Marijuana

Science for Potheads

K.M. Cholewa

There's so much misunderstanding around marijuana. Here's what's really happening to people when they smoke weed

Drug warriors have long tried to smear marijuana as a dangerous scourge, seeking to criminalize possession of a leaf they clearly do not understand. The key to comprehending its effects is by better grasping our physiology.

Marijuana is not magic. Marijuana (botanical name, cannabis) affects the human body because the plant-based cannabinoids in marijuana, once ingested, can “plug into” the cannabinoid receptors that are used by the cannabinoids made by our own bodies.

It’s not just people that have cannabinoid systems. All mammals have them. All creatures do, except bugs. Although

cannabinoid systems can utilize the plant-based cannabinoids in marijuana, the cultivation and preservation of cannabinoid systems by the evolutionary process has nothing to do with pot. The cannabinoid receptor appeared on the planet at least 550 million years before marijuana.

Evolution has selected for cannabinoid

systems, meaning once they emerged, they were retained, and broadly adopted. A cannabinoid system must make living here on this planet easier, or even possible, for those who have them. That’s why life cultivates and retains certain mutations, such as fins, eyes or bigger brains. They’re useful, or at least once were. Why would the cannabinoid system be any different?

The cannabinoid receptor seems to have first appeared approximately 600 million years ago in sea squirts. Sea squirts also happen to be our closet relatives among the invertebrates. We share 80 percent of our genes with them.

A sea squirt is a tunicate, and tunicates contain a host of potentially useful chemical compounds that are effective against various types of cancer. In the May 2007 issue of The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal, researchers from Stanford University showed that “tunicates can correct [biological] abnormalities over a series of generations… the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon may lead to insights about the potential of cells and tissues to be reprogrammed.”

Could that underlying mechanism allowing for “reprogramming” involve the cannabinoid system?

Tunicates evolved in the early Cambrian period, a period that featured the Cambrian explosion that was characterized by increased diversity and diversification of organisms by an order of magnitude. The Cambrian explosion marked the sudden (in geological terms) emergence of almost every biological type known.

Prior to 580 million years ago, life forms were simple. Over the following 75 million years the rate of evolution accelerated. Charles Darwin considered the Cambrian explosion one of the best arguments against his theory of natural selection. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge’s theory of punctuated equalibria challenged the idea that evolution took place exclusively gradually over the generations and asserted that instead there were eras where rapid change ensued. Gould pointed to stasis in most of the fossil record for evidence.

Could there be a connection between an accelerated rate of evolution 580 million years ago and the emergence of the cannabinoid system 600 million years ago? Is it possible that it is a system involved with evolution itself?

The capacity to change is essential to survival. Grow a fin. Resist bacteria. Accept a new idea. The ability to change can mean the difference between life and death, at the individual level or for a species. We know we can change biochemically. There has to be a biochemical reason for that. Such a biochemical system would be mandatory for most species when it comes to survival in a changing world.

The cannabinoid system seems at least in part to be associated with the capacity to “shift,” i.e., change, dislodge stagnancies and interrupt patterns (“forget”). Memory is not just an act of the mind. The body has memory, too.  Marijuana affects “memory by way of the receptors in the limbic system’s hippocampus, which “gates” information during memory consolidation.”

According to Judith Horstman in “The Scientific American Brave New Brain,” learning is a product of memory formation. Memories are created “when messages are sent across the tiny gaps between neurons called synapses… A memory is held in the connections made by this network and firmly established when a network of synapses is strengthened… Over time, this net of memories can be strengthened further, weakened, or broken, depending on your brain chemistry, your genes, and your actions.”

So, these networks can be viewed as grooves that get dug and create underlying structure. Information gets trained to the tracks. So what if the well-dug groove becomes maladaptive, or even detrimental to survival? What if the dug groove was grounded in misinformation? What if the underlying structure distorts the

information running through it? How do you realize it? (How does the body realize it?) How do you know to jump the tracks? And if you do jump them, jump them into what?

Unlearning, or pattern breaking, under certain circumstances is critical to the ability of life itself to persist. It may be equally important in organisms, organizations and even software to have a mechanism for pattern interruption when changes in the environment make a formerly useful pattern destructive. The interruption serves as a reset button and causes the system to reassess and aim for optimizing in current reality as opposed to maintaining historical patterns.

The researchers who work with cannabis, the cannabinoid system and cannabis science often refer to cannabinoids as working like “grease” and facilitating transitions from one state to another, and as allowing change. Certainly, more study in these areas is desirable, and necessary. But the federal government systematically blocks such studies.

Whereas clinical researchers can get permission from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to grow or create restricted compounds like LSD, MDMA or psilocybin in the lab, they are unable to do so when it comes to marijuana.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) currently is funding a nearly $2 million study in an attempt to find a link between marijuana use and domestic violence, even though a recent study published by the journal Neuropharmacology has found that cannabinoids may reduce aggression and improve social interactions.

Despite such obstacles to research, there are more than 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to the cannabis plant and cannabinoids. Other countries, such as Israel, are moving ahead to study cannabis’ therapeutic applications.

The paradigm is changing for marijuana in America. According to Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”:

    The decision to reject one paradigm is

always the simultaneous decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other… [T]he transition of a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by the articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalizations.

We may be in for exciting times.The cannabinoid system is an ancient one. Life organized around it. The illegal status of marijuana is less than 100 years old. Political institutions and economic interests organized around it.

How the cannabinoid system functions may be a door to more secrets about the workings of our physiology. And, as when we figured out that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, it might shake up some faulty premises and challenge the work of authorities.

Marijuana medicine and science will change things. New information that conflicts with the prevailing paradigm always does.

Marijuana economics may change things, too. Whether it does depends largely on how the regulatory models shake out and whether the resources – the money – generated under legal status flow to new players, provide broad opportunities for entrepreneurship, build the middle class, or find their way to the more deeply dug grooves of those who already command the resources of the economy.

Marijuana politics is the tool that is used to reinforce current patterns, networks and flows — or to dig new grooves and enable change.

K.M Cholewa has worked as a political writer, policy consultant and lobbyist in Montana for 22 years, including on issues related to medical marijuana. Her novel, Shaking Out the Dead, is due out Spring 2014.

salon.com

Outside the Hourglass

Thinking Outside the Hourglass

by Zen Gardner

This imposed artificial time constraint is a very subtle one, especially when you realize everything depends on perspective. We’re clearly experiencing a manipulated, illusory cycle of time with parameters that make us feel contained, limited. And that’s the intent. Closing in on your prey is an ingrained predatory behavior. If the subjects feel there’s no escape, compliant behavior will eventually follow.

That’s pretty clever on the part of the controllers, but it’s only effective when you’re not awake to what’s going on.

Perceived containment has been proven time and again in even popular science to produce certain behaviors. Time is only one factor, but an important one as it is one of the more subtle ways they exert control and amplify fear. We cannot succumb to any of these false paradigms. Humanity is running to and fro in an effort to find solutions, but only within the confines they’ve been cleverly restricted to. It’s a closed system with clearly defined limitations. We look within their constructed time-framed and otherwise controlled system for The only true solution lies in conscious, transcendent awareness of the true big picture.

Playing By the Rules

Herein lies the big “catch”.  Similar to the obvious political right-left paradigm, we’ve been injected into a much more complex set of confining rules and regulations. They are adopted by assumption from the parameters we’ve been given. It’s not possible to objectively discern our condition when we think we have all the information we need to make right decisions…when in reality we don’t.

We have to find out for ourselves what the real facts and truths are. And even those need constant re-examination and regular conscious, aware assessment.

These same self-imposed authorities dictate our limitations within which we’re to find solutions, when they very well know there are no solutions but theirs within those confines, whichever directed “side” people choose. To snap out of this hypnotic, severely limiting mind set is our first priority.

So Where Are We?

It’s hard to say exactly. We can only describe the conditions and our awakened understandings as they surface. When we put those realizations into effect in our lives a wonderful spiritual detachment takes place and we see more clearly by the day.  Taking living action on these realizations precipitates the most radical transformations in our own lives as well as in those we influence. Those who don’t take action are missing out, and that is the biggest travesty of mankind.

All while the imposed hourglass lets its ticking sands of time drop into a mirrored, carefully contained paradigm.

