{"id":106,"date":"2025-08-13T14:09:32","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T14:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/13\/it-may-be-increasingly-legal-but-doesnt-mean-cannabis-is-safe\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T14:09:32","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T14:09:32","slug":"it-may-be-increasingly-legal-but-doesnt-mean-cannabis-is-safe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/13\/it-may-be-increasingly-legal-but-doesnt-mean-cannabis-is-safe\/","title":{"rendered":"It may be increasingly legal but doesn\u2019t mean cannabis is safe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A recent CBS News\/YouGov survey found that two-thirds of Americans want recreational marijuana use to be legal. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncsl.org\/research\/health\/state-medical-marijuana-laws.aspx\">Nearly 70 percent of states<\/a> allow the medical use of cannabis products and a growing number have legalized recreational use.<\/p>\n<p>But neuroscientist Yasmin Hurd says that doesn\u2019t mean cannabis gets a clean bill of health.<\/p>\n<p>What we consume as well as when in life we are exposed to it play major roles in how our brains may be affected. That was the message from Hurd, speaking in the online presentation \u201cNeuroscience and Cannabis: Implications for Law and Policy\u201d \u2014 which fittingly took place on 4\/20, a cannabis culture allusion to marijuana.The hourlong presentation was part of the <a href=\"https:\/\/petrieflom.law.harvard.edu\/research\/project-on-law-and-applied-neuroscience\">Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience<\/a>, a collaboration between the <a href=\"https:\/\/clbb.mgh.harvard.edu\/\">Center for Law, Brain and Behavior<\/a> at Massachusetts General Hospital and the <a href=\"https:\/\/petrieflom.law.harvard.edu\/\">Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics<\/a> at Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n<p>Hurd is the Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience and the director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She quickly reviewed the legal history of cannabis in this country, noting the huge racial disparities in arrests, convictions, and other penalties, such as the separation of mothers from their newborns following positive drug tests.<\/p>\n<p>But while the biased application of law enforcement regarding marijuana has led to a trend toward legalization, the science is more unclear. Even beyond its \u201ccomplex history\u201d and \u201ccomplex legal status and policies,\u201d cannabis is a \u201ccomplex plant,\u201d said Hurd. \u201cCannabis contains over 500 chemicals, including over 140 cannabinoids that have a greater or lesser degree of psycho-pharmacological activity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And although Hurd focused primarily on cannabis\u2019 best-known psychoactive compound \u2014 THC \u2014 and to a lesser extent CBD, she pointed out that their interaction with the human brain is complicated by another factor: the human body\u2019s own naturally occurring cannabinoids.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent CBS News\/YouGov survey found that two-thirds of Americans want recreational marijuana use to be legal. Nearly 70 percent of states allow the medical use of cannabis products and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-staying-healthy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liftandletgo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}