The Evidence Keeps Piling Up...

... That pot is actually good for you.

A French study published in the Journal of Neuroscience is yet another interesting addition to the mounds of evidence that marijuana is not the boogeyman your parents (and the FDA and DEA and the baby Jesus) want you to believe.

The study bears the hefty title "Nonpsychoactive Cannabidiol Prevents Prion Accumulation and Protects Neurons against Prion Toxicity." Let's break this down a little bit.

Cannabidiol is the primary nonpsychoactive compound in cannabis. Prions are incredibly weird little things that are currently freaking out the scientific establishment. Here's one definition:

[prion diseases are] infectious agents which (almost certainly) do not have a nucleic acid genome. It seems that a protein alone is the infectious agent. The infectious agent has been called a prion. A prion has been defined as "small proteinaceous infectious particles which resist inactivation by procedures that modify nucleic acids". The discovery that proteins alone can transmit an infectious disease has come as a considerable surprise to the scientific community. Prion diseases are often called spongiform encephalopathies because of the post mortem appearance of the brain with large vacuoles in the cortex and cerebellum. Probably most mammalian species develop these diseases.

The most commonly known prion disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka Mad Cow Disease.

I'm not Thirtyseven's bitch or anything, because I often link to his stuff, but goddamn, he's often right on the same track as I am. Look for a new article on prions from him soon, there's a brief mention in this post. This is a subject I may revisit at some point as well, because this shit is scary. Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that cannabidiol, a primary chemical ingredient in marijuana, has been shown in scientific testing to help prevent against scary fuck-off diseases that eat holes in your brain.

So can we please give the cows some goddamn weed now?