Marijuana harms your Lung System by drying up your fluid metabolism from the level of the Lungs. It damages your Thin Fluids and degenerates your Lungs’ ability to distribute Thin Fluids throughout your entire body. Marijuana coats your Lungs with Hot Poisons, which toxifies them and the rest of your body over time. Marijuana damages your Lung Yin, and with it the foundation of the Yin of the rest of your body. Marijuana radically depletes your Qi, confuses and devitalizes your Immune System and will tend to damage first the most compromised and constitutionally deficient areas of your body and psyche.

Marijuana begins to burn up your Yin the instant you take it. The first level of Yin it attacks is your Lung and Stomach fluids. When your Lung fluids dry up, the effect you feel right away is cottonmouth.

If you smoke marijuana, you might develop some of the same respiratory problems that other smokers do. Marijuana is a lot more resinous than tobacco is. It’s difficult for your Lungs to deal with marijuana resin, even though you might not smoke it in gigantic quantities. There’s a typical kind of chronic cough, wheezing, phlegm and bronchitis that marijuana smokers can work up over time. Other breathing problems can come along with it as well.

Marijuana harms your Lung System by:

This final effect occurs whether you smoke marijuana or ingest it. This is because marijuana’s Hot nature burns up your Yin, beginning with the Thin Fluids of your Stomach and Lung. These Thin Fluids are the basis of all the deeper Yin fluids and functions in your body.

When marijuana burns up your Thin Fluids it affects your general fluid metabolism. Your Lung’s function of dispersing Thin Fluids gets compromised, and patches of fluid become isolated and stagnant, which creates Phlegm. Phlegm in Chinese Medicine is different than what we call phlegm. Phlegm can lodge and foul any of your organs and force them to lose their functions. Most of all, Phlegm distorts your perceptions and removes you from your natural objective feedback cycle with life. We’ll talk more about Phlegm in the section on Shen.

As Marijuna burns up your Lung Yin it also pollutes your Lungs with Hot Toxic Poisons. When this process begins, it takes a tremendous amount of energy from your body to accommodate this new Fiery element into your system. The presence of Marijuana in your body and life will soon begin to damage your Qi, leaving you with a sense of sleepiness and lethargy.

Over time, this process will deplete your Qi to the point that it confuses and compromises your Immune System. Once that happens, marijuana’s Poison will go straight to the most compromised and deficient areas of your constitution and harm the combined functions of all your organs and Shen.

One of the classics of Chinese Medicine, The Golden Mirror, states, “In the beginning of a disease, the state of the Shen is important. This is because if the Shen is strong at the beginning of a disease, the pathogenic factors will not defeat the Upright Qi because it is strong. If the Shen is dull, it shows that the Upright Qi cannot resist pathogenic factors as it is deficient.” This leads us to our next topic, which is damage to the Wei Qi and Immune Function.

If you use marijuana on a regular basis you might develop an immune deficiency on top of your respiratory problems. Chronic marijuana users often come to my clinic with colds, various forms of pneumonia and other infections.

Marijuana’s chronic weakening of your immune system isn’t limited to your respiratory immune function. In the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine , we know that THC increases your chances of developing other kinds of infections as well.Even modern Western Medicine agrees that THC inhibits immune responses.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, we say that marijuana confuses your Wei Qi. Wei Qi grants you immunity from external pathological invasions. It is the Qi that flows along the external surfaces of your body. Marijuana confuses your Wei Qi because:

All of these factors point in a single direction: Marijuana confuses and damages your Wei Qi and Immune Functions.

Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you? Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of marijuana on the lung system.

Marijuana harms your Digestive System by drying up your digestive fluids and your production of appropriate digestive enzymes. It alters the flow of nutrients into and out of your blood stream, creates Pathogenic Heat in your digestion, and confuses the function of your ‘Middle Jiao’, or overall digestive abilities. This level of marijuana intoxication comes when it affects your Digestive System. A large part of marijuana’s direct influence impacts your Stomach and Pancreas. This is what gives you the munchies and is a strong part of your rush. Munchies happen for three main reasons:

The Hot nature of marijuana dries up your digestive fluids. Digestive fluids are the basis of your Thin Fluids and the production of Yin for your entire body. This drying up confuses your Stomach and Pancreas, which throws off the enzymatic processes of your digestion and triggers you to desire food from an illusory digestive Fire. The Fire of the marijuana confuses your Middle Jiao, or digestive function. This compromises the integrity of your Spleen System, which then fails to support your Brain and other organs with adequate nutrition. This is the main factor that gives you a rush. Your Spleen System is striving to keep a balanced flow of food supply to all of your organs in the midst of a wildly shifting psychedelic landscape. Your body will do anything to normalize your Spleen System to get you back in balance. Eating is the quickest way to do it. Your body wants to dilute and antidote marijuana’s Poison. The fastest way to do that is by eating and drinking.