Our solution is really quite simple. Disengage, disconnect, and stop listening to their sirens of propaganda. It’s much like getting off of a mind-numbing medication to where you can think clearly again. It takes time and some simple commitment. Your resolution becomes wanting to wake up, so you do what needs to be done, come what may.

Our current condition appears quite tenuous. We can go with the flow of lies and hunker down and just take it, or we can rise to the occasion. Rising means becoming individually what each of us is meant to be. Alive, awake, aware, conscious and activated and no longer stupefied by circumstances and false information. That may sound simplistic or ethereal but without that break each of us is doomed to repeat after them and their dictates. We’ll follow, react, or as so many have done just give up and acquiesce in confusion and despair.

The world condition continues to deteriorate so rapidly that it’s forcing just such unconscious decisions. Like it or not, imposed circumstances are herding the hive mindset into various corners of defensiveness – the patriots, the libertarians, the anarchists, the survivalists, and on and on, and most of all the clinging system adherents.

Don’t get caught up in their game of false paradigms.

Our Opposition Is Spiritual

It’s more important than ever to choose our battles wisely. Our challenge is spiritual first and foremost. What we’re up against manifests and lives in the minds of men as an implanted psychotropic manipulative mindset. It’s ugly, it’s completely controller-serving and it’s artificial. Yet it grows as if it’s organic.

It’s not. Clearly all of creation is some kind of vibrational wave-form or another, but what we call evil apparently is a very conscious anti-organic life form. It seems to exist to destroy and manipulate to its own satisfaction for whatever anti-creative reason. Granted, an all-wonderful Universe has certainly taken all of this into consideration. A good example is the human body with its anti-bodies and amazing immune system. A microcosm of the macrocosm.

The nano and genetic manipulations, and the techno, geo-engineering and mind control technologies are further evidence of this invasive force. These are mind derived, howbeit composed of Universal components. Recognizing what we’re up against is most of the problem.

It’s Time for No Paradigm

There’s no pat, blanket answer for everyone when it comes to knowing what to do. The matrix gives itself away by offering “group plans” and locked in behavioral boxes to resort to for comfort and security. Awakening souls naturally rebel against such confines on our spirits but this engineered “group option plan” is pretty well bought by most of humanity, sad to say.

I’ve seen a lot of proposals for new world systems, and to be honest none of them appeal to me. They all smack of the same old control paradigm, but with new people and rehashed religiously inclined belief systems in charge. Some of these might seem nice in the short term but where would they lead us? My inclination is to believe it will be more of the same. Just like the encroaching new world order “big idea”, they generally smell like more “hope and change” solutions that only signify more sophisticated control.

I can’t even say what exactly it is I do champion. That’s why my conviction has always been along the lines of personal awakening. When we get there we’ll understand. Right now, people are generally fighting in the dark. And it makes no sense to make unconscious decisions without the full light of truth.

As I see it, information sharing and strenthening local community are our best bet. Creating this evolving revolution of loving interaction from the ground up is the manifestation of our new reality. Literally. Get back to the land. Work locally in not just community gardening and cooperation, but to change minds and structural mindsets around us. It’s the solution at hand.

That, and continuing to dissolve this world of lies via passionate dissemination of enlightened information. And that I’m happy to report is happening at an accelerating rate, as is the growth of indigenous, caring communities.

As the old dissolves, truth based reality evolves.

Let go of the old and be part of the new emergence.

Truth will not be suppressed.

We truly are the solution we’ve been waiting for.

Love always, Zen

zengardner.com

Truth Warrior

The Rise of the Conscious Warrior

by Zen Gardner

Life is a struggle. How much more then is the spiritual life, the fight to remain conscious in an illusory world where deviant forces vie for control more than caring, battering your very body and soul day in and day out on top of your struggle to survive?

Oh, we’re going peacefully downstream in the conscious dimensions. There we learn to let go and follow the flow of the Universe and synchronicity.

But in this physical, lower density world, we’re fighting directly upstream. In addition, we’re living in a time of increasingly turbulent waters. Our kayaks hit all kinds of eddies and crosscurrents, never mind the rocks and rapids we have to navigate–all while idiots, enemies and doubters, prodded on by the propaganda whores, are screaming obscenities from the shore and trying to hit us with anything they can get their hands on!

But alas, grasshoppers—we have powers they know not of!

