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Quotes from Darryl Inaba, Pharm.D. Director of the Haight-Ashbury Detoxification, Rehabilitation, and Aftercare Clinic
"Marijuana is a substance that contains up to 360 active brain chemicals in every variety a person smokes. We found that just one of those chemicals, Delta-9 THC, thought to be the most potent and causing the greatest amount of brain effects, is altered by the liver. The liver tries to destroy this drug and get rid of it but in the process, it actually creates 60 or more new drugs that are active in the brain. So marijuana is a multitude of drugs."
"There is marijuana growing everywhere with a very high potency of 14-20% THC. To fully understand importance of this, we must realize that people who smoked in the 1960s thought marijuana was a benign drug. Smoking one joint today is the equivalent of smoking about 14 of those joints from the '60s. Thus, we have a much greater concern about the health consequences of today's marijuana."
"The big problem we see at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic is that the potent form of marijuana today is causing a lot more problems than we saw in the 1960s. I never treated a single self-admitted marijuana addict in the Clinic from the early '60s through the mid-'80s. However, by the late-1980s we started seeing people coming in saying, "Help me. I want to stop smoking pot. It is causing me to have memory problems. Causing me to be too spaced out. Not to function in my work. I can't complete tasks. It's causing me to be sick in the morning and cough. I have withdrawal symptoms. I want to stop and I can't stop." We now have at our program in San Francisco about 100 patients every month who are in treatment specifically for marijuana addiction."
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