So, yesterday the big news was that the White House sent a memo out to the attorneys general in all the states where it’s legal to use medical marijuana. You might be thinking that if you’re not sick it doesn’t affect you, but you’d be wrong. It’s a step in the right direction, and every baby-step counts, people!

Besides the estimated 28 million people in this country that smoke pot (legally and otherwise), there’s a growing number of Americans who are waking up to the fact that marijuana isn’t the dangerous drug that they’ve been brainwashed into believing. In fact, a slim majority of Americans now believe that alcohol is a more dangerous drug than weed. Think about that.

Ultimately, public opinion is what will eventually make marijuana legal. If more and more people (whether they’re users or not) are realizing that pot isn’t a dangerous drug, then it follows that eventually more and more people are going to get fed up with seeing their tax dollars spent on fighting a losing battle. Even the White House gets this, based on this passage from yesterday’s memo:

“…prosecution of individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses who use marijuana as part of a recommended treatment regimen consistent with applicable state law, or those caregivers in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state law who provide such individuals with marijuana, is unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources.”

In other words, the Obama administration thinks it’s a waste of federal dollars to fight medical marijuana – and it knows that most Americans think so too.

We should all let our government know that we support its decision regarding medical marijuana. Maybe it isn’t much, but it’s also one more way to let them know that the tide of public opinion in general is changing regarding marijuana laws.

Want to say “thank you” to President Obama? NORML has set up a page on their website that makes it easy to do just that. All you have to do is fill in your name & contact info (I suppose so that they can see what district you’re from).

To send an email to the White House, go here: http://capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=14205391

And while we’re at it, we should give NORML a big shout out too. It’s organizations like theirs that keep the fight moving forward.

Annual Causes of Death in the United States:

• Tobacco: 435,000
• Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity: 365,000
• Alcohol: 85,000
• Microbial Agents: 75,000
• Toxic Agents: 55,000
• Motor Vehicle Crashes: 26,374
• Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs: 32,000
• Suicide: 30,622
• Incidents Involving Firearms: 29,000
• Homicide: 20,308
• Sexual Behaviors: 20,000
• All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect: 17,000
• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs such as Aspirin: 7,600
• MARIJUANA: 0

This information could be used to make a case for outlawing couch potatoes who sit around watching porn, smoking cigarettes and eating Big Macs under the influence of aspirin. But, um, as a deterrent against smoking pot it didn’t exactly scare the pants off me. They’ll have to try harder.

You can read the entire article here, but basically what it says is that a new study was done in the UK to try to prove the earlier study’s results (common practice among researchers). The conclusion the second study came to was completely different from the first one, and the results were recently published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

The authors of this study were professional and polite in their wording, and they didn’t exactly come right out and say those other guys are idiots. But they didn’t need to, because based on the following excerpt from the news article it’s pretty damn obvious that weed can’t be linked to schizophrenia:

According to the study, cannabis use in the UK between 1972 and 2002 has increased four-fold in the general population, and 18-fold among under-18s.

Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29% between 1990 and 2010.

But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased.

So in other words, in the UK there are four times as many people smoking marijuana today as there were in 1972. But not only has the incidence of schizophrenia not increased, it’s actually slightly decreased since 1972.

If the researchers that did the first study had any common sense, then they would see that it stands to reason that if smoking pot was linked to schizophrenia then there would have to be about four times as many schizophrenics today as there were in 1972. But it just ain’t so. Which has to make ya wonder – what were THEY smokin’ ?

Does Detoxification Work for Passing a Drug Test?

First off, some basic science about where the evidence of marijuana use is found in your body. THC metabolites, which are the by-products that testing labs will be looking for in a urine test, are stored in your fat cells. They’re NOT stored in your liver, they’re NOT stored in your kidneys, and they’re NOT stored in any other major body organ. THC metabolites are only found in your fat cells. Which is why so-called ‘detox’ products are useless for passing a drug test – they can help cleanse organs like the liver and kidneys, but you can’t ‘detoxify’ fat cells – your only option for getting rid of THC metabolites in a hurry is by getting rid of fat cells in a hurry. And if you can do that, you’ll be a millionaire and you probably won’t need to pass a drug test anyway. :-)

But over time, these THC metabolites get processed naturally through your body and are eliminated through your kidneys, just like many other kinds of toxins and chemicals that we ingest. So if you’re a daily smoker, everyday you’ll be losing metabolites in your urine, and also adding new ones to your store of fat cells. Any discussion about how to pass a drug test has to start with the facts, and now you know: passing a drug test is possible through other means, but you cannot actually ‘detox’ your body in time to pass a test that you’ve got coming up the next day or the next week.

