Excessive Cannabis Users Risk Partial Brain Shrinking
	The parts of the brain affected by long-term, heavy cannabis use are those where memory and the regulation of emotion functions reside. High resolution magnetic resonance imaging of the brain of 15 men who have been smoking at least five joints per day for periods of time at least 10 years long compared to that of people who haven't been consuming any drugs show that the hippocampus region of the brain of cannabis users has ... [read more >>]
	03 June 2008, 08:35GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cannabis Exposes Teens to Mental Illness
	Cannabis has been around for millennia – indeed, as archaeologists have proved, the miracle of cannabis smoke has been puzzling our ancestors ever since the Neolithic age, which means that yes, once humans have found something they really enjoy, it's unlikely they're going to give it up without a fight. Today, cannabis is seen as a drug and its cultivation, possession or transfer are punishable by law in the vast majority of coun ... [read more >>]
	02 June 2008, 05:26GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cannabis Makes You Lose Your Teeth!
	You may feel high, you may feel sexier, but how does this come when you may be losing your teeth? A new research published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" has connected heavy smoking of cannabis in young people to a higher risk for periodontal disease. After taking into account tobacco smoking, gender, socioeconomic status and infrequent trips to the dentist by 35% of the subjects, the authors co ... [read more >>]
	06 February 2008, 03:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cannabis Is More Powerful than Tobacco in Causing Cancer!
	You may get high, but your brain gets down. Cannabis mashes up your brain, affecting brain nuclei even in unborn children, especially the cortex, the brain part involved in thinking, learning, attention and planning. The drug also increases the risk of developing psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia. But it is more than blown mind: cannabis smoke is much more toxic than tobacco smoke, as found by a governmental Health Canada team. Th ... [read more >>]
	19 December 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Legalize Cannabis, Says Take That Star
	I knew the boys at Take That weren't exactly the best role models in the world (just look at what Robbie Williams turned out to be – but that's a completely different story). And in case you needed more proof, one of the band's members, Howard Donald has just publicly demanded that "cannabis be legalized". The 39-year-old singer thus managed to spark some serious outrage by insisting the drug is less harm ... [read more >>]
	23 November 2007, 09:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Marijuana Chemical Against Breast Cancer!
	Cannabis is advertised by many as a pain reliever. But a new research made at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute and published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics goes much further: a cannabis chemical could impede breast cancer from ‘invading’ the whole body. Cannabidiol (CBD) could be an alternative to chemotherapy devoid of the extreme side effects, like nausea and high infection risk, and the chemical b ... [read more >>]
	20 November 2007, 05:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Brain's Marijuana Treats Depression
	Who said marijuana is bad? In the end, its use as a pain killer in desperate cases is well known. And now it appears that it can also treat the "mental pain", depression, not only the physical one. An American-Italian team led by Daniele Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences and director of the Center for Drug Discovery at the University of California, Irvine has discovered that spurring the levels [ADMARK ... [read more >>]
	06 November 2007, 03:34GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Moderate Cannabis Relieves Pain, High Dose Boosts It!
	There is a strong advocacy towards using cannabis for relieving pain in many conditions. A new study has come up with a surprising result: even if "moderate" doses of cannabis can ease pain, high doses actually boost it. "Our study suggests that there is a therapeutic window for analgesia, with low doses being ineffective, medium doses resulting in pain relief, and high doses increasing pain," said lead aut ... [read more >>]
	24 October 2007, 03:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

One Cannabis Joint = Five Tobacco Cigarettes
	Just a mild drug without severe consequences? If the fact that many researches have shown it affects brain activity, from thinking to learning, attention and planning, learn this: just one cannabis joint has the same effect on the health of your lungs as smoking up to five cigarettes in one go. A new research made on a pool of 339 adults up to the age of 70, chosen from an ongoing study of respiratory health, assigned the subj ... [read more >>]
	31 July 2007, 14:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cannabis Makes You Mad
	It is known that cannabis mashes up your brain, affecting brain nuclei even in unborn children, especially the cortex, the brain part involved in thinking, learning, attention and planning. Now a team has come with the strongest proof yet that using cannabis rises the risk of later developing psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia. Cannabis smokers presented a 41% greater chance of experiencing such disorders than non-smokers. ... [read more >>]
	27 July 2007, 07:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Are Teenagers More Vulnerable to Cannabis Consumption and to Its Negative Effects?
