COM 0193.044 2006-2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Is it possible that American women didn't know how to use marijuana intelligently? Did you find that Jamaican women had more ganja wisdom? American drug use often takes place without cultural rules and in an unsupervised context. The Jamaican women we studied had been educated in a cultural tradition of using marijuana as a medicine. They prepared it with teas, milk and spices, and thought of it as a preventive and curative substance. Smoking it during pregnancy was a way of relieving nausea, increasing appetites, combating fatigue and depression, providing rest and relaxation. Some of these women were in dire socioeconomic straits, and they found that smoking ganja helped allay feelings of worry and depression about [heir financial situation. Our testing showed that the children of women who used ganja had better alertness, stability and adjustment than children of women who didn't use ganja. This was measured at the age of one month. We measured children again at four years and at five years of age, and found that there were no apparent deficits in the children of marijuana-using mothers. In fact, in many ways, they were better oft than children ofnon-smoking mothers. The ganja-using mothers also seemed better off than non- users. Since these results contradicted the hysteria of drug war assertions, did you find it hard to get your studies published? I insisted on publishing in a medical journal - I wanted the academic community to understand that thejury was still out on marijuana and that's why we do cross-cultural studies to determine how drugs really affect people. It isn't logical to look just at one culture's problems with a drug and conclude that that's a universal situation. The medical community needed to see that these results, which came from very solid research methods, were far different than what they are usually exposed to. They needed to see that women who smoked marijuana are not bad mothers. I am so damned sick of picking up a woman's journal or a tabloid and seeing some article saying that if you smoke even one marijuana cigarette during pregnancy you are a bad mother and you're doing permanent damage to your baby. There's no evidence to back up these warnings, and in my studies the evidence points in the other direction. It sounds like you're frustrated about the influences of politics and inaccuracy in the reporting of marijuana research findings. I just want researchers to use good research methods and to tell women the truth. I think these hyperbolic warnings about marijuana and pregnancy have made women absolutely nuts. 1 got a call from a woman who was in tears because she and her husband had waited several years to adopt a baby and finally she had found a baby to adopt, but somebody told the couple they couldn't adopt the baby because the baby had tested positive for marijuana. "Oh for god's sake," [said, "Go adopt your baby. Love your baby. Your baby is going to be just fine." Now they're talking about charging women with child abuse if they test positive for drugs during pregnancy. It's a slippery slope. Where's it going to stop? Are we going [o arrest women for sitting on the couch eatingjunk food watching television during pregnancy? We are on the way to the Stepford Wives. So one of my goals with this research was to get the message to physicians: so women smoke a little marijuana -big deal. Let women enjoy their pregnancies. If there's something seriously wrong with their baby it would have occurred no matter what -marijuana or not. Things have gotten so strange in regard to babies. We have to have the perfect baby and if not, well somebody or something has to be blamed. It must have been a whiff of paint she smelled, or a glass of wine, or a cigarette, or a draw of marijuana... It's ridiculous. 5