Marijuana
damages your Blood System by stagnating, heating, depleting and poisoning
the Blood.
Chapter 18 of the Chinese Medical classic Ling Shu says, "The Stomach
is in the Middle Burner. It opens into the Upper Burner, receives Qi,
excretes the dregs, evaporates the fluids and transforms them into a refined
essence. This pours upwards into the Lungs and is transformed into Blood.”
And later, “The Blood is the foundation of the Mind and Spirit.”
Marijuana burns up the first two stages of your Blood production that
involve the Upper and Middle Burners. It devastates your ongoing foundation
for building Blood by using energy from the world around you. In other
words, marijuana cuts you off from getting nourished by life.
Blood deficiency in Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn’t just mean
you’re low on Iron. It means that the nutritional status of your
Blood is low. It may also mean that your Blood’s ability to carry
nutrition has been compromised or damaged.
What does ‘The Blood is the foundation of the Mind and Spirit’
mean? In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Blood System contains memory,
and many other mental and psychological elements. It supports many of
the higher functions of your mind, thinking, perceptions and Shen, or
Spirit. When your Blood quality goes down, so does your capacity to perform
any of these tasks.
Marijuana doesn’t just burn up your ability to produce Blood. It
also burns up your Blood itself with its Fire. The quality of the high
and the expansion, compression and alteration of your consciousness put
a tremendous strain on the mental and psychic capacities of your Blood.
Blood is a deep stage of Yin. The Fire of marijuana burns it up.
With your Blood turning into a crispy blackened powder right in your veins,
what effect is that going to have on the rest of you? Because much of
the Blood and Heart Systems in Traditional Chinese Medicine have to do
with mental, emotional and psychic states, we’ll cover those issues
in the section on the non-physical effects of marijuana.
What about the physical level? Your skin is a major organ of elimination.
Your body does whatever it can to dispel marijuana’s Poisons from
your Blood, and the Hot Poison can easily show up on your skin in the
form of pimples, rashes and irritations. Traditional Chinese Medicine
views these factors as evidence of marijuana’s poison damaging your
Blood. As the Heat from the Poison intensifies, it will begin to affect
your organs, particularly your Heart System, because it is so closely
associated with the Blood.
The Hot nature of marijuana can increase your heart rate and confuse the
functions of your small vessels and capillaries. The most obvious manifestation
of this Heat happens when you get bloodshot eyes when you’re high.
Oddly enough, marijuana reduces blood flow to your brain at the same time
it gives you red eyes. Both of these symptoms come from the marijuana
confusing the function of the Spleen and the Middle Jiao, which control
the small vessels.
Because marijuana can increase your heart rate and it can confuse your
lung functions, it can throw off the subtle natural rhythm between your
Heart and Lung Systems. This altered rhythm can bewilder your Zhong Qi,
or Ancestral Qi. The confusion often turns into a vicious cycle where
the Zhong Qi fails to infuse your Blood properly, which leads to alterations
in your memory and true perceptions, which leads to retardation of your
Shen, or Spirit. Disturbed Shen leads to further Blood damage, which in
turn fails to nourish your Heart System, which then fails to manage your
Blood properly, and so on.