Just How Long Does Marijuana Stay In Your System?

To illustrate what this means for you, let’s use an example of Smoker A and Smoker B. They both smoke the exact same amount of weed everyday, and the exact same grade. And since they’re both smokers, they’re both looking for info on passing a drug test. Will the exact same method work for both of them equally? Very unlikely, and I’ll explain why…

Let’s say Smoker A is a sports freak who works out every day of the week. He runs, lifts weights, goes rock climbing, the works. This guy is a total hardbody without an ounce of extra fat on him. Smoker B works at a desk all day, and when he goes home his favorite sport is smoking a bowl while sitting on the couch and watching TV until bedtime. Over the years he’s slowly put on a few extra pounds (okay, probably more than a few).

Are you starting to guess where this is going…? It’s not rocket science. Smoker A doesn’t have very many fat cells where THC metabolites can hide out, so they’re constantly being filtered through his body and being excreted through his urine. If he completely stopped smoking today, he’d probably be clean in 10 days to 2 weeks, even though he’s a daily smoker. He still has to worry about passing a drug test on short notice, but if he has any kind of advance notice at all he can pass a urine test just by abstaining for a while.

But things aren’t so simple for Smoker B. Because he’s got quite a few extra fat cells where THC can plant itself, it takes a lot longer for it to cycle out of his body and into his urine. For him, passing a drug test means it’s definitely time for panic mode. Depending on how much extra weight he’s carrying, if he stopped smoking today it could be anywhere from 1 to 2 months before he’s able to pass his drug test.

So What’s Your Best Option for Passing a Drug Test?

So what can you do…? The reason why it’s so hard to know exactly how long marijuana stays in your system is because a person’s metabolism is very seldom as cut & dry as the difference between our friends Smoker A and Smoker B. We’re all completely different, and the only way to know if you’re clean or not is to buy a home drug test and just test yourself. If it comes up positive, and you know you’re going to be given a urine test, you’ve really only got one option: dilution.

Contrary to popular misconception, dilution does not mean drinking a gallon of water a day for a week or a month before your test. For passing a drug test, all you need to do is drink enough fluids right before your test so that your urine becomes dilute. Remember how I told you that the THC metabolites in your fat cells end up going through your kidneys and getting flushed out in your urine? Well, all you need to do to pass a urine test is drink so much that your kidneys become ‘overloaded.’ When that happens, your urine gets so dilute that your pee actually comes out clear, instead of yellow. And that means that anything that would normally show up in your urine (THC metabolites, and also other substances) is basically non-existent.

Every single detox drink on the market works on the principle of dilution. Their instructions tell you to drink a certain amount of water, and then what the drink does is add these ‘other substances’ back into your urine that are supposed to be there (for example, creatinine). Labs know that people try to dilute, so they run some tests specifically to see if you’ve been trying to game the system. Detox drinks have a sketchy track record of success, but if you’re a light smoker, with a fast metabolism, then your chances of passing a drug test with one of them are actually pretty decent.

Passing a Drug Test for Heavy Smokers

If you’re a pretty regular pot smoker, then using a commercial ‘detox’ drink is a big gamble. In that case, your best bet to successfully pass a urine test is to do your own dilution method at home. You can buy the same ingredients that are in the detox drinks and achieve much more reliable results by controlling the process. And especially if you’re overweight, you’ll also most likely need to drink quite a bit more water than the detox drink instructions tell you to, to help guarantee you’ll pass.

There are a lot of sites on the Internet talking about how to pass a drug test, but most of them are commercial sites of companies who want you to buy their products. But another real advantage of diluting on your own is that it’s a LOT cheaper. Which means you can afford to do a trial run and give yourself a urine test at home first, to make sure you’ve got the process down. You can pick up a home drug test in any major pharmacy, and once you can pass at home, then you can be confident of passing a drug test at the lab.