POT CAUSES POT BELLIES

I read in this morning’s paper a USA TODAY article titled STONED AND STARVING? HERE’S WHAT FUELS YOUR FEEDING FRENZY, reporting on a finding about “the insatiable hunger that strikes marijuana users.” According to the article, scientists at Yale University School of Medicine have identified brain cell circuits called POMC neurons which, under the influence of pot, switch from signaling “Don’t eat” to “Eat.” It seems that when researchers dosed mice with an imitation marijuana chemical, they (the mice, not the researchers) gorged on 3 or 4 times their normal amount of food.

This is certainly welcome news to expansion-challenged men and women who are sick and tired of being accused of lacking the willpower to curb their appetites. Now, like a drunk driver who denies liability for crashing into a building such as that all-you-can-eat restaurant gluttons often patronize (because alcohol rendered him not responsible for his actions), you too may claim no responsibility for being unable to stop shoveling food into your mouth — you can claim to be a pot head (of which your mouth happens to be a part). Naturally, if you live in a state where marijuana is legal, all the better.

Of course, being neither a fat head nor a pot head, I take but a passing interest in the above report, by way of passing said news on to those of you for whom the following poem may suggest the need to defend your, shall we say, appetites:

JUST DESSERTS

One day I looked down at my tum-tum,
And found, to my great chagrin,
That in place of what was my tum-tum
Was a blob of fat with skin.

“How could this have happened?” I wailed —
But I knew the answer well….
For my will power had come up short,
And my tum-tum had gone to hell.