Feb 12, 2009 09:30 AM
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San Francisco, 11:33 PM
Tue Feb 9
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It's good news/bad news when it comes to recreational drug news. New studies show that the long-term effects of Ecstasy aren't as bad as suspected... but smoking pot might lead to testicular cancer.
The latest news on the long-term effects of Ecstasy come via the New Scientist, which reports:
Enough time has finally elapsed to start asking if ecstasy damages health in the long term. According to the biggest review ever undertaken, it causes slight memory difficulties and mild depression, but these rarely translate into problems in the real world. While smaller studies show that some individuals have bigger problems, including weakened immunity and larger memory deficits, so far, for most people, ecstasy seems to be nowhere near as harmful over time as you may have been led to believe.
But just when you thought it was safe to get high, suddenly pot becomes more dangerous that you'd previous suspected, claims a new medical study:
The study was the work of researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, and other centres in the US and is published early online in the journal Cancer. The study results show that being a marijuana smoker at the time of diagnosis was linked to a 70 per cent higher risk of testicular cancer. For men who smoked marijuana at least once a week or who had been smoking it since their teens, the risk was about double that of a man who had never smoked it.
On the plus side, those "Truth: The Anti-Drug" advertisements now have a much easier sell than "Your friend's eyes are red, that sucks."
Ecstasy's legacy: So far, so good [New Scientist], Testicular Cancer Risk Linked To Marijuana Smoking [Medical News Today]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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