Today, people have a general knowledge on the effects of taking in recreational drugs. Well, in the days when society had no clue, experiments were carried out by curious scientists. We encountered the list of the top five recreational drugs experiment. Check out the list in the full article.

Scientists have come up with a new drug composed of chemicals found in weed and sea urchin eggs. The new drug, a hybrid of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive agent found in weed, and anandamide, the euphoria-causing chemical found in sea urchin eggs, has so far proven to be a powerful painkiller. The scientists have so far declined to comment on the possible recreational uses of this new drug.

Initial findings in a study conducted by Harvard university researchers have shown that Marijuana compound tetra hydrocannabinol may be useful in fighting lung cancer in humans.

That doesn't mean you can smoke weed like mad in an insane effort to save your lungs. Smoking pot is still very dangerous and therefore must not be mistaken as a healthy habit. However, the study does prove that some of its components can be applied in treating cancer patients.

Scientists monitoring the effect of the compound on tumors have shown that it actually impedes growth by half. That means lesions will be more easily manageable. Also, cases of malignant cancer have been observed and THC seems to be helping stop the spread of the dreaded disease in the body.

"I find it fascinating, wondering if the reasons we're not seeing this spike is that THC inhibits lung cancer cells," says Dr. Len Horowitz of the Lenox Hill hospital in  New York. "It would be very ironic, although you certainly wouldn't tell somebody who smoked cigarettes to add marijuana," she adds.

On a side note, the research teams also reported some other new treatments possible for cancer patients. They're also experimenting with virus genes that attack cancer cells while ignoring healthy ones altogether. Both the marijuana and virus treatment concepts are still in early experimental stages but the findings have showed promise so far.

A vast study conducted by UCLA produced surprising results - smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The leader of the UCLA team, Dr. Donald Tashkin, said that they "hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer and that the association would be more positive with heavier use...What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Earlier works have found out that marijuana contain cancer-causing chemicals, potentially as harmful as those in tobacco. But they also found out that it also contains the chemical THC, which may kill aging cell and keep them from becoming cancerous.

The study involved 1,200 people in the L.A. area who had lung, neck, or head cancer, and another 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex, and neighborhood. The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older folks were generally not exposed to marijuana use during their youth.

The group was then asked about their lifetime use of weed, cigarettes, and alcohol. Tashkin and his team found out that the very heavy marijuana users (who lit up more than 22,000 times) showed no increased incidence of lung, neck, or head cancer. When asked to explain why other studies found links between marijuana use and cancer, he mentions that most of these previous studies used smaller human studies and lab animals.

If you're naturally prone to forgetting, then you should all the more stay away from Marijuana. That's because scientists may have already found the reason why weed impairs memory.

With the help of them ever-friendly lab rats, Neuroscientists at Rutgers University have found that the weed's active ingredient, THC, actually disrupts the hippocampus activity, that brain area linked to memory. Putting the rats under a standard memory test where they had to go through a maze in order to get water, with THC injected in them, they apparently became more prone to and actually committed more mistakes. Although there was no difference on how often the cells fired nerve impulses, it was the timing that was affected, as it got erratic.

Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki compared it to having an orchestra where the musicians are deafened and perhaps blindfolded. While they could still play their own pieces, it was without any feedback from the other instruments played by other musicians or the conductor. "What is missing is the temporal coordination."

What this suggests is that memory formation is crucially dependent on synchronized brain cell activity. Furthermore, THC impairs memory precisely by disrupting this set synchronized activity.

On the brighter side of things, however, there's also the suggestion that the way THC disrupts the synchronized brain cell activity could help fight epileptic seizures. The thing with seizures is that the brain activity becomes abnormally synchronized. So therefore, the idea is that THC's disruptive effect might actually temper down this abnormally synchronized activity. Then again, further studies still have to be conducted in order for that theory to be conclusive.

If you want to see the report on the findings, check out the December issue of the journal of Nature Neuroscience.

Err...what's the findings about again?