What is Marijuana and Marijuana Dependence?
Marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug in the world today. It is a substance derived from dried flowers, seeds and leaves of the cannabis plant which is the Indian hemp plant. The plant, Cannabis Sativa, has been used over centuries for the effects of its psychoactive resins. The plant has more than 400 chemicals but the cannabinoid known as delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive component. Marijuana appears to be the least potent of all the cannabis products and its common form of use is through inhalation of the smoke from marijuana cigarettes. It may also be ingested by adding it into meals such as cookies or brownies and sometimes even added into main courses. This substance is known by many names such as weed, pot, Mary Jane, roach, dope, Ganja, grass and etc.
Marijuana dependence contains 3 major critical elements; preoccupation with the acquisition of the marijuana, compulsive use of marijuana and relapse or recurrent use of marijuana (Miller &
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The benefits of marijuana use could only be obtained mostly from old researches which raised questions to their credibility in our current day and age. There were also some notable contradictory results where marijuana is stated to be helpful to insomniacs (Carlini, 2004) and another research stated marijuana use may deteriorate insomniac conditions (Jacobus, Bava, Cohen-Zion, Mahmood, & Tapert, 2009). Many researchers also seem to holding biasness when conducting experiments to discover if marijuana is more beneficial or detrimental. This could be due to the already set negative stigma attached to marijuana and its use. Another weakness that could be observed is that many of the disadvantages of marijuana studies fail to mention if the consequences of using the drug are permanent or temporary to the