In this thread I would like us all to look at and evaluate the main-stream-media's anti-cannabis stance by fielding reports/articles that are negative towards cannabis and cannabis users.
To get the proverbial ball rolling on this, here is a Reuters article claiming that 'Marijuana use holds three-fold blood pressure death risk: study'
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-marijuana-hypertension-idUSKBN1AP0JS
''LONDON (Reuters) - People who smoke marijuana have a three times greater risk of dying from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who have never used the drug, scientists said on Wednesday.
The risk grows with every year of use, they said.
The findings, from a study of some 1,200 people, could have implications in the United States among other countries. Several states have legalized marijuana and others are moving toward it. It is decriminalized in a number of other countries.
"Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health," said Barbara Yankey, who co-led the research at the school of public health at Georgia State University in the United States.
"It is important to establish whether any health benefits outweigh the potential health, social and economic risks. If marijuana use is implicated in cardiovascular diseases and deaths, then it rests on the health community and policy makers to protect the public."
Marijuana is also sometimes used for medicinal purposes, such as for glaucoma.
The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, was a retrospective follow-up study of 1,213 people aged 20 or above who had been involved in a large and ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. In 2005–2006, they were asked if they had ever used marijuana.
For Yankey's study, information on marijuana use was merged with mortality data in 2011 from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted for confounding factors such as tobacco smoking and variables including sex, age and ethnicity.
The average duration of use among users of marijuana, or cannabis, was 11.5 years.
The results showed marijuana users had a 3.42-times higher risk of death from hypertension than non-users, and a 1.04 greater risk for each year of use.
There was no link between marijuana use and dying from heart or cerebrovascular diseases such as strokes.
Yankey said were limitations in the way marijuana use was assessed -- including that researchers could not be sure whether people had used the drug continuously since they first tried it.
But she said the results chimed with plausible risks, since marijuana is known to affect the cardiovascular system.
"Marijuana stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, leading to increases in heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen demand," she said.
Experts not directly involved in the study said its findings would need to be replicated, but already raised concerns.
"Despite the widely held view that cannabis is benign, this research adds to previous work suggesting otherwise," said Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in mental health at Britain's York University.''
Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Jeremy Gaunt
What a load of unmitigated CLAP-TRAP!
I don't see how they believe they reached any valid conclusions at all from this.
They looked at a study of 1,200 people who admitted to smoking pot 12 years ago, they did not say how much, or how long they smoked, they did not even include data to say if they were still smoking. They claim, death by high blood pressure but found no correlation between heart disease or strokes.
So what exactly are they claiming these people died from?
Hypertension in and of itself does not kill you. They don't say what killed them exactly. How many died from "hypertension" vs the average? Was this sample of 1,200 people random or where they picked back then for other factors? So far I can't see this as anything other than a scary study. The bias of the researchers also shows up in their interview on other sites. They made many assumptions and stated opinion as fact over and over. Furthermore, I have not been able to find out who paid for this study or even the most basic estimates on validity.
Very sloppy work and almost certainly a group who went looking for data points within a study to reach a preconceived conclusion. How much did they "massage" the data to reach this conclusion? Clearly quite a bit considering that they say "hypertension" not related to heart conditions or stroke.
By far the most common deaths from hypertension are in fact heart attacks and strokes and in a study this small if you remove the deaths from heart attack or stroke you are going to be left with a very very small number of people who could possibly have died from hypertension unrelated to heart attacks or stroke..... So it's likely they found a subset of data where 3 or 4 people died from something that might have been related to hypertension in the pot smokers and only 2 or 3 died on average from..... So you are really only looking at 1 or 2 extra people and you will always find that kind of statistical variation in a small group when looking at an even smaller portion of the whole.
I would suggest that this will be yet another "study" that proves to be unrepeatable in any actual scientific examination, which this clearly is not. But it will be cited by people even though it's yet to be peer reviewed or repeated in any way at all. Which of course is what has actually happens with practically every single piece like this. And confirmation bias being what it is, people who want to believe pot is going to kill you will believe this well after it's been debunked.