	You may wonder why teens get addicted to marijuana just as flies get stuck on flypaper, while most adults easily reject the drug. Surprisingly, tests on rats revealed that adolescent rats, too, are more likely than adults to get hooked on cannabis; more than that, the harmful secondary effects inflicted by the drug on their brain (reflected on memory skills) are more severe in their case. During a test period of 18 days, the t ... [read more >>]
	25 July 2007, 06:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Want Nice Skin? Then Smoke Cannabis!
	They put the blame on cannabis for many things: from madness and early aging to fetal malformations. But cannabis is used in some therapies as well and now it has been found to decrease allergic skin reactions. This discovery could lead to the development of new drugs based on tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis's active chemical, against allergy and autoimmune disorders. The team led by Andreas Zimmer at the University of Bonn in ... [read more >>]
	08 June 2007, 16:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cannabis Smoking Makes You Look Older
	Cannabis contains most of the chemicals of a tobacco cigarette, but the damage induced to the lungs can be higher. A 2002 report of the British Lung Foundation showed that 3-4 cannabis cigarettes daily induced the same damage to the lungs as over 20 tobacco cigarettes. But researchers find it difficult to separate the effects of cannabis smoking from those of tobacco smoking in patients, as most of them smoke both. " ... [read more >>]
	04 June 2007, 04:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Marijuana Shapes Our Brains Even from the Womb
	After all, marijuana is not so bad. Cannabis-made marijuana may be easing the pain, but marijuana-like chemicals produced by your body may have head brain cells to make proper connections while you are the size of a bean inside the womb. These chemicals, called cannabinoids, were found to work like guideposts for neurons of fetal mouse brains. This could explain why the children of marijuana smoking mothers are slower in neural proc ... [read more >>]
	26 May 2007, 09:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Plant Compound Makes You Quit Cannabis
	Quitting marijuana can be extremely difficult. But now better therapies against this addiction in humans could be based on a recently discovered chemical that decreases the desire for marijuana and impedes its brain effects. Rats that received the chemical extracted from larkspur, a plant in the buttercup family, lose their desire for a synthetic molecule of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical found in cannabis. The che ... [read more >>]
	23 May 2007, 17:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Better Way of Drugging with Cannabis
	This "social" drug comes to us under the form of marijuana and hashish. Cannabis has been proved beneficial in relieving pains in some severe diseases. But smoking cannabis, besides the drug's effect, is as harmful as smoking tobacco. Now, a USCF team has developed a smokeless cannabis-vaporizing device that delivers the same amounts of active therapeutic chemical, delta-9-tertrahydrocannibinol (THC) inducing the same ... [read more >>]
	16 May 2007, 09:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Smoking Cannabis Induces Madness
	After a joint do you believe you are Napoleon? Or Julius Caesar? That's normal, as cannabis drugs are known to induce psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia. Now they have discovered how. King's College London researchers found that cannabis's active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) disinhibits brain areas that control aggressiveness and unsocial behavior while another cannabis chemical, cannabidiol ( ... [read more >>]
	01 May 2007, 05:55GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

What's The Difference Between Hashish and Marijuana?
	The cannabis or Indian hemp (Canabis sativa indica) is a variety of the common hemp, a grassy plant with sticky leaves and female and male flowers located in different individuals. The plant originated in Central Asia but now is cultivated from Himalaya to Columbia, Jamaica, Eastern Europe and Holland. The breed was cultivated 3,000 years ago in China as a medicine employed against rheumatism and malaria and was used even by Neolit ... [read more >>]
	13 April 2007, 11:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia