Dr. Andrew Weil makes a good arguement in this essay re the Drugged Driving Law.
http://deoxy.org/pdfa/marijuana.htmExcerpts:
What No One Wants to Know About Marijuana
From The Natural Mind by Dr. Andrew Weil
(last half of chapter four pg. 86-97)
Because marijuana is such an unimpressive pharmacological agent, it is not a very interesting drug to study in a laboratory. Pharmacologists cannot get a handle on it with their methods, and because they cannot see the reality of the non-material state of consciousness that users experience, they are forced to design experimental situations very far removed from the real world in order to get measurable effects. There are three conditions under which marijuana can be shown to impair general psychological performance in laboratory subjects. They are:
1) by giving it to people who have never had it before;
2) by giving people very high doses that they are not used to (or giving it orally to people used to smoking it); and
3) by giving people very hard things to do, especially things that they have never had a chance to practice while under the influence of the drug.
Under any of these three conditions, pharmacologists can demonstrate that marijuana impairs performance. And if we look at the work being done by NIMH-funded researchers, all of it fulfills one or more of these conditions. In addition, the tests being used by these scientists are designed to look for impairments of functions that have nothing to do with why marijuana users put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. People who get high on marijuana do not spontaneously try to do arithmetic problems or test their fine coordination.
What pharmacologists cannot make sense of is that people who are high on marijuana cannot be shown, in objective terms, to be different from people who are not high. That is, if a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not appear to perform any differently from someone who is not high. Now, this pattern of users performing better than nonusers is a general phenomenon associated with all psychoactive drugs. For example, an alcoholic will vastly outperform a nondrinker on any test if the two are equally intoxicated; he has learned to compensate for the effects of the drug on his nervous system. But compensation can proceed only so far until it runs up against a ceiling imposed by the pharmacological action of the drug on lower brain centers. Again, since marijuana has no clinically significant action on lower brain centers, compensation can reach 100 percent with practice.
These considerations mean that there are no answers to questions like, What does marijuana do to driving ability? The only possible answer is, It depends. It depends on the person - whether he is a marijuana user, whether he has practiced driving while under the influence of marijuana. In speaking to legislative and medical groups, I have stated a personal reaction to this question in the form of the decision I would make if I were given the choice of riding with one of the following four drivers:
1) a person who had never smoked marijuana before and just had;
2) a marijuana smoker who had never driven while high and was just about to;
3) a high marijuana smoker who had practiced driving while high; and
4) a person with any amount of alcohol in him.
I would unhesitatingly take driver number three as the best possible risk. One may wonder how many drivers of types one and two are on our highways. Probably many. But there is some consolation in the fact that persons learning to do things under the influence of marijuana almost always are anxious about their performance and therefore tend to err on the side of overcaution.
The tendency for novice users of marijuana to imagine that their psychological functioning is disrupted to a much greater degree than it actually is, is most noticeable in conection with subtle changes in speech. People who are high on marijuana seem to have to do slightly more work that usual to remember moment to moment the logical thread of what they are saying. This change manifests itself in two ways: as a tendency to forget what one started out to say, especially following an interruption, and a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents. Zinberg, Nelson and I were able to pick up these changes in tape recordings of our Boston subjects, but I must emphasize the adjective subtle in describing them. Someone not specially trained to listen for these changes would not hear them. Interestingly enough, however, marijuana users themselves often imagine they are not making sense abd become anxious about other people guessing that they are high. Some users experience this subjective anxiety about speech most intensely when they are talking on the telephone.
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Most people who have read the hypothesis Zinberg and I first presented in Nature have drawn the conclusion that marijuana interferes with immediate memory. In fact, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in testimony before Congress in 1970, used our results to support the statement that "more recent studies . . . in which researchers have learned some troublesome facts . . . make it impossible to give marijuana a clean bill of health."2 I would once have gone along with this kind of reasoning, but the more I have thought about the matter, the more it has become clear to me that it is not useful to think of marijuana as interfering with one's awareness of the immediate past.
For one thing, disturbance of immediate memory seems to be a common feature of all altered states of consciousness in which attention is focused on the present. It can be noticed in hypnotic and other trances, meditation, mystic ecstasies, and highs associated with all drugs. Therefore, to call marijuana the cause of the phenomenon is probably unwise. In addition, the phrase disturbance of immediate memory bristles with negativity. Is it a negative description of a condition that might just as well be looked at positively? I believe so. In fact, the ability to live entirely in the present, without paying attention to the immediate past or future, is precisely the goal of meditation and the exact aim of many religious disciplines.
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Thus the pharmacological way of thinking leads to the formulation of a hypothesis built upon an incorrect causal attribution and a negatively biased description of a phenomenon assigned great value in other ways of thinking. The pharmacologist says marijuana interferes with immediate memory, and by using tests in which one is penalized for not paying full attention to the past, the pharmacologist can produce evidence to document his hypothesis. The National Institute of Mental Health is supporting this kind of research with money appropriated by Congress. It is not funding research designed to look for the positive advantages of having one's full awareness focused on the present.
In a similar way, all other psychological effects of marijuana turn out to be common features of altered states of consciousness unassociated with drugs, and whenever pharmacologist describes them in negative ways, it is possible to look at them positively from the point of conscious experience. The perceptual changes reported by marijuana users are another example. Here again is an apparent paradox since all testing to date has failed to show any objective changes in sensory function during acute marijuana intoxication. If pharmacologists paid closer attention to what users say, they would find their way out of this paradox. There is no indication from persons high on marijuana that their sense organs are working differently from usual. Rather, the change seems to be in what they do with incoming sensory information. For instance, many users claim that listening to music is more interesting and pleasurable when they are high. They do not claim that they hear tones of lower volume or that they can better discriminate between pitches of tones. Yet all of the testing of auditory function under marijuana has been aimed at the ear--at auditory thresholds, pitch discrimination, and the like.
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I now realize that altered secondary perception of sensory information is intrinsic to all altered states of consciousness, whether triggered by drugs or not. Therefore, it no longer seems profitable to me to try to understand how marijuana "causes" the effect. In addition, I no longer subscribe to the negative hypothesis that marijuana interferes with normal processing of perceptual data. Rather, I observe that in altered states of consciousness, one frequently gains the ability to interpret his perceptions in new ways and that this ability seems to be the key to freedom from bondage to the senses. For example, hypnotic anesthesia is nothing more than another way of perceiving pain. The patient, fully aware but in a state of focused consciousness, learns the "trick" of separating the pain itself from his reaction to it. He is thus free to perceive the pain in a novel way - something going on "out there" but not hurting. (One hypnotist I know produces this state with the suggestion that "the hurt is going out of the pain.")
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http://deoxy.org/pdfa/index.htm[ This Message was edited by: Deborah on 2004-09-08 09:19 ]