Marijuana can also make you feel thirsty for all the above reasons. That’s another reason you get cottonmouth. You’re feeling how the Marijuana is burning up your Thin Fluids and Yin. Your body is doing what it can to bring you back into a state of balance. Marijuana’s Heat in your digestion is a constant irritant. It throws your entire digestive function off. It also tends to dry out the full length of your digestive tract over time. This slowly compromises the function and movement of your Intestines. Beyond the obvious discomfort of slow-moving Intestines, the slow transit time of digested materials increases the toxification of your whole body. It retards your fresh Yang energy from flourishing and bewilders your Large Intestine’s capacity to maintain its role in your water metabolism. The process I described above is only one of the ways marijuana depletes your Qi. You manufacture Qi from the air you breathe, the food you eat and by transmuting your Jing Sexual Essence into more physically active forms of energy. Your digestion is therefore a very important source of energy for you. The way your digestion functions dictates many of the ambient feelings that run through you as you go through your day. When your digestion gets congested, nothing else seems right. Marijuana’s effect on your digestion happens whether you smoke or eat it. Marijuana affects your Lung and Digestive Systems at nearly the same time. If you smoke it, the effect on your Lungs will be more pronounced. If you eat it, the effect on your digestion will be more pronounced. You will have slightly less Fire to deal with if you eat marijuana rather than smoke it, but the effects go straight to a deeper level of your body when you eat it. Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you?Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of marijuana on the digestive system.

Marijuana slowly poisons your entire body by creating low-level inflammation and filling you with its toxic, Hot Poisonous nature.

Damage from Hot Poison

If you keep taking marijuana, sooner or later you will lose your ability to cope with its Poison. That’s when real physical damage to your body begins. Marijuana’s Heat slowly creeps into every part of you, beginning with your weakest areas first. The effects you feel will vary depending on your sensitivity and susceptibility to damage by Hot Poison.

Unless you caved in to peer pressure when you first experimented with marijuana, there’s probably something about it that you craved on an instinctual level. You believed it would heal you or take you to a new and different place. There’s a powerful part of you that knows how to heal. That part of you knows that marijuana is very powerful medicine.

The difficulty arises when you lose yourself in the moment and forget what you were doing in the first place. Once you’re lost, it’s too easy to slip further and further away from your goal.

Maybe there’s something about the Hot nature of marijuana that is or was nurturing or healing for you on some level. In the long run, though, it’s still going to hurt you if you continue to take it. The chances that marijuana’s nature can balance and benefit your constitution on an ongoing basis are very small. Marijuana’s basic nature is contrary to the healthy and long-lived human condition. The toxic build up of marijuana’s Hot Poison isn’t beneficial for anybody.

When you begin to heat up from using marijuana again and again, its Poisons begin to deposit in the compromised areas of your body. As this toxic build up occurs, the functions of your organs decrease and begin to create toxic waste of their own. This reduced organ function may no longer allow them to clean their waste at normal levels of efficiency, and can lead to a build up of Hot Poisonous caches. The result is a vicious circle that gets more and more toxic until your system finally breaks down.

Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you?Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of Marijuana poison.

Marijuana damages your Blood System by stagnating, heating, depleting and poisoning your 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.

Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you?Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of marijuana on the heart and blood systems.

Marijuana damages your Liver System by congesting your Liver with Hot Poison, heating the Liver up and damaging your Liver Blood.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, one of the main functions of the Liver System is to store the Blood. Storing is a process of resting and rejuvenating the Blood. When your Blood is Hot and Toxic from marijuana's Poisons, it irritates your Liver System and compromises its other functions. As a result, your Liver System gets perplexed and congested, and your Blood burns out over time.

One of the first ways you can tell that marijuana is affecting your Liver System is if you start feeling dizzy and having trouble walking when you're high. When you go beyond the point of bloodshot eyes and your eyes feel like they're buzzing or full of insects then you're in the realm of the Liver System.

