any other sedative with any other recreational drug or with any other addictive drug because marijuana is all three it is a sedative is a recreational drug and it is an addictive drug and it does also cause brain damage wouldn't it sound ridiculous if the leader of blacklivesmatter were endorsing the recreational use of opiates of xanax even of alcohol even of beer and whiskey claiming that you needed any of these drugs in order to achieve your optimal state in order to make progress with democracy and social justice transform our very beings to perform at our optimal state it would sound laughs out loud hilarious but somehow this one particular sedative marijuana still has this strange halo surrounding it on the left wing I would say especially because of the legacy of specific african-american and new world movements like Rastafarians 'm the influence of restive Aryan ism yes in Jamaica but even more in the Unites States America I think there is a sense in which marijuana is still thought of as somehow a rebellious and revolutionary drug and the reality is that now with the progress of modern medical science we know more clearly and specifically than ever that marijuana does indeed cause brain damage quote our study demonstrates a pattern of gray matter of volume changes in a group of regular cannabis users compared with a group of occasional ones just an interesting note everyone who participated in the study was age 19 to a JH 29 so there were no effects in the brain here old age or other cumulative habits over many years regular users exhibit a decrease in gray matter volume if the medial temporal cortex temporal Pole parahippocampal gyrus left insula and orbital frontal context cortex I'm not a brain surgeon I'm not let me ask you in the audience if I hadn't struggled to pronounce the different parts of the human brain there do you think any of you would have just felt comfortable with marijuana causing brain damage was marijuana marijuana causing the loss of very matter in in just some parts of the brain and not others was there anyone in the audience who is sitting there thinking hmm okay the temporal cortex temporal Pole that I can live with that's no problem but wait a minute it causes brain damage also in the orbital frontal cortex okay forget it I'm out okay now I'm gonna take this seriously guys now I'm gonna quit smoking marijuana before the first four or five parts of the brain you mentioned being damaged by marijuana that I was cool with but not that last cortex that was one cortex too many and I actually believe can be one of the critical vehicles for the 21st century to help us in transforming this world so that we can have a democracy that works for all of us I believe that we have an opportunity for us to live up to the change that we talked about we talked about you know this conference and even this convening being one that is recognizing that cannabis is a catalyst for change and I believe that cows can be a catalyst for social change and social good so that is where I will close it's estimated 9% of cannabis users will develop an addiction or dependency which is less than alcohol and nicotine but for those who start talking as teenagers it's about 17% I gotta tell you it's a very psychological addiction when you stop it's some physical addiction there's some physical I mean you stop sleeping you get the chills you get body aches you get restless leg syndrome restless leg syndrome is the worst part of it I would say I have no patients I have my tempers through the roof and that is not like me I there's sleep is out the window for about sleep I'm not sleeping for about three days until my body crashes and then I'll sleep for about four hours and then that'll be my sleep for the next three days until I crash again and the metal like and that and food is definitely out the window don't want to heat food at all appetite is gone at fifteen it meant everything by the time high school was over Vanessa Markov and her friends were smoking pot every day Markov admits she probably wouldn't have listened to anyone's advice but she regrets spending more than a decade of her life in a drug-induced haze I was extremely lethargic I went from being an athlete to being a couch potato as a kid I absolutely didn't think it was addictive because no one had ever talked about it being addictive these changes strongly correlated with the monthly frequency of cannabis use in the three months before inclusion in the study specifically significant gray matter atrophy can occur either with a heavy cannabis consumption independent of the age of first use or with recreational consumption that started during adolescence before the age of eighteen neuropsychopharmacology come on that's a journal nobody can even spell the title it's a terrible name for a journal how are you gonna sell any copies on newsstands with a title like that yeah well it's a respectable peer-reviewed journal that's what I was quoting before and that's what I'm interested in quoting again our findings corroborate several animal studies adding evidence that the duration of exposure to cannabis is indeed associated with localized volume reduction in regions rich in cb1 receptors correlating with the amount of cannabis used let me just let me just emphasize here mmm volume volume it doesn't mean doesn't mean they're turning down the volume in the brain it's not it's not about sound here okay localized volume reduction that's talking about the actual shrinkage of lobes of the brain okay the loss of gray matter being visible as shrinking hemispheres of the brain shall we say continue our position here the aggression of them a long-term exposure to drugs toward the development of substance use disorders and addictive behaviors is often associated with deficits in decision-making in this regard it has been demonstrated that substance dependent individuals in patients with vmPFC lesions exhibit similar behaviors that lead them to make similar decisions in real life preferring choices that bring immediate benefits even if coupled with negative consequences thoughts so what they're saying here is the type of brain damage they have proven proven marijuana to cause it doesn't just show up in a brain scan on a computer screen down at the hospital it's also evident in changes in human behavior in the types of decisions 15 years later she found herself in a doctor's office pleading for help with multiple mental health issues I just started to have extreme panic attacks and very high anxiety brutal social anxiety to the point where I had to be either drunk or high in order to really relate to people or feel comfortable in my own skin um one day do I want to not do smoke marijuana and just be sober absolutely do I think I can I don't know people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know