We’re in a warfare, any way you look at it. Only it’s not a warfare of hate, but of love. It’s not a warfare of physical violence, but a spiritual one of intention and a Truth directed life. The inherent cause of Universal consciousness is the dissolution of the ways born of ignorance and darkness by means of the all powerful exposing and enlightening weapons of Light, Love and Truth.

The medieval matrix, no matter how fancy and hi-tech it’s become, is dissolving and losing its grip. And we need to actively help it on its way to oblivion.

Don’t forget, non-compliance is a decisive action, not inaction. Inaction is going with the current of the matrix.

There is no sitting still. We’re all doing one or the other.

That’s the choice. That’s the battle.

In A Time of Imbalance the Call to Rise is Natural

Similar to the poetic beauty of martial arts, the Truth warrior uses his weapons skillfully and with great discretion. While many argue we need evil for good to exist and all that esoterica, we happen to be living in a time of great imbalance.

Do you enjoy having lords of darkness rule over you and yours, exercising more death dealing, spirit quelling control over humanity by the day?

Didn’t think so. Will it collapse under its own weight? In many ways it has to. Will it do it all by itself?

Then why are we here? As long as we’re here we’re part of the Great Design we need to do our part.

All I know is that what I am finding out and tuning into calls me to participate. It’s as real as the sun and water hitting a seedling and the organism responding. If it’s not evident to you that our planet and civilization are under attack I do wonder how you got to this article. It couldn’t be any clearer. That’s why they direct the angst people are feeling, the knowing that something is wrong, towards fabricated “outside” enemies to divert attention from the real perpetrators.

Similar to how religion co-opts, steers and contains the human soul’s hunger for the spiritual, the Controllers arouse, channel and misdirect humanity’s sense that it is being attacked and they literally harness what they themselves have aroused, using it for their own parasitic, vampirist purposes.

Cattle prods and sheep dogs driving humanity into the slaughterhouse.

There is No “They”…They Said.

The old “tell a big enough lie” ploy. Their biggest tool is to say there is no they. There are no dark forces. In fact, we’re told the “they” are the good guys looking out for us. Reminds me of the adage that the biggest lie Satan ever told is that he doesn’t exist.

There is no negative, destructive, usurping parasitic force in the Universe. Humanity just has other humans to worry about. The PTBs are here to save us from each other.

Oh really?

After all, that’s the mantra of the anti-conspiracy camp. ” THEY? Are you crazy? You really think there’s some ‘secret cabal’ running things from behind the scenes? How insane are you? If that were the case we’d be hearing all about it! No way they could hide something that big!”

Same old, same old.

Reversing, hiding and disguising the obvious truth so those who do sense the true reality that something is seriously wrong then question their own conscience just enough that they become neutralized and therefore unresponsive.

A very dark time right now indeed.

If you feel the call to participate more it’s consciousness calling, any way you slice it. Take your place on the great mandala and all that, but there’s a bulldozer headed for your house. Are you just gonna sit there?

It’s that urgent.

No doubt you’ve given all of this serious thought. And I know many of you have activated and it’s absolutely beautiful. I’m proud to be associated with so many amazing, loving committed people. I think we just need to be adaptive and prepared for more. The winds are picking up and the battlefield is becoming more fluid, more challenging and more demanding.

And for those on the sidelines:

It’s time to choose your weapon – or let it choose you.

I’m not gonna tell anyone what to do. If people don’t learn to choose for themselves, consciousness is not at work and back to the old paradigms we go.

But do something. Get the boat in motion or the rudder can’t take effect. Find and take your calling seriously and step it up. We all have to.

Meditate, intend, pray, affirm. Change your life, change the etheric. Try new consciousness technologies. Write, talk, show up, contribute, speak to groups, attend gatherings of active and motivated individuals. Find the opening and jump in. The rest will follow.

Contribute we must. Hopefully with our whole lives.

It’s not a time to get frantic by any means, but perhaps take this as an alert, something I know many of you are also feeling. Our old views of just weeks and months ago are shifting and will continue to do so. It’s subtle, but it’s real. We have to step it up and yield to what consciousness is calling each of us to do.

A purely motivated heart will always find the way.

Again and again.

Much love,

Zen

zengardner

 I Choose Love                                                                                                                                      vid