[Ls Magazine Issue 15 Spoilt Babies
Addison Mauldin
Dr. Karen Gill is an ABMS board certified pediatrician whose expertise includes breastfeeding, nutrition, obesity prevention, and childhood sleep and behavior issues. She currently lives and practices in Portland, Oregon.
\n
Plus, 2013 research suggests that your early interactions with baby are shaping and molding their brain. A little skin-to-skin contact in those early days and weeks can be beneficial, too, especially for babies who were born pre-term or with low birth weight.
Most writers are poor, and I am no exception. During my smoking years I grossed about $8000 annually, which means that more than 10 per cent of my income went up in smoke. But I rationalized that any sort of night out on the town would set me back at least twenty bills. For that amount I could buy enough pot to stay stoned for a week.
The first time I got giddily high I watched clouds flee across the moon and admired the eerie glow spread across the neighborhood. The music we listened to had spatial dimensions; a rock on the porch turned into a skull. When I closed my eyes, Miresque scribblings danced across the insides of my eyelids. It was fun.
Stoned, we watched the clouds flee across the full moon and admired the eerie glow spread across the neighborhood. The music we were listening to took on spatial dimensions, and a rock on the porch suddenly turned into a skull. Whenever I closed my eyes, Miresque scribblings danced across the insides of my eyelids. It was fun, but clean lungs were still important to me. I smoked pot a couple of times a year at parties for the next few years and never did any other drugs.
I came back to Austin in the fall, after a six-month racing stint in the Midwest, disappointed with my performance, troubled by my rootlessness, and not at all interested in returning to the pretentious but provincial Texas racing scene, not after what I had been through on the major league circuit. I determined to quit racing and open a bike shop. While I waited for one or another partnership to coalesce, I went back to work as a mechanic at a local shop and started busing and cooking at a few downtown restaurants and bars for not much more than minimum wage.
I was rooming with a nickel-and-dime pot dealer, so there was always plenty of weed around the house. But it was more than ordinary pot. I had smoked Oaxacan, Guerreran, and Colombian in the past, and they had left me cold. This was skunkweed: fresh, fragrant, pura sinsemilla (seedless marijuana), scientifically grown in the Lost Pines between Bastrop and Smithville. It was spicy-tasting stuff that put a bounce in your step and made you want to rock and roll instead of slowing you down and putting you to sleep.
The late seventies had signaled a new marijuana era in Austin and the rest of America. Until then, there had been a popular prejudice against homegrown and domestic pot. American industry may have been on the downslide, but American ingenuity led to a revolution in pot-growing and in the character of the drug itself. Bright young potheads put the latest technology to work and developed marijuana that was six and seven times stronger than what we had started out smoking ten years earlier. It was like the difference between driving a Model T and a Ferrari. The days of 2 per cent THC and $10 bags were gone forever. The new weed packed 12 to 14 per cent THC and sold for $100 a lid. The dried-out, musty, brain-numbing, cheap Mexican and Colombian pot was crowded out of the market by this super sinsemilla, grown locally or imported from California, Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Hawaii. Jamaican weed became easier to find too, and though it was not as fresh, it still had a potent kick. Marijuana had become big business. Nonusing, noticeably non-hippie types became kingpins in the marijuana trade. Dealers began packing guns, and people started dying as the stakes got higher.
In the last couple of years Mexican weed has made a comeback, in Austin anyway, and probably accounts for at least half the pot sold in town. But it is nothing like the Mexican weed we started out on many years ago. Though it is not pura sinsemilla, it is nevertheless good stuff, fairly fresh and clean with only a couple of dozen seeds per bag (dealers sometimes cheat when making lids by adding seeds to the bag to bring it up to a full ounce in weight). It sells for around $80 a bag, and locally grown skunkweed fetches $150 an ounce when you can find it.
Many people think that marijuana is a crude and simple drug because of its simple preparation process (harvesting and drying), but just the opposite is true. Precisely because it is so unrefined, marijuana is a complex drug about which little is known. And because of the recent rapid evolution of the superweeds, scientists have been forced to reexamine their already scanty precepts.