Your Liver System is also in charge of the coordination of your thinking processes. Because of this, when marijuana begins to intrude on your Liver System you'll find that it begins to alter your motivations for doing things. The way you think and the ways that you can learn will change as you use marijuana. At first, this can lead you into some very innovative new ways of perceiving your world. But over time the information you have retained will become disordered and useless. Learning new things will become increasingly difficult.

As your Liver Qi becomes more frustrated and befuddled, your Liver Yin and Blood begin to burn up, and you may experience anxiety, panic attacks, headaches and nausea. When your Liver Blood loses its ability to nourish your nervous system, you may begin losing your coordination. If you're a woman, it's easy to monitor marijuana's effects on your Liver Blood by observing your menstrual blood and how you feel around the time of your menstruation. Typical PMS symptoms will appear as your Liver Qi begins to congest. As your Liver Qi gets more congested you may have a rougher pre-menstrual experience. When your Blood heats up, it will affect the quality of your menstrual blood. As marijuana dries out your Blood, it will dry up your menstruation at the same time.

If you're a man, the main things you'll experience as marijuana first encroaches on your Liver Qi are a lack of motivation, coordination and a loss of power in your muscular strength. As your Liver Yin and Blood begin to heat up you'll get irritable.

Your Liver System is the seat of your Hun, or Spiritual Soul. When marijuana damages your Hun, it leads to a great variety of non-physical symptoms. A very important mechanism of how marijuana injures your Hun is seen in MIST.

MIST

Have you noticed an increasing sense of restlessness when you get high? Even if you’re using marijuana to relieve pain, sometimes it might give you a weird feeling of uneasiness. Listen to your body. It’s telling you that something’s wrong. Don’t let the illusion of marijuana keep you from doing anything about it.

The uneasiness you’re feeling means that your Liver Qi is getting baffled and poisoned. The feeling comes from your Liver Qi wanting to get you out of the situation you've put yourself in. Yet marijuana’s grip on your Kidney Qi doesn’t allow you to motivate yourself and move beyond the danger you’re in. The strength of your uneasiness shows you how deeply marijuana is damaging your Liver Yin. The strength of your feeling of helplessness shows you how much the marijuana is claiming your Kidney Qi.

The paradox between the panic and anxiety you’re feeling and it seeming like you can’t do anything about it creates trauma in your nervous system. Trauma reprograms your nervous system in an effort to cope with what’s happening to you. Over time this trauma and the changes it produces in your nervous system creates a syndrome I call MIST, which stands for Marijuana Induced Stress Trauma.

MIST sets up a negative pattern of passivity and helplessness in your nervous system. Neurological research concludes and confirms that our nervous systems modify themselves according to our experiences in life. We adapt on a physical level to have more experiences like the ones we’re already having. This adaptation can either happen in a single, very intense experience, or over time through many small experiences.

Marijuana doesn’t have to do physical damage to your nervous system to leave negative traces on the way it functions. Your nervous system can be physically perfect and malfunction at the same time if a repeated pattern of experience becomes the way you do things. Because of MIST, marijuana conditions you to become passive and helpless in your life experience.

The issue of MIST is a very important one. MIST is one of the main ways that marijuana claims your Hun and your life. Once you understand how damaging MIST is and how it works, you can begin to take back your energy, heal and move on.

I also believe that MIST is a critical issue because it is grossly mismanaged in the medical community. It has become politically correct in some medical circles to pretend that they are experts on the subject of marijuana. They’ll tell you that the feeling of uneasiness you’re having when you get high is “normal.” They’ll say you shouldn’t do anything about it. But your body is telling you otherwise.

Isn't it also “normal” to have an increasing sense of uneasiness if you’re drowning? Just because it’s “normal” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something about it.

These medical people will speak with you in a very matter of fact tone as if they really know what they're talking about. They'll tell you not to take any medicine at that time, not to take any action on behalf of your sanity and to just try to relax, listen to soothing music and make yourself comfortable. Their idea is to divert your attention away from that uncomfortable feeling. But what is your body telling you? Probably to do something like increase your activity levels, go outside, hyperventilate and jump around until you break free from the spell you're under. Something like that is probably what you'll need to do to break out of the long and short-term effects of MIST.

