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by Adam Heimlich "It won't make me go schizo, will it?" In the movie Animal House, a young fraternity pledge wants to know if trying marijuana just once will drive him stark, raving mad. The answer is easy: no way. It's indisputable — a single experiment is completely safe. Of course, if everyone tried marijuana once and never smoked it again, pot wouldn't be much of an issue, and you wouldn't be reading about it right now. Most likely, you weren't quite satisfied with the lab conditions or investigative procedures of that first trial run, necessitating that your experiment with marijuana be performed again and again over a period of several years. Such are the ways of science. As one question is settled, others are inevitably raised. But to ask what's likely to result, healthwise, from sporadic, habitual or (God forbid) constant pot smoking is to swing a mighty uppercut at a particularly sticky tar baby. You'll probably remember why, if you cast your mind back to a college lesson on research methods. It's that insidious problem of bias. Lab experiments are funded, designed, conducted, and interpreted by human beings. And the biological and psychological effects of marijuana are simply too controversial to be approached even-handedly at every stage. The maze of conflicting data emanating from media, government, medical, and counterculture sources incontrovertibly proves one thing — our culture is flatly unable to reach a bottom-line verdict on pot and let it rest. Summarizing the results of recent marijuana research is like condensing a plot synopsis from a cyclical, epic melodrama. Typically, research funded by your tax dollars discovers some possible marijuana harm. For example, a 1985 study found that THC, the "active ingredient" of the cannabis plant, weakened the immune system of laboratory mice, thus increasing their risk of herpes infection. The media inevitably goes hog wild with the story, in this case suggesting that smoking pot will directly cause you to develop nasty sores on your private parts. Eventually, critics of marijuana laws weigh in with any number of troubling observations that call the scare story into question. In our 1985 example, some of the unlucky lab animals were pre-primed with up to 1000 times the effective dose of THC. Yowsa. In other research, massive doses of synthetic THC (more than you could ever sit down and smoke, tough guy) have been found to cause not only impairment of the immune system, but also brain-cell damage, physical addiction, and temporary dysfunction of sex hormones. But the brain-cell findings were decisively repudiated in the early '90s, under far better lab conditions than had been used in the early experiments. Neither physical addiction nor sex trouble has stood up to repeated experiments on lab animals. (And that's not for lack of trying. The US. Institute for Drug Abuse's 1990 budget for marijuana research was $26 million, an overwhelming portion of which went to experiments on animals. Considering the vast number of humans happy to volunteer as guinea pigs in marijuana research, it makes sense to question whether such mouse-abusing reefer madness has anything to do with you.) PAGE ONE -- PAGE TWO -- PAGE THREE -- PAGE FOUR