Cannabis and pregnancy...Your opinions

Perhaps people with schizophrenia smoke weed to mask symptoms? People with bipolar disorder do, in order to mask the symptoms. It does not cause bipolar disorder.

Peace & Love

 

Personally I wouldn't smoke weed while pregnant...just like I wouldn't smoke cigarettes or drink any alcohol or eat a lot of junk food.

It's my own personal choice. If you decide you want to smoke pot, cigarettes, and drink alcohol...it's your choice. I don't like when people tell me what I should or shouldn't do with my own body...or what choices I "should" make. But at the same time, I wouldn't want to do anything that put my baby in any kind of potential danger...

It's my personal choice...just like it's everyone else's.

 

It seems that you and your husband put alot of time and thought into what kind of delivery you would like to have, but its very disturbing to read that you dont see anything wrong with turning your unborn child into a pothead.
Using marijuana everyday might not effect your babies spinal cord. but what is it doing to his poor little brain development (think about your brain on drugs).
I think its very selfish of you to say you dont want to quit smoking pot while you have an innocent baby growing inside you, it sickens me. what kind of mother are you going to be... a selfish one thats what kind. Being a mother of my own.. having already birthed 2 children, i know what that instinct is,,, as soon as you know there is life growing in you, you want to protect that baby, your not protecting your baby by forcing him to get high with you.
Why dont you ask your doctor what he thinks, if marijuana is ok to smoke then why dont doctors say so.

 

Right round the corner from me... my mother's a district nurse who occasionally works there, that's how I met my friend who told me these things, and in turn met some of the patients there who had smoked themselves (and that was after I was nearly sent there myself, after symptoms that were so severe I was put on a cocktail anti-depressants and anti-psychotics). I don't see why is it so hard to believe? The link between cannabis and mental-illness has been made on more than one occasion:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/325/7374/1183
http://society.guardian.co.uk/drugsandalcohol/story/0,8150,1117959,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4305783.stm
http://www.mentalhealthcare.org.uk/schizophrenia/causes/cannabis/

I'm am not 'spreading propoganda', lol, I haven't got some whacked-out agenda : I'm saying it because it DOES harm people, I've seen it, experienced it, and I've been harmed by it myself.. surely that's enough cause for concern? Maybe we get the stronger stuff here in the UK, I dunno.

 

Well it's a little hard to judge people and I think you're feeding into a lot of media propaganda. And doctors say it's bad to smoke marijuana because it's an illegal substance...not because they KNOW it's bad...

 

See the above post...

 

I'm talking about BABIES in the womb.

 

When you post a message like that, you are asking to be judged...
i also smoke marijuana and im a mother i know all about sacrifices, so no im not listening to anything media. Ask the doctor why its "bad" to smoke weed while pregnante, hes not going to say "because its illegal"
just because no babies have come out with abnormalities or brain damage doesnt mean that it makes it ok.

 

Depending on what state you're in, if a physician tells a woman it's OK to smoke weed and gets caught doing so...he can get his license taken away. So he has to tell you something ELSE even if marijuana ISN'T harful to the fetus.

 

Well, some research into weed and pregnancy :

http://www.marchofdimes.com/professionals/14332_1169.asp

 

Thank-you cham

now i hope the person who started this thread has read all that information as well.

 

I read the articles and investigated into the studies. It appears there is a correlation between psychosis and marijuana, not causation. From what I read, marijuana can trigger pyschotic episodes in people who are already suspectible to developing schizophrenia, such as people who have the gene for it. Those people might have been destined to develop schizophrenia anyways. Who can say for sure that they wouldn't have developed it in a year even if they hadn't smoked?

I have a form of bipolar disorder, as well as ADHD. I learned about the mood disorder AFTER I was prescribed to Adderall and had a psychotic manic episode. It turns out that my brain chemistry is prone to amphetamine induced pyschosis as well as mood swings caused by drugs. Did the Adderall "cause" me to have a mood disorder? No, rather, it caused the symptoms to arise. Perhaps this is the case with marijuana and schizophrenia. It is a disorder that is not understood well, so perhaps not all the information is correct. There are not many studies which support this, and they all seem to point to a "link" aka corralation rather than causation. After all, how long did it take people to learn that the world was round, that babies are developed from eggs and sperm, that the Earth has tectonic activity...