The more you deny your feelings and what your body is telling you to do, the deeper the traumatic split goes into your nervous system. If you do what the medical people tell you to do, you’re training yourself how to split apart, to deny what you know is true and instead obey an external authority that contradicts your own experience. That’s not a healthy direction to go.

Your body and its sensitive feedback mechanisms exist for very good reasons. They are what will heal you and move you forward in life. Please listen to the signals your body is giving you. Listen deeply. If you want to break free from the grip of MIST and get back your Hun and your life, you're going to need to learn what your body wants, how to pay attention to it and train yourself to take immediate positive action in that direction whenever it’s communicating with you.

Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you?Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of marijuana on the liver system.

Marijuana damages your Kidney and Jing Sexual Essence Systems by devastating your Kidney Qi, Yin and Yang, depleting and depolarizing your Jing Sexual Essence and confusing, provoking and exhausting your natural sexual functions.

Every drug has its own nature. It has a unique set of properties that can be described by a very specific curve of benefits and drawbacks. Marijuana’s benefit curve, whether you take it by prescription or otherwise, will at first seem to give you more than it takes. Over time, though, this curve reverses, and it will begin to take more than it gives you. If you’re addicted to marijuana during its taking phase, your high will get weirder and emptier every time you take it. It will also take you longer and longer to recover from it. That's part of the process of developing tolerance for marijuana. It's also when long-term damage begins. Long-term damage is the realm of the Kidney System.

Your Kidney System is responsible for your long-term health. It regulates the enduring cycles your body goes through over the course of your lifetime. By the time marijuana affects the level of your Kidney System, it is altering the course of your life in a serious way.

Many of the systems in you that marijuana affects are unconscious. That’s why it can be difficult to know what's happening to you until it's too late to do anything about it. There are a number of signs, however, that you can watch for to gauge where you are in the process.

You can tell marijuana's beginning to get hold of your Kidney System if you feel like you’re underwater when you're high. Another earmark that marijuana is affecting your Kidney System is that you'll feel fear. The fear can take many forms, but it often comes as paranoia.

When marijuana's beginning to claim your Kidney System you'll experience a loss of memory. This often takes the form of impaired or reduced short-term memory, and impaired or reduced comprehension of what's happening in your world. You'll also lose your ability to listen effectively. Marijuana can so damage your learning and attention skills over time that you may wind up with no ability to get back from the place it's taken you to.

When marijuana first begins to burn up your Kidney Yin it will make things seem hysterically funny to you. As your Kidney Yin gets more depleted, the funniness will end and paranoia will begin. Depending on your constitution, your burning Kidney Yin may leave you feeling speedy or sleepy.

When marijuana is affecting your Kidney System on a more profound level things seem like they’re happening in slow motion. Time seems to go on forever. What's really happening is your perceptions are moving very fast. This is when marijuana is burning up your Jing Sexual Essence. When marijuana's Toxic Heat spends your energy and deep Yin Fluids at this level it creates very substantial damage to your long-term health and wellbeing.

What is Jing Sexual Essence? The Chinese medical classics state that Jing Sexual Essence, Qi and Blood are the physical foundations of your mind and Spirit. Traditional Chinese Medicine views the body as if it's an amazingly intricate alchemical cauldron. This cauldron distills the substances you eat and breathe into concentrated subtle essences. Your body continually refines these essences into higher qualities of matter and energy. Your physiology then uses them to support its different functions. Jing is the highest level of physical refinement in this system.

Jing Sexual Essence is a storehouse for your life potential. Jing is your reserves. It determines the quality of your life experience and possibly even the length of your life as well. You may be trading a portion of your life potential for your relationship with marijuana.

Marijuana’s effects are serious because of how it affects your Jing. Traditional Chinese Medicine views the brain as a repository of Jing and potential. One of marijuana’s qualities is that it moves quickly into your brain and to very specific receptor sites on your core nerve cells. The parts of your brain that have the highest concentration of these receptors are the ones that control your experiences of pleasure, thought, memory, sensation, concentration, time perception and coordination. These are the areas of your brain that get the most poisoned over time, so they’re the ones that will get the most damaged.

When you first get involved with marijuana it doesn’t seem like there’s any harm in it. This is because marijuana burns up your potential before it claims anything you use for critical life functions. Your body does what it can to route marijuana's Poison to non-essential areas of your brain to preserve your life.

