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The Good Drug Guide : new mood-brighteners and antidepressants
The above link is to an excellent, but quite lengthy, report by HEDWEB titled The Responsible Parent's Guide to Healthy Mood-Boosters for All the Family. While not a pro-drug paper, it takes the middle road and does not demonize mind altering substances in the way that the anti-drug warriors do. One section of this paper has links to some interesting scientific studies of cannabis (the substance the drug warriors call marijuana) that reveal that this plant does not have addictive properties. Here is what it says about this substance:
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By contrast to today's opioids, marijuana isn't usually addictive in the traditional sense of the term. It can still be habit-forming. Marijuana has euphoriant, psychedelic and sedative properties. Experiments with stoned rats suggest the drug reduces the amount of corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) in the amygdala. Excess secretion of CRF is associated with abnormalities in the HPLA axis and depression. The rebound surge of CRF on ceasing cannabis-use is associated with increased vulnerability to stress and a withdrawal-reaction, arguably one good reason not to stop in the first instance. A dysfunctional response to stress, linked to a chronically overactive HPLA axis, causes anxiety disorders and depression; CRH-type 1 receptor antagonists like antalarmin are being investigated as potential anxiolytics and antidepressants. The deeper roots of our malaise lie buried in the evolutionary past.

The primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC, tetrahydrocannabinol. Smoking or eating marijuana and its complex cocktail of compounds may rarely trigger episodes of depersonalisation, derealisation and psychosis. Sometimes it can induce paranoia, particularly in advocates of The War Against Drugs. More commonly, marijuana just leaves the user pleasantly and harmlessly stoned. It's fun. Sleepiness, pain relief and euphoria are typical responses. Indeed the first brain-derived substance found to bind to our cannabis receptors was christened "anandamide", a derivative of the Sanskrit word for internal contentment. Getting high may thus serve as an innocent recreational pastime in an uncaring world.

Yet marijuana is not a wonderdrug. Cognitive function in the user is often impaired, albeit moderately and reversibly. Marijuana interferes with memory-formation by disrupting long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. One of the functions of endogenous cannabinoids in the brain is to promote selective short-term amnesia. Forgetting is not, as one might have supposed, a purely passive process. Either way, choosing deliberately to ingest an amnestic agent for long periods is scarcely an ideal life-strategy. It's especially flawed given the centrality of memory to human self-identity. Some artists and professional bohemians, it is true, apparently do find smoking grass an adjunct to creative thought. For persons of a more philistine temperament, on the other hand, it's hard to see such a drug as a major tool for life-affirmation or the development of the human species. This does not, one ought scarcely need to add, suggest marijuana users should be persecuted and criminalised.
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The full article has many links to a wide range of topics that mentioned in the text. We have only provided a few of those links in the above paragraphs.

Interestingly, the weight of scientific opinion seems to say that the best thing to take if you are suffering from mild depression caused by withdrawl from marijuana is to continue taking it. :-)

As Terence McKenna was fond of saying: Keep the Old Faith and stay high.

posted by LoZo 11:57 AM