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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Time drags for stoned rats
The Guardian
Thursday 12 Jun 2003 Cannabis makes rats lose track of time, robbing them of the ability to discriminate between short and long periods. This may help explain why human users may be less adept at tasks that require sustained concentration. "Any task that requires prolonged attention could be affected," says Jonathon Crystal of the University of Georgia at Athens, who led the study. Somebody driving after smoking marijuana, for example, could be capable of executing the required manoeuvres, but could be prone to disastrous lapses in concentration, he warns. Cannabis is known to affect time perception in humans. "A minute can seem like an hour," says Roger Pertwee, who studies the drug's effects at the University of Aberdeen. Crystal's team trained rats to distinguish between two-second and eight-second bursts of sound. The rats had levers for "short" and "long", and received food for pressing the right one. The researchers then played bursts of intermediate length, to find the "midpoint" which rats were equally likely to interpret as short or long. Rats given a synthetic cannabinoid - an active component of marijuana - flunked the test. Mistakes included interpreting a pulse as short even if it was longer than the midpoint. The team, whose study appears in Behavioural Brain Research, attributes the inaccuracy to a general lack of concentration rather than an inability to judge time at all, because the average midpoint did not change. "You have to focus your attention or you lose track of time," Crystal explains.
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