Mellow Moms: Marijuana Babies Nearly Twice as Likely to Survive

By Cannabis Patients Alliance on June 23, 2014 • ( 1 )

Photo by Elnaz6

It’s 3 a.m. and I lean over my wife staggered in front of the porcelain toilet idol, pull her hair back from the retching, and hand her the vape pen. She takes it like it was Jesus himself who signed her weed script, inhales, and her convulsing storm calms.

“I just hope to God this isn’t hurting our baby,” she says.

It wasn’t. We had hit the bookstores on medical cannabis and pregnancy as soon as that stork first shit on the house, and what we learned mellowed the uptight Nancy Reagan of our consciences. We discovered that actually quite a bit of what’s in cannabis is good for a fetus.

One of the most shocking things I learned is that a baby that tests positive for THC has nearly twice the chance of surviving as a fetus that never inhaled.

A study published in the July 1, 1997 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics examined 2,964 infants for fatal outcomes during their first two years of life.

Forty-four percent of the children tested positive for drugs targeted by the DEA, including 30.5 percent for cocaine, 20.2 percent for opiates, and 11.4 percent for cannabis. Strikingly, cannabis not only had the lowest infant mortality rate, but at 8.9 deaths per 1,000 births, it ranked considerably lower than babies who did not test positive for any drugs. Babies who pissed clean actually had 15.7 deaths per 1,000 births. Cannabis babies had nearly half the mortality rate.

Incidentally, crack babies had 17.7 deaths per 1,000 births, and those on the junk had 18.4 deaths per 1,000 births. Even the hard stuff caused only a slightly higher incident of death.

Read the rest of the article by Clyde Gallagher at Cannabis Now Magazine: Mellow Moms: Marijuana Babies Nearly Twice as Likely to Survive | Cannabis Now Magazine.

Clyde Gallagher is a journalist, poet and blog writer living in Oakland, Calif. He is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and creator of the blog Nailednutz.com, he supports the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis, but more importantly the industrial use of hemp, as it can be an invaluable substitute for fuel, paper, and plastics, as well as a remedy for many of the ills that are killing this planet. If only weed floated in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and Henry Ford’s hemp-fueled car was a roadside standard, our children would inherit a brighter world and a bold tomorrow. Clyde is a contributor to Cannabis Now Magazine.