Parkinson’s and Me, Part 2
Marijuana & Pesticides: The Long Road to Parkinson’s?
It was 1986 — At least 13 years before I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
I was a year into recovery from an addiction to marijuana that was hefty enough that I needed help from the 12-Step programs — Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
When something seriously worries me, the first thing I do is investigate it. I was working for a university scientist at the time. I went right to the library there and looked up whatever I could find about marijuana. We were still in the dark ages in terms of information; the digital revolution had not yet happened.
Also the early days of marijuana research. Long- and short-term studies were being held up by government officials — afraid of public outcry. Only a select few researchers had been awarded funding to help them pursue the answers to questions about marijuana, although they were becoming more pressing — use and abuse of the drug had been spreading like wildfire. Promoted by the counter culture and the growing music scene, “pot” was showing up everywhere.
Then, in 1990, with the discovery of the THC receptor by a research team in Jerusalem, the investigations really took off.
But sitting in that library, with the heightened anxiety of only a year in recovery, I was freaking out. I found that what I suspected and feared was confirmed.
First, I ran across a study where the researchers treated a group of rats (or mice) with two pesticides, one of which was Paraquat. The unlucky rodents exhibited symptoms of Parkinsonism. I had already heard about Paraquat; it was in the news during the years that Nancy Reagan was promoting her Just Say No program, which involved, among other things, arranging for US helicopters to spray the Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, and that was what I was smoking — the cheap weed from Mexico. Leave it to the Republicans to dream up an anti-drug policy that poisons drug users.
I focused on the worst possible outcome: I imagined hordes of marijuana smokers, my generation, coming down with cancer and all sorts of lung diseases. I remembered with chagrin that when I first heard about the spraying of the Mexican marijuana fields, my reaction at the time was not to question the wisdom of using the drug. Instead, I told myself if I limited my use to high-priced weed it meant it would be “pure” — free of carcinogens and other harmful additives.
I ended up buying something called Mendocino Gold, said to carry levels of THC a.s high as 14%. Evidently, law enforcement in Mendocino County (and points North) eventually attempted to control or eradicate the burgeoning marijuana fields by spraying them with pesticides from the air. Then later, the drug was made legal and growers were welcomed with open arms by county officials eager to divert to public projects some of the massive influx of money pouring into the region.
A whole generation of young people turning on, tuning in, and dropping out…
The second thing I learned that afternoon in the university’s library, was helpful for me on a personal level. It was in an essay written by a 19th-century scientist who was an early investigator of the drug. He was writing to researchers of the future. He urged them to focus on how “it makes you feel like things are not going to work out.”
That was exactly how smoking marijuana had begun to make me feel.
I’d realized the impact of marijuana was greater than “making me high.” It was changing my attitude and way of thinking. I was both relieved and upset by this revelation. Sitting in AA meetings, I was also — with difficulty — realizing the impact of growing up in a family steeped in functional alcoholism.
I had been hearing people in AA and Narcotics Anonymous talk about how much drugs had affected their lives. Sitting in meetings, listening to people tell their stories, I worried that I “didn’t really belong” because marijuana was considered such a “light-weight” drug. I stopped smoking weed abruptly and fell into what I think was a real depression. I cried a great deal. I realized my pot use had reinforced a depressed and draining cynicism, and withdrawal increased my depressive thinking. It was not easy.
15 years later, when I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I was convinced that it had been caused by my use of marijuana, and I had only myself to blame for it. Although it certainly crossed my mind that growing up in Venezuela might have been the culprit.
I was raised in Venezuela, on the ground floor, so to speak, of what was to become the booming oil business, an environment with gas flares scattered liberally around. Living in the oil camps, we were exposed to gas flares, to the leaks and spills that spewed oil from passing freighters, leaving a trail of oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waves, then deposited on the beaches reserved for the American families (and therefore deemed safe).
The air itself was perfumed by the gigantic refinery nearby, whistling and screeching as they belched effluent from its towers, like a gassy castle. Given the role played by Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon Mobil) and the other oil companies in the deliberate disintegration of the planet, there were clearly forces operating on a global scale that likely outweighed the effects marijuana may have had on me.
The Parkinson’s diagnosis was terrifying. I remember feeling really scared, frozen with fear.
I have heard that the toxins responsible for Parkinson’s Disease enter your body through the gut and nose, some ten or fifteen years before you are diagnosed on the basis of emerging symptoms. In my case, that would mean Parkinson’s would have started to affect the bacteria in my intestines, as they started to make the long journey to my brain, where they would settle in and begin wreaking the slow havoc that would characterize the presence of the disease
The Big Picture
Interestingly, an article recently appeared in the Guardian (April 7th), that quoted a researcher from the University of Rochester Medical Center, Dr. Ray Dorsey, who was predicting an epidemic of Parkinson’s Disease coming: His way of putting it is “We’re on the tip of a very, very large iceberg”. The article cited a 35% increase in the number of cases in the last ten years, and Dorsey says, “We think over the next 25 years, it will double again.” Parkinson’s is reputedly the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world.
The consensus as to the cause of this surge, according to the Guardian article, is a widely used agricultural pesticide called TSE, also used in industrial degreasing, dry cleaning, shoe polish, carpet cleaners and spookily, it can infiltrate buildings, rising up from the soil under the buildings. Everyone who worked at the famously cutting edge Google Quad Campus in Santa Clara (not to mention the designers) must have been stunned to learn that the EPA notified Google that their workers were inhaling unsafe levels of toxic “vapors” coming up from under their offices.
Reading about the role of pesticides added a new possible route to my illness. My father was an avid gardener, using pesticides liberally, a miracle boon to his garden. I added that to the story I was creating: “How I got Parkinson’s Disease.”
As a psychologist, I know that people tend to blame themselves for any and all illnesses and disasters. I’d developed a long list of possible culprits, all coming back to “it’s my fault” that this happened.
(There was no mention in the article about the historical social context, maybe reflecting a reluctance to interfere with the bonanza represented by the billions of dollars pouring into and out of the expansion of the marijuana industry.)
But why did it matter how I came down with this disease?