After you use marijuana for a while you develop a tolerance for it. This means you need more and more to get high. If you become more tolerant by continuing to use marijuana, a time will come when you won’t get high at all when you take it. You’ll just get more burned out. When you reach this stage you’re deep in the burned out core of your brain, nervous system and Jing Sexual Essence. It means that your Jing has been so charred that the basic alchemy of marijuana doesn’t work in your body any more. There’s nowhere left to go from there. If you're in this situation you desperately need to do something to replenish yourself. If you don't, and you continue to use marijuana, you can do yourself some very serious damage.
The main reason marijuana extinguishes your life force and longevity over time is because of the way it affects your Kidney and Jing Sexual Essence Systems. Marijuana’s very nature induces the aging process.

How does marijuana induce aging? Whenever any organ system in your body is over-working, your Kidney System will get involved to help out. The strain marijuana puts on you drains your Kidney Qi, Yang and Yin. Losing Yin is a big part of the aging process. Losing your Kidney Yin withers you up. Losing your Kidney Yang means losing the genuine Heat you need to maintain life itself. Losing your Kidney Qi means losing the functions of your organs. Marijuana speeds up and intensifies these processes that happen naturally as you age.

Let's compare the effects of marijuana with those of aging:

We already know that marijuana poisons you little by little over time. It creates Heat in your body, dries up your body fluids, Yin and Jing Sexual Essence. It confuses your digestive system, compromises your immune system and reduces your mental and emotional capacity for dealing with life.

The main issues we face as we age are toxification and a rising Fire of inflammation. This Fire creates a loss of fluids, Yin and Jing Sexual Essence. This loss compounds with a reduced digestive capability and less energy in general, which makes it increasingly difficult to thrive in the face of life’s demands.
Marijuana's effects, in terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine, are very similar or identical to the process of aging.

Sex

Some people use marijuana to increase their sense of sexual pleasure. Yet over time marijuana poisons the very centers in your brain that are responsible for your sexual pleasure. This means that as you enjoy the experience in the moment, marijuana is burning up the physical foundation of your sexuality.

During this phase, your erotic sensations get heightened, but only if you’re high. As the marijuana poisons your Liver and Kidney Systems and confuses their functions, your sexual energy will begin to disperse.

Another reason you become sexually aroused when you get high is that your body feels marijuana's age-inducing effect. Your Jing is the physical foundation of your sexual energy. Your body reacts to marijuana’s premature biological aging by protecting your Jing and passing it on to the next generation before you get too old and poisoned to do so.

Your Jing Sexual Essence is the cream of your body’s manufacturing processes. Your body will do everything it can to protect your Jing. If you override your body’s impulse to protect your Jing Sexual Essence, your body will eject it in order to save its integrity.

You may feel hornier for a while as the marijuana depletes your Kidney Yin, but this falsely stoked sexual frenzy will only cause you to lose your Jing more rapidly. Once your Jing Sexual Essence gets depleted past a certain point, it may be very difficult or impossible to get it back. At that point the issue of sex will be one from your past. Marijuana damages the physical basis of your sexual function on every level.

Reproductive and Hormonal Changes

Did you know that marijuana affects people differently according to their gender?
If you’re male, as the marijuana poisons the parts of your brain that control your sex and growth hormones it can decrease your ability to produce Yang energy. It’s easy to tell if you’ve reached that state if you just don’t feel like doing anything, or you’re spaced out a lot of the time and have lost your edge. You're not producing Yang if you only want to have sex when you’re high. If you continue using marijuana, over time your testosterone levels will continue to drop, and so will your ability to produce healthy mature sperm.

Sperm is one of the most critical elements of your Jing. If you lose your ability to produce sperm, you’ll lose your ability to recycle it back into your body and nourish yourself with it. In terms of Western Medicine, your testosterone is an important hormone that plays a critical role in many of your body's functions. When your testosterone levels go down, so do your other functions. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, your sperm itself has similar functions.

Although marijuana's reducing your sperm count and retarding your sperm’s mobility might not affect your fertility, Traditional Chinese Medicine views this damage to your sperm as part of the greater destruction marijuana does to your Yang energy. Damaged Yang and Jing Sexual Essence will influence the quality of your offspring.

Marijuana affects women differently. As it poisons the part of your brain that controls your sex and growth hormones, marijuana increases your Yang energy and burns up your Yin at the same time. You'll become more masculine on physical, emotional and mental levels. Marijuana's masculinizing effect on women can easily affect your menstrual cycle and your ability to use your own natural hormones in daily life. Marijuana's side effect of changing your menstrual cycle is reversible. It may take several months of not using marijuana before your cycle becomes normal again if you’re not doing something to balance yourself from the marijuana.

