Pot Boosts Brain Cell Growth?

It almost makes me wish my smoking days were not long behind me; this from Libby posting at Newshoggers under "Marijuana is good medicine":

The prohibition profiteers lie to you when they tell you that pot has no medicinal value. A new study just out shows marijuana increases brain cell growth.

ST. JOHN’S, Nfld — Supporters of marijuana may finally have an excuse to smoke weed every day. A recent study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests that smoking pot can make the brain grow.

Though most drugs inhibit the growth of new brain cells, injections of a synthetic cannibinoid have had the opposite effect in mice in a study performed at the University of Saskatchewan. ...

The researchers found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis — the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. A current hypothesis suggests depression may be triggered when the hippocampus grows insufficient numbers of new brain cells. If true, HU-210 could offer a treatment for such mood disorders by stimulating this growth.

Now cannabis is a complex plant and the research was conducted with only two of a multitude of elements it contains so this study isn't really a license to smoke pot, but this could explain why so many people who suffer from depressive disorders self-medicate with marijuana. Taken in moderation, it works better than Zoloft with a lot less dangerous side effects.

Meanwhile, I have mixed feelings about this research. It's good to establish that cannabinoids are useful as medicine but the focus on using synthentic compounds suggests to me that prohibitionists want to profit from marijuana without having to give up their equally lucrative war on the natural plant.

Republicans, Mental Health, And Delusions

As Ricky Shambles posts at my "other" home at All Things Democrat, GOPeeuponers are into delusion: they think their mental health is better than anyone else's.

Ricky puts it well: ignorance MUST be bliss.

The Mentally Ill: "A Little Torture in Michigan"

Monkeyfister points us to this terrible - and sadly, less and less unusual - story of a man with manic depression who very quickly deteriorated and died in prison custody, presented by CBS. Solitary confinement and restraints can "break" a healthy person in a very short period of time. Yet throughout America as well as in America's "secret" prisons and Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo, often with people charged with no crime whatsoever or as in this case, a mere shoplifting charge, law enforcement and military and quasi military organizations use these techniques that result in unbelievable suffering, permanent mental illness, and, with growing frequency, death.

You wouldn't imagine these days that a mental patient could be chained to a concrete slab by prison guards until he died of thirst, but that’s how Timothy Souders died and he is not the only one.

Souders suffered from manic depression. And like a lot of mental patients in this country, he got into trouble and ended up not in a hospital, but in jail. It was a shoplifting case and he paid with his life.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, no one would have been the wiser, but a medical investigator working for a federal judge caught wind of Souders' death and discovered his torturous end was recorded on videotape. The tapes, which are hard to watch, open a horrifying window on mental illness behind bars.

Six months ago, Tim Souders was in solitary at the Southern Michigan Correctional Center. He was 21, serving three to five years. Though an investigation would show he needed urgent psychiatric care, Souders was chained down, hands, feet and waist, up to 17 hours at a time. By prison rules, all of it was recorded on a 24-hour surveillance camera and by the guards themselves.

The tape records a rapid descent: he started apparently healthy, but in four days Souders could barely walk. In the shower, he fell over. The guards brought him back in a wheelchair, but then chained him down again. On Aug. 6th, he was released from restraints and fell for the last time. Souders had died of dehydration and only the surveillance camera took notice.

Thanks, too, to Scott Pelley and CBS News/60 Minutes for presenting a story that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by all but those who loved this young man.