11 "Faux Pas" That Are Actually Okay to Make With Your buy weed online

[Jauregui Norsworthy]

Employers across the country continue to do drug testing which tests for the five most commonly abused categories of drugs including marijuana. If an employee tests positive on a drug test, it is up to the employer to deal with the problem. The employer has the right to immediately fire the employee or to warn the employee that breaking the company's drug free policy will not be tolerated. In this case, the employee may be tested again at a later date. It is a second chance for the worker to provide a urine sample free from the evidence of marijuana use. In states where medical marijuana is legal, employees are usually treated the same as a worker who is using marijuana illegally. Even with a medical recommendation from a physician, employees can be fired.

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An employee's work will surely suffer if the worker is high and has used marijuana at work. Work and drug use just do not go together. Work takes mental and physical effort, and these are hampered by drugs of any sort. If a worker is using Oxycontin, Percocet, Vicodin, or other prescribed drugs that cause extreme drowsiness, an employer will not typically allow this employee to remain at the work site. Especially those in a safety sensitive work environment. The employee will be sent home and told to return with a doctor's excuse. Why should an employer have to accept an employee who is high at work from marijuana when they would never let an employee remain on the job who was incapacitated from legal drugs to treat a condition?

In states where marijuana is legal, such as Colorado or California, its use must be done in private. A person smoking marijuana in public can be arrested and face jail time whether or not they have a marijuana card that documents that they are a medical marijuana user. Does this give an employee the right to go into the restroom or out to the parking lot to smoke marijuana for medical reasons?

Drug testing can identify workers who are using marijuana, and employers have the right to know this. Under federal law, marijuana is illegal and in states that have legal medical use, an employer's drug free workplace policy takes precedence over a worker's medical marijuana card. Any employee, even those with medical reasons, can be fired immediately if the drug shows up in a random drug test.

Random drug test are the best way for businesses to keep their company drug free. Marijuana will show up in a drug test for seven to 30 days after its use, depending on how heavy of a user the employee is. Random testing can eliminate marijuana use on the job, with proper use of pre employment drug testing and random drug screens. There is no reliable way to wash marijuana use from the body in a short period of time, despite the great variety of products on the market that claim to do this.

Take a deep breath!

In 2012, a study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) calculated that even smoking a single joint every day for 20 years might be benign, though most participants only smoked two or online dispensaries in usa legit three joints each month. "I was surprised we didn't see effects [of marijuana use]," said UCSF epidemiologist Mark Pletcher, who led the study.

One assessment of various epidemiological studies points to small sample size and poor study design as reasons for scientists' inability to nail down a link between cannabis and cancer risk. But some suspect that such a link doesn't exist, and that marijuana may even have cancer-preventive effects. A 2008 study, for example, suggested that smoking marijuana may reduce the risk of tobacco-associated lung cancer, calculating that people who smoke both marijuana and tobacco have a lower risk of cancer than those who smoke only tobacco (though still a higher risk than non-smokers).

But even Pletcher isn't sanguine about marijuana's effects on the lungs, and suspects that there may still be long-term lung damage that can be hard to detect. "We really can't reassure ourselves about heavy use," he explained.

Your brain on drugs

There is some evidence to suggest that stoned subjects exhibit increased risk-taking and impaired decision-making, and score worse on memory tasks-and residual impairments have been detected days or even weeks after use. Some studies also link years of regular marijuana use to deficits in memory, learning, and concentration. A recent and widely discussed report on the IQs of New Zealanders followed since birth found that cannabis users who'd started their habit in adolescence had lower IQs than non-users.

In this study, led by researchers at Duke University, "you could clearly see as a consequence of cannabis use, IQ goes down," said Derik Hermann, a clinical neuroscientist at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany who was not involved in the research.

But not 4 months later, a re-analysis and computer simulation at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo countered the Duke findings. Ole Rogeberg contended that socioeconomic factors, not marijuana use, contributed to the lower IQs seen in cannabis users.

Rogeberg's conclusion counters a sizeable literature, however, which supports a link between pot use and neurophysiological decline. Studies in both humans and animals suggest that people who acquiring a marijuana habit in adolescence face long-term negative impacts on brain function, with some users finding it difficult to concentrate and learn new tasks.

Notably, most studies on the subject suggest that while there may be negative consequences of smoking as a teen, users who begin in adulthood are generally unaffected. This may be due to endocannabinoid-directed reorganization of the brain during puberty, Hermann explained. The intake of cannabinoids that comes with pot use may cause irreversible "misleading of the neural growth," he said.

In addition to the consequences for intelligence, many studies suggest that smoking marijuana raises the risk of schizophrenia, and may have similar effects on the brain. Hermann's group used MRI to detect cannabis-associated neuron damage in the pre-frontal cortex and found that it was similar to brain changes seen in schizophrenia patients. Other studies further suggest that weed-smoking schizophrenics have greater disease-associated brain changes and perform worse on cognitive tests than their non-smoking counterparts.

But much of this research can't distinguish between brain changes resulting from marijuana use and symptoms associated with the disease. It's possible that cannabis-smoking schizophrenics "might have unpleasant symptoms [that precede full-blown schizophrenia] and are self-medicating" with the psychotropic drug, said Roland Lamarine, a professor of community health at California State University, Chico. "We haven't seen an increase in schizophrenics, even with a lot more marijuana use."

In fact, other research suggests that cannabis-using schizophrenics score better on cognitive tests than non-using schizophrenics. Such conflicting reports may be due to the varying concentrations-and varying effects-of cannabinoids in marijuana. In addition to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a neurotoxic cannabinoid that is responsible for marijuana's mind-altering properties, the drug also contains a variety of non-psychoactive cannabinoids, including cannabidiol (CBD), which can protect against neuron damage. Hermann found that the volume of the hippocampus-a brain area important for memory processing-is slightly smaller in cannabis users than in non-users, but more CBD-rich marijuana countered this effect.

A deadly cocktail?

While data supporting the harmful effects of marijuana on its own are weak, some researchers are more worried about the drug in conjunction with other substances, such as tobacco, alcohol, or cocaine. Some studies suggest, for example, that marijuana may increase cravings for other drugs, leading to its infamous tag as a "gateway drug." A study published earlier this month supported this theory when it found that, at least in rats, THC exposure increases tobacco's addictive effects. Furthermore, marijuana may not mix well with prescription drugs, as cannabis causes the liver to metabolize drugs more slowly, raising the risk of drug toxicity.

Despite these concerns, however, Lamarine thinks it's unlikely that the consequences of cannabis use are dire, given the amount of research that has focused on the subject. "We're not going to wake up tomorrow to the big discovery that marijuana causes major brain damage," he said. "We would have seen that by now."