Peace & Love

 

The links between cannabis and mental illness are sketchy at best. Is mental illness caused by cannabis, or are mentally ill people self-medicating? Just because a mental illness is diagnosed after a person has smoked pot doesn't mean it the pot caused it. It is a logical fallacy to assume that just because B came after A that A caused B.

http://www.canorml.org/healthfacts/healthmyths.html

http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/92334.html
http://www.medboardwatch.com/marijuana-myths-marijuana-facts.htm
http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion18.htm

 

Just my point, but spoken better than I could have said it.

 

How many people see a psychiatrist the moment they feel "different" mentally? How many would rather just try to deal with it themselves and hope for the best? How many people can AFFORD mental health treatment in the first place?

Pot is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than any form of doctor visit, and with most people with no or really crap insurance coverage, any corelation between pot smoking and mental illness is more than likely due to the patient self-medicating in the only form that they have available that makes them feel better.

Also, if you look at other drugs and how they relate to mental illnesses, you'll see that most don't CAUSE the mental illness, but rather aggrevate symptoms in already pre-disposed persons. LSD is one such drug. If you are predisposed to schizophrenia, you are more likely to develop symptoms after tripping if you weren't already experiencing them before. Which is why, because I feel I'm predisposed, that I will never take LSD.

However, I have never heard of a correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia, and the majority of people I know smoke. The only person I know with schizophrenia is my uncle, and he has never smoked pot in his life.

As far as the research on marijuana causing any sort of birthing and pregnancy problems, those described sound strangely like the ones linked to TOBACCO SMOKE. And in an earlier post of mine, I made the hypothesis that the only problem with SMOKING marijuana would be the smoke causing problems, like those found in tobacco addicted babies. There is no real study of THC that has been INGESTED. Without the effects of the smoke on the foetus marring the results, how would the study look different? Is it the THC that has an effect? or is it the smoke?

 

And I feel I have to mention that the OP has said she does not smoke, she ingests it or uses a vaporizer.

 

that would also explain the fact that many pregnant women, myself included, have a very strong aversion to the smell of smoke, any smoke, and choose to listen to what their body is telling them, and avoid it.


the studies are flawed, all of them. Do they control for economic standing? ethnicity? tobacco use? Maternal nutrition during pregnancy? Any article that says "some studies" but does not cite those studies is suspect. Find the studies and read them for yourself before believing what anyone says about them. In college Early Child Development course, the only study on prenatal exposure to marijuana in my textbook was the Jamaican one which showed no adverse effects on the infants other than the babies of mothers who smoked marijuana were quieter, calmer infants.
And I just found this study http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/hemp/medical/can-babies.htm which is probably not the one I learned about in school, seeing as how it was published after I took the class (though it is possible that it made it into my textbook before being published in a medical journal), which shows improved scores for the infants of mothers who smoked pot in Jamaica.

 

Like hummblebee's sig says, "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics - Even if you win you're still retarded". So I'm just going to say this :

Marijuana and denial go hand in hand. Everyone I know, all my close friends, have smoked. All of them (bar one) have now quit, either because of paranoia, delusions, or lowered grades at college/uni because of lack of motivation. As for the one who hasn't quit, there is not a day that goes by where he doesn't mention weed. He is never happy until he gets some weed, and then once he smokes it, he's depressed again. It's scary to look back 6 months and think most of us were like that too. Before we quit, at the height of our habit, we were going through an 8th a day between 3 of us, that roughly translates to 6-7 joints.

Well, in the UK our psychiatric care is free. As for the term 'self medicating', I've been described as that. It's not self-medication though, it's an excuse to carry on smoking pot (although I wouldn't have said that before I quit). If you tell someone who smokes weed and has negative effects that they're just 'self-medicating', they're just going to smoke more. It's a vicious circle because it makes it seem like the weed makes the symptoms less severe, which isn't the case at all. Weed was the cause of my symptoms, and now I don't smoke, they've gone, which is the whole reason I take this stance on it.

Now I understand most of this doesn't relate to pregnacy, but me, my friends, and our families have all been negatively effected by weed, so to see people denying the possibility of it having an adverse effect on mental health is quite frustrating.

 

I think you baby could have a bigger chance of getting addicted to smoking when he/she gets older.

 

Based on what research?