cannabisnews.com: Harvard Scientists Build a Device To Smoke Weed Harvard Scientists Build a Device To Smoke Weed Posted by CN Staff on September 27, 2007 at 20:11:34 PT By Aaron Rowe Source: Wired News USA -- Smoking during a brain scan is not easy. Why would you want to? Because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to observe activity in the brain, and doing so while smoking tobacco or pot could enhance our understanding of addiction and how to treat it.But during an MRI, the head must remain completely still. In the narrow bore of a superconducting magnet, there isn't much room to maneuver a cigarette or eat a pot brownie either. Smoke raises a second set of concerns. At the very least, it will stink up the lab. Perhaps, it could even damage the expensive machine. So five Blaise Frederick at Harvard Medical School built a device that delivers smoke into the narrow confines of a scanner. His colleagues, Kim Lindsey and Liz Ryan, tested it out on nine volunteers at McLean Hospital. They described their work in the May issue of Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior. Since that project was completed, Lindsey has used the same equipment to study the neurological effects of tobacco. Last Friday, Scott Lukas, the ringmaster for these studies and director of the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory was informed that he will receive a grant to conduct further studies with marijuana.Displaying skills that would put MacGyver to shame, Frederick constructed a makeshift water pipe inside of a picnic cooler, then ran 2.4 meters of tubing to a plastic facemask that rests inside of the scanner. Since the mask is made from materials that are not magnetic, it will not interfere with the imaging.To be sure that the contraption can get people high, Lindsey and her associates asked nine volunteers to inhale smoke from a marijuana cigarette with exactly 3.51 percent THC, then checked to see how much of the drug made it into their blood. Using the mask, the subjects got almost as high as if they had puffed on a joint directly. The researchers suggested using stronger weed to achieve more realistic effects.Most important, the plastic facemask did not interfere with the scanner. While the volunteers were smoking, they were given a visual stimulus. Several sharp images of activity in their visual cortices showed that the Harvard scientists can credibly say, "This is your brain on drugs."Complete Title: Harvard Scientists Build a Device To Smoke Weed During Brain ScanSource: Wired Magazine (CA)Author: Aaron RowePublished: September 27, 2007 Copyright: 2007 Wired Digital Inc.Website: http://www.wired.com/URL: http://tinyurl.com/22sr6xContact: newsfeedback wired.comCannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Comment #5 posted by whig on September 29, 2007 at 11:19:06 PT paulpeterson It may be that cannabis can help to treat tardive dyskinesia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardive_dyskinesiaWouldn't that be something? [ Post Comment ] Comment #4 posted by ekim on September 29, 2007 at 10:24:51 PT good going Paul -- of course the 1st says it all USA -- Smoking during a brain scan is not easy. Why would you want to? Because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to observe activity in the brain, and doing so while smoking tobacco or pot could enhance our understanding of addiction and how to treat it.how to treat ithow to treat it how to treat it how to terat it http://blog.leap.cc/ [ Post Comment ] Comment #3 posted by paulpeterson on September 29, 2007 at 09:15:47 PT E_Johnson Yes, Tommy, THC and its cousins can stop the debilitating brain wasting effects of Naegleria Fowleri, that nasty, nasty amoeba that is wasting campers in warm waters at an alarming rate. 6 dead-and I'm not talking O-Hio.THC can stop the debilitating death from prion diseases. It helps brain cells to protect themselves from known toxins. It protects against the inflammatory processes which accumpany degenerative brain diseases. It produces new brain cells via "neurogenesis". So why shouldn't it provide therapeutic assistance where this newly published Darth Vader wastes the brains and nerve cells targetted by Naegleria Fowleri, eh?But don't wait up for the FDA to do something like encourage research into this troubling area of new fatal disease from people merely trying to do some old fashioned apple pie type of activity like swimming in a lake.The FDA will otherwise just bury their heads in the sand, of the beach, and try to forget that this amoeba lurks just off-shore from the sand castles. Sort of like this is the "blob" of that camp movie sensation, way back in the way back of the 60's, when the blob would grow, unabated by law enforcement agencies, which wanted to just pretend the scourge didn't exist-just like the Air Force and friends, tried and still tries to convince us home-town folk that UFO's are just evidence of now mass hysteria, even though thousands upon thousands of credible people have seen recent sightings in Arizona and Chicago-and most people give nary a peep about this in the press-because all modern society dwellers have been rigidly indoctrinated to believe (and rightly so) that if they persist with eye-witness accounts of such things, they will be placed in straight jackets and forced to take brain killing neuroleptic drugs, designed to kill large numbers of neurons, especially the "giant cells of betz", the motor neurons that control the complex movements that are responsible for the most difficult of maneuvers, like Michael Jordan's complex drill of jumping, faking, faking again and then stuffing it into the hoop, all before he has to relent and allow gravity to bring him down to earth.And right now, the newest generation of "neuroleptics", called Abilify, is on screen on most TV screens in the realm, on ads that advertize this as a good fix for "bipolar" disorder, and right there in the ad it talks about telling your doctor if you start to have uncontrolled jerking and other movements, that "might be a symptom of a life threatening condition", without stating the condition is called "tardive dyskinasia" (sorry if my spelling is rusty here) which is the direct evidence that the drug is starting to rob you of your brain power.And, by the way, even telling a doctor you believe marijuana products might help stop Alzheimer's, or any of the other brain killing disease processes, like this blob like amoebic killer, is enough to force a doctor to force feed you with the true debilitating drug drip of death for your intellect, those Soviet era Stalin ordered gulag cocktail drugs called neuroleptics, which are given to the really adamant believers in truth, and change, until the person starts to drool from one side of the mouth to the other, which means the person is cooked, and done, and finally up to a "therapeutic dose", and I'm done now, and thanks for bringing this issue up, and to the fore, and thanks for listening, to me, a discredited person, merely for voicing these things, perchance too early, 6 years ago, before there was even any real supporting evidence of such things.But hey, even now, that all things have been more than proven, they still refuse to believe. So at first where I thought the issue was one of "ignorance", I was just heinously naive-it really is about greed. And no, I don't expect those amusement park owners, that guard the sands of the lakes in question, will ever really warn their unwitting victims, of the blobs that lurk in the shallows, of the carnage that awaits their young children.Instead, there will be more stern warnings to keep your kids off the dope. Even though smoking a little weed would be safer than letting your kids leave the sandy shores for the "old fashioned" fun, eh? [ Post Comment ] Comment #2 posted by E_Johnson on September 27, 2007 at 21:31:33 PT Could cannabis protect people from THIS? http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,298338,00.htmlAn amoeba that enters through the nose and starts attacking the brain, starting up the olfactory nerve, has been killing people recently. [ Post Comment ] Comment #1 posted by FoM on September 27, 2007 at 20:18:14 PT Link To The Wired Article It has diagrams and a picture and links.URL: http://tinyurl.com/22sr6x [ Post Comment ] Post Comment