Psychiatrists’ attitude to medical use of marijuana in Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionMarijuana was cultivated in India and China before 4000 B.C. It has long been used for religious, recreational and medicinal purposes in India, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and South America (Li & Li, 1974; Touwn, 1981). The first evidence of the medicinal use of marijuana was published during the reign of the Chinese Emperor Chen Nung in 2737 B C (Touwn, 1981). It was recommended for malaria, constipation, rheumatic pains, absentmindedness and female Another Chinese herbalist recommended a mixture of hemp, resin, and wine as an analgesic during surgery. In India, marijuana has been recommended to quicken the mind, lower fevers, induce sleep, cure dysentery, stimulate appetite, improve digestion, relieve headaches, and cure venereal disease. In Africa it was used for dysentery, malaria, and for stress relief (Azurdi, 2006).Marijuana acts on cannabinoid receptors in the brain, these receptors are the most prevalent in the nervous system and influence many functions in the body including memory, attention, arousal, appetite, sleep, motivation and perception (Sacks,2013). The psychoactive properties of marijuana are mediated by the active constituent, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), interacting primarily with cannabinoid receptors in a large number of brain areas. It is the activation of these receptors located within the central brain reward circuits that is thought to play an important role in sustaining the self-administration of marijuana in humans, and in mediating the anxiolytic and euphorigenic effects of the drug (Gessa et al, 1998; Lupica et al, 2009).Evidence from controlled trials suggests that cannabinoids are useful in controlling nausea and vomiting, combating wasting by improving appetite, alleviating acute pain and relieving gastrointestinal distress caused by anti-retroviral medications in people with HIV-related disorders (Institute of Medicine, 1999). In 2001, the Canadian government reacted to demands to allow medical use of smoked marijuana, based on doctor's prescription, among patients experiencing severe symptoms related to cancer, HIV infection, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. Symptoms include nausea, pain, weight loss and persistent muscle spasms and seizures (National Drug & Alcohol Center, 2000). Recently, a marijuana extract (Sativex) was provisionally approved in Canada for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (National Drug & Alcohol Center, 2000; O'Connell & BouMatar, 2007). This decision was made in the absence of strong evidence supporting the efficacy of cannabinoids in many of these disorders. A number of synthetic cannabinoids (e.g., dronabinol) have been approved for medical use in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States (National Drug & Alcohol Center, 2000). Proponents of medical marijuana have cited its efficacy in neurological conditions such as epilepsy, Tourette syndrome, migraine and brain trauma and in musculoskeletal disorders such as arthritis, and chronic back pain (Janet & Watson, 2010).Researchers against the medical use of marijuana posited that not only is the drug illicit in many parts of the world it is also harmful to health (Shalala, 1995; Bostwick, 2012; Arseneault et al, 2004). Research continues to show that it damages short-term memory, distorts perception, impairs judgment and complex motor skills, alters the heart rate, can lead to severe anxiety, and can cause paranoia and lethargy. Its use by young people is clearly associated with increased truancy, poor school performance and crime (Shalala,1995). Several studies reported growing evidence of marijuana's addictive potential especially among the young, and its strong propensity for inducing and worsening psychotic illness in the susceptible (Bostwick, 2012; Arseneault et al, 2004).Arseneault and associates (2004) found that marijuana use confers a two fold increase in relative risk to an individual for developing schizophrenia, while removing marijuana from the population will reduce the incidence of schizophrenia by 8% assuming a causal relationship. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".