The Great Pot Experiment

Barcott is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, National Geographic and other publications. Scherer is TIME’s Washington bureau chief. Portions of this article were adapted from Barcott’s new book “Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America,” from TIME Books, is now available wherever books are sold, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound. Yasmin Hurd raises rats on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that will blow your mind. Though they look normal, their lives are anything but, and not just because of the pricey real estate they call home on the 10th floor of a research building near Mount Sinai Hospital. For skeptics of the movement to legalize marijuana, the rodents are canaries in the drug-policy coal mine. For defenders of legalization, they are curiosities. But no one doubts that something is happening in the creatures’ trippy little brains. In one experiment, Hurd’s rats spent their adolescence getting high, on regular doses of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana. In the past, scientists have found that rats exposed to THC in their youth will show changes in their brain in adulthood. But Hurd asked a different question: Could parental marijuana exposure pass on changes to the next generation, even to offspring who had never been exposed to the drug? So she mated her rats, but only after she had waited a month to make sure the drug was no longer in their...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Drugs Source Type: news