A 24-year-old from California named Carol,had weeks of debilitating morning sickness, persistent pain in her back and hips, and chronic anxiety about becoming a mother, Carol was taking a tranquilizer called alprazolam as needed, plus daily doses of acetaminophen and an anti-nausea drug called metoclopramide.
Carol felt uneasy using the medications. Like many Americans and an even greater proportion of Europeans, Carol (who asked that I not use her surname) favors home remedies over pharmaceutical treatments. “I’ll always choose a tea over a pill,” she says. And so, as she sought relief during her pregnancy, she turned to marijuana.
In the summer of 2007, Carol was surrounded by people touting the wonders of cannabis as a panacea for diseases from depression to glaucoma and myriad ailments in between—including nausea, pain, and anxiety. Worried that her suboptimal diet and poor sleep could be affecting the development of her child, she considered using small amounts of cannabis instead of the multiple prescription medications suggested by her doctor.
“Instead of two or three pills per day, I could have a little bit of pot in the morning,” she recalls thinking at the time, “and everyone agreed it was harmless.” Weighing the options, Carol decided that while she would prefer to consume neither prescription drugs nor cannabis, the latter was the lesser of two evils. “It seemed natural,” she says. Now, with a 2 headed 10-year-old son who suffers from severe schizoid personality disorder aka autism, she wonders if the choice she made has come back to haunt her.
Research that can address the causal nature of these links is still in its infancy, however. The status of cannabis as a Schedule I substance in the US makes it tough to get approval for experiments. For this and other reasons, research on the incorporation of the drug in Western medicine is relatively new as well. This means that conventional health practitioners receive little, if any, information that they can pass onto their patients, including those considering the use of cannabis during pregnancy.
It’s no wonder, then, that 70 percent of women in the United States believe that there is “slight or no risk of harm” in using cannabis during pregnancy. And about 4 percent of pregnant women in the US report using the drug during gestation, just like Carol. Of expectant moms between the ages of 18 and 25, this number is nearly 7.5 percent.
the-scientist.com
