Marijuana linked to foetal damage

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 23

Marijuana linked to foetal damage

NZPA-AP Anaheim Two studies of drugged rats boost evidence that marijuana may damage the human reproductive system, perhaps even in the offspring of pregnant women who smoke marijuana, researchers say. “Smoking marijuana during pregnancy might cause irreversible damage to those cells in the (foetal) brain which control the female gonads,” said Amarendhra Kumar, of Boston’s Tuft’s University School of Medicine.

A critic of the studies, a Harvard medical school psychiatrist, Dr Lester Grinspoon, said the marijuana given to the rats was higher than the amount smoked by most humans, and the findings did not necessarily apply to people. The researchers agreed.

They gave newborn female rats the equivalent of two to 20 marijuana cigarettes worth of tetrahydrocannabinol, or T.H.C. — marijuana’s active ingredient — during each of their first five days of life. The rats never developed normal female cycles, indicating permanent damage, he said. When the rats were killed at 10 months of age, he said, they were found to have abnormally low levels of a chemical necessary to trigger the brain’s pituitary gland to help make ovaries produce eggs. The second study, by a University of North Dakota Medical School pharmacologist, Syed Husain, found the equivalent to as few as 2¥a “joints,” or cigarettes, a day for 15 days impaired the processing of energy-rich sugars in the testicles of young adult male rats.