Your hormones are another important part of your Jing Sexual Essence. Through the eyes of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the fact that Marijuana affects your hormones signals that it’s doing the deepest possible damage to your body. We say that it depolarizes your Jing. This is because much of the power of your Jing comes from its polarity. A strong polarization of your retained Jing is the foundation of your physical energy. For the sake of your health and longevity, you want to keep your Jing polarized for as long as possible.

Marijuana alters your Kidney and Jing Sexual Essence Systems in ways that are detrimental to your health.

If you're taking marijuana and you do get pregnant, please remember that marijuana crosses the placenta. The placenta is a network of blood vessels your baby uses to connect with your blood stream to nourish itself. That means when you get stoned, your baby does, too.

How much worse is it for your baby to get stoned while it's developing inside you? Way worse. Why? Because this is the time your child is creating its body. If the foundations of your child's body get poisoned while it's still inside you, the root of all its body systems will be damaged from the beginning of its life.

Although there’s no direct evidence that marijuana causes chromosome damage, using while you’re pregnant can give your child developmental damage. This can happen on both mental and physical levels. Studies have shown that if you use marijuana during your pregnancy your baby will be smaller than if you didn’t. Smaller babies develop more health problems in general.

If you’re nursing and using marijuana, you’re infusing marijuana’s Hot Poison right into your breast milk and into your baby. Research has shown that if you use marijuana during your baby’s first month of breastfeeding, it can impair your baby’s motor development. This can retard it for its entire life.

If you're pregnant or have recently given birth and are still breastfeeding, marijuana affects the development of your baby in negative ways. Your child will suffer from what you're doing, possibly for his or her whole life.

This means that if your parents used marijuana during your growth and development, it has impacted you in some very important ways.

If you’re using marijuana as you come into puberty, the potential long-term effects from the hormonal changes marijuana creates on you are much more dramatic. That's because this is the time your reproductive system is ripening and coming into flower. If your reproductive system gets damaged or compromised from the beginning of its development and maturation, it can take you a lot of time and energy to repair yourself, if it’s possible at all

Want to know more about how Marijuana affects you?Click here to learn about the non-physical effects of marijuana on the kidney and jing sexual essence systems.

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Marijuana damages your Shen, or Spirit, by depleting and drying out your Blood and memory. It alters both the structure and function of your brain and nervous system. Marijuana develops a parasitic relationship with you. It creates Phlegm that ‘Mists’ your orifices, which confuses and confounds your perceptions in an ever-degrading negative feedback loop.

Shen means Spirit. Although we tend to think of Spirit as being something abstract and intangible, for practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine it is the exact opposite. Shen is your quality of presence, sincerity and awareness. Each of your organs has its own Shen. Each of them combines with the others to create your overall Shen. The presence of Shen is critical for health. We consider any condition that lacks Shen or that harms the Shen to be very serious.

Marijuana’s psychoactive nature puts a heavy strain on your Blood and nervous systems because it pushes you to go into non-physical and hyper-physical realms of perception. This taxes your Blood, because your Blood does everything it can to support your normal perceptions. Objective, clear perceptions come from a healthy and thriving Shen.

Marijuana’s Hot and Dry nature dries up the moistening and nourishing qualities of your Blood. One of the functions of Blood according to the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine is to store memory. Marijuana’s drying effect on your Blood is one reason it destroys your memory. The end result of this drying is that your damaged and depleted Blood loses its ability to nourish the normal functions of your organs. Lowered organ function means less Shen. When your Blood loses its capacity to nourish, your Shen has nowhere to reside.

Shen damage is the final product of burning out. You burn out because of two things:

1. Getting high has used up the nutritional basis in your body for getting high. This happens long before the next stage, which is:
   
   
2. Physical damage to your body. Any activity you do has specific nutritional requirements. Getting high is no exception. The more you partake of marijuana, the heavier demand you will have for the substances your body needs to get high. If those substances are no longer present in your Blood, your body will begin to search for them from other places in your body. As time goes on, your body will scour itself for all available materials, which means that those same materials won’t be available for your other normal physiological processes. The more you get high while you’re in this phase, the more wear and tear you’ll put on yourself.