Sad but TRUE!
To get the proverbial ball rolling on this, here is a Reuters article claiming that 'Marijuana use holds three-fold blood pressure death risk: study'
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-marijuana-hypertension-idUSKBN1AP0JS
''LONDON (Reuters) - People who smoke marijuana have a three times greater risk of dying from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who have never used the drug, scientists said on Wednesday.
The risk grows with every year of use, they said.
The findings, from a study of some 1,200 people, could have implications in the United States among other countries. Several states have legalized marijuana and others are moving toward it. It is decriminalized in a number of other countries.
"Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health," said Barbara Yankey, who co-led the research at the school of public health at Georgia State University in the United States.
"It is important to establish whether any health benefits outweigh the potential health, social and economic risks. If marijuana use is implicated in cardiovascular diseases and deaths, then it rests on the health community and policy makers to protect the public."
Marijuana is also sometimes used for medicinal purposes, such as for glaucoma.
The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, was a retrospective follow-up study of 1,213 people aged 20 or above who had been involved in a large and ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. In 2005–2006, they were asked if they had ever used marijuana.
For Yankey's study, information on marijuana use was merged with mortality data in 2011 from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted for confounding factors such as tobacco smoking and variables including sex, age and ethnicity.
The average duration of use among users of marijuana, or cannabis, was 11.5 years.
The results showed marijuana users had a 3.42-times higher risk of death from hypertension than non-users, and a 1.04 greater risk for each year of use.
There was no link between marijuana use and dying from heart or cerebrovascular diseases such as strokes.
Yankey said were limitations in the way marijuana use was assessed -- including that researchers could not be sure whether people had used the drug continuously since they first tried it.
But she said the results chimed with plausible risks, since marijuana is known to affect the cardiovascular system.
"Marijuana stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, leading to increases in heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen demand," she said.
Experts not directly involved in the study said its findings would need to be replicated, but already raised concerns.
"Despite the widely held view that cannabis is benign, this research adds to previous work suggesting otherwise," said Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in mental health at Britain's York University.''
Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Jeremy Gaunt
What a load of unmitigated CLAP-TRAP!
I don't see how they believe they reached any valid conclusions at all from this.
They looked at a study of 1,200 people who admitted to smoking pot 12 years ago, they did not say how much, or how long they smoked, they did not even include data to say if they were still smoking. They claim, death by high blood pressure but found no correlation between heart disease or strokes.
So what exactly are they claiming these people died from?
Hypertension in and of itself does not kill you. They don't say what killed them exactly. How many died from "hypertension" vs the average? Was this sample of 1,200 people random or where they picked back then for other factors? So far I can't see this as anything other than a scary study. The bias of the researchers also shows up in their interview on other sites. They made many assumptions and stated opinion as fact over and over. Furthermore, I have not been able to find out who paid for this study or even the most basic estimates on validity.
Very sloppy work and almost certainly a group who went looking for data points within a study to reach a preconceived conclusion. How much did they "massage" the data to reach this conclusion? Clearly quite a bit considering that they say "hypertension" not related to heart conditions or stroke.
By far the most common deaths from hypertension are in fact heart attacks and strokes and in a study this small if you remove the deaths from heart attack or stroke you are going to be left with a very very small number of people who could possibly have died from hypertension unrelated to heart attacks or stroke..... So it's likely they found a subset of data where 3 or 4 people died from something that might have been related to hypertension in the pot smokers and only 2 or 3 died on average from..... So you are really only looking at 1 or 2 extra people and you will always find that kind of statistical variation in a small group when looking at an even smaller portion of the whole.
I would suggest that this will be yet another "study" that proves to be unrepeatable in any actual scientific examination, which this clearly is not. But it will be cited by people even though it's yet to be peer reviewed or repeated in any way at all. Which of course is what has actually happens with practically every single piece like this. And confirmation bias being what it is, people who want to believe pot is going to kill you will believe this well after it's been debunked.
Sad but TRUE!