My problems with women sometimes interfered with my work. I had started to write for a living; it filled in the time and the dollar gaps while I waited for the bike shop to happen. When love made me too depressed to write, smoking a joint frequently helped to break through the gloom.
By the fall of 1981 I had a book contract, I was writing regularly for a new magazine, and I was in love again, with a spirited but flighty young woman. My pot smoking abated that fall and winter because I came down with a terrible case of mononucleosis and spent most of the rest of the year on my back.
It began to take more and more pot to unlock my door, regardless of what mood I was in. Still, my writing career was progressing, slowly but surely. I got good reviews and better assignments. People complimented my work for its clarity. I enjoyed the irony.
Marijuana produces 50 per cent more tar than the same weight of, say, a Camel. Since a joint is usually smoked down to as small a butt as possible, it yields twice as much tar as it would if smoked like an ordinary cigarette. Marijuana tar contains more than 150 complex hydrocarbons, including carcinogens such as benzo[a]pyrene. The concentration of benzo[a]pyrene in marijuana tar is 70 per cent higher than that in the same weight of tobacco tar. One joint, totally combusted, yields about five times as much benzo[a]pyrene as one cigarette of equal weight smoked to a butt of 30mm. The amount of benzo[a]pyrene from one joint retained in the lungs is probably even greater than that from five cigarettes, because pot smoke is inhaled deeply and held for up to thirty seconds. Thus, just two or three joints a day may carry the same risk of lung damage as a pack of cigarettes.
In another study a group of laboratory rats inhaled marijuana followed by aerosolized bacteria. The lungs of the rats exposed to marijuana showed a proliferation of the bacteria; those of the control rats did not. If the implications of that finding can be extended to man, it suggests that marijuana smokers have an impaired ability to ward off lung infection. Cannabis tar, when painted on the skin of mice, causes precancerous changes similar to those produced by tobacco tar. Cultures of isolated human and animal lung cells also undergo precancerous changes when exposed to cannabis. Small samples of bronchial tissue from twenty-year-old heavy hashish and tobacco smokers have contained precancerous changes not normally seen in heavy tobacco smokers under age forty.
Accumulation of THC in body fat has been demonstrated unequivocally in humans. A substance is not necessarily toxic just because it is retained in the body for a long time, but if a substance does have inherent harmful effects, the longer it is used the higher the risk because of the progressive buildup of toxicity.
Although there is debate as to exactly how long it takes the body to rid itself of THC and related compounds, the process is lengthy compared with the rapid elimination of alcohol and other water-soluble drugs. Less than 10 per cent of alcohol is released through the lungs and kidneys, while 90 per cent is metabolized at the rate of 5 to 10 milliliters per hour. One drink of alcohol should be eliminated within six hours. A single dose of THC has an estimated half-life of five days to a week, and its complete elimination may take up to a month, 80 per cent via the intestine and 20 per cent via the kidneys. According to a current theory, a regular user will accumulate THC at a faster rate than he will get rid of it, and accumulation will be much more rapid from smoking 15 per cent THC pot than from the old 2 per cent pot.
Clinical observations have long suggested that regular heavy marijuana use may produce lung damage, impair reproductive and endocrine functions, cause long-lasting behavior disturbances, and lower resistance to infection. Under investigation also are the effects of marijuana on the children of users, on chromosomes, on cells and cellular reproduction, on brain functioning and physiology, and on the human immune system.
The end finally came not with a bang but with a whimper. Three weeks after the San Angelo trip I drove down to Reynosa to work on a story. I smoked most of a joint on the way down, and it made me feel absolutely terrible. I dropped off a single wrapped-up joint a few miles this side of the border for the trip back, but carried nothing with me over the border. On the way home I smoked half the joint, with the same miserable results. A year earlier I might have smoked three joints on that boring drive.
I would get up each morning, make coffee, and try to read the newspaper, but some mornings I had trouble getting through the comics section. Whenever I tried to read about my favorite subjects, such as Mexico, the Soviet Union, or Afghanistan, I had to reread the stories several times in order to make their meanings register.
In conversations I sometimes found myself forgetting what I had just said or was going to say, or what the other person had said. I had trouble finding the right words for the ideas I was trying to express, and when taking notes during an interview I often transposed letters and words.
795a8134c1