I bet youve got opinions about marijuana; everybody does.

I bet youve got opinions about marijuana; everybody does.

But I also bet you dont have much knowledge about it; few of us do.

How addictive is dope? Does it have health benefits and if so, which ones, and in what context? How about health drawbacks, physical or mental?

I dont know and neither do you, and no wonder. The effects of bogarting that joint (to use terminology from my youth) can be tough to pin down; thats true even for a man who has done at least as much of that pinning-down as anybody in New Hampshire.

When youre talking about smoked marijuana, its not easy to do good research. Its tough to interpret. Its tough to run the studies. Its tough to have a placebo. Its tough to get people in your studies that arent already smoking marijuana. Its tough to try to dose it, said Alan Budney, a professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, who has written lots of papers about cannabis use disorders in adults and adolescents.

But New Hampshire is ramping up to allow medical marijuana, so it behooves us as residents of the state to know more.

Happily, Budneys going to help us learn.

He is one of two panelists who will answer all your questions about the science of marijuana at Science Cafe New Hampshire in Nashua, a week from Wednesday, Sept. 17. Stacy Gruber, director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core at McLean Hospitals Brain Imaging Center in Cambridge, will also be there; her lab has done a slew of research into the results of substance use and abuse, especially cannabis.

As always, I will moderate the free, two-hour session, which starts at 6 p.m. at Killarneys Irish Pub.

Read more here:
Want to know more about marijuana? Science cafes (yes, plural) to the rescue