…FDA Cautions Against It (click link for Iowa Public Radio story on cannabis use by pregnant women).
Studies show more women in the US are using cannabis during pregnancy. In 2009, when I was first becoming an activist, the Iowa Board of Pharmacy heard testimony on medical cannabis users in Jamaica who were pregnant. The study author, former Iowa School of Nursing Dean Melanie Dreher, testified that marijuana use showed not only no adverse outcomes in children, but that they were healthier than non-cannabis using mothers children. This was the longest longitudinal study ever done on cannabis and pregnancy.
I was going to link to her testimony from 2009, but I Find this article from September 2019 to be more interesting and also more advanced in the discussion. Check this out: UNDARK: To Justify Using Weed, Some Pregnant Women Cling to an Old and Dubious Study:
She studied men, who worked cutting sugar cane and believed ganja made them more productive, and school children, whose mothers gave them ganja tea to help them focus, enhance their health, and improve their strength and stamina. Finally, with funding from the March of Dimes—a U.S. nonprofit organization that aims to improve health outcomes for babies—and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she turned her attention to cannabis use in pregnancy among Jamaican women.
Dreher and colleagues asked local midwives to help recruit pregnant women, some who smoked cannabis and some who didn’t. The researchers routinely visited the study subjects in their communities, which allowed them to observe and gain their trust, and that gave them a more accurate estimate of how much cannabis the expectant mothers were using than a survey administered in a clinic might yield, Dreher said.
The study included 24 newborns exposed prenatally to cannabis and 20 unexposed. At three days old, there were no detectable differences in their behavior, but at 30 days, the cannabis-exposed babies were less irritable, more stable, and had better reflexes. Those born to the 10 heaviest cannabis users, who averaged more than three joints per day, scored even higher. “The heavily exposed neonates were more socially responsive and were more autonomically stable at 30 days than their matched counterparts. The quality of their alertness was higher; their motor and autonomic systems were more robust; they were less irritable… and were judged to be more rewarding for caregivers than the neonates of non-using mothers,” reported the study, published in 1994 in the journal Pediatrics.
At the time, those intriguing results garnered little attention, “not a peep from the medical community,” said Dreher, now retired from a dual career in anthropology and nursing education, most recently as dean of Rush University College of Nursing in Chicago. “It’s not until now, 25 years later, that people are paying attention to that study,” she added. Dreher’s paper currently sits in the 99th percentile of research outputs based on the volume of attention it has received online, as ranked by the Altmetric Attention Score. Most of that attention comes from Facebook and Twitter shares by people promoting the safety of cannabis in pregnancy, not from doctors or researchers discussing the science. Her work hasn’t been taken seriously by the medical community, Dreher said, but “it was taken seriously by women who used it regularly and felt that they had been justified.”
“The ‘Jamaica study’ continues to garner fame despite being one small study in a relatively large pool of evidence,” said Torri Metz, associate professor of maternal fetal medicine at University of Utah Health. “Anybody could find a single study that sort of supports what they would like to say, but really, we need to look at all of the studies that are out there.”
Dreher makes no claim that cannabis is good for babies, nor does she encourage pregnant women to use it. Though the cannabis-exposed babies scored higher on some measures in her study, it didn’t show that cannabis caused these better scores. In fact, the mothers who used the most cannabis also had more education, more financial independence, and fewer other children to care for, which likely allowed them to provide a more nourishing environment for their newborns. While it’s reassuring that their cannabis use didn’t seem to compromise infant development, it’s also possible that subtle effects of cannabis were masked by these advantages. In another paper published in 1988, Dreher and coauthors wrote, “Caution should be taken in making generalizations to other cultures where characteristics of marijuana users may not be similar.”
Yet online conversations between expecting parents don’t reflect this caution. Dreher’s study is shared on Reddit, Facebook, and pregnancy sites like BabyCenter.com as evidence of safety of cannabis in pregnancy. Kaycee Lei Cuesta, who writes The Cannavist Mom blog with 34,000 Facebook followers, described it in a 2017 post as “some of the best and only work on [the] topic of cannabis using during pregnancy.” It’s mentioned in a New York Times piece about women who used cannabis in pregnancy as providing comfort to one of them about her choice. Likewise, when I talked to mothers who had used cannabis while pregnant, most mentioned Dreher’s study by name, without prompting, and said that it significantly impacted their decision.
Online narratives about Dreher’s study frequently mention that the National Institute on Drug Abuse cut off her funding when her results didn’t show problems with cannabis use. Dreher said this is true, and she’s told the same account in interviews on podcasts like Drug Truth Network and The Medical Pot Guide. “That alone speaks volumes,” wrote Keira Fae Sumimoto in a 2018 post on her blog, Cannabis & Motherhood. The idea that the government and medical community don’t want people to know about this study often surfaces online. For example, when the InfantRisk Center at Texas Tech University reviewed the literature on this topic without mentioning Dreher’s research, the center was accused of bias and fear-mongering. Several commenters posted links to Dreher’s paper, with one claiming that her study “calls BS” on the center’s findings.
Women wrestling with this decision are likely to encounter these conflicting online narratives. In a 2016 study, women who used cannabis while pregnant said they wanted to know more about how cannabis might affect their babies, but their doctors didn’t offer helpful information. “They’re really not discussing it with their obstetric providers or midwives or obstetricians, but really hearing anecdotes from friends and families and searching online,” said lead author Marian Jarlenski, assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
“We are saying this again and again: Those that say cannabis is safe during pregnancy do not really know. Those that say it is not [safe] do not know either,” Tiemeier said. It’s a scientific debate that can’t be resolved with the results of one study, be it a tiny one in rural Jamaica or a large one in a modern Dutch city.
Read the full article here at UNDARK.
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