Good Mother Who Needs to Get Stoned

Dear Good Mother,

You have been making some good decisions. You are not taking drugs that might affect your baby, and you are not taking drugs that might keep you from taking good care of your baby. You also have good scientific intuition -- you understand that the drugs that you take wind up in your breast milk and in your baby. For those without your good intuition, there is an easy rule of thumb: Anything that gets into your brain gets into your breast milk, and into your baby and his or her brain. This includes pretty much every drug you might take for fun -- alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, heroin and of course the THC in your beloved pot.

You also seem to understand that the THC in the pot will stay in your breast milk for a long time. It takes as many as eight days for 90 percent of the THC from one joint to leave your body, so a one-time fling would probably leave a modest amount of THC in your breast milk for at least a few days.

The big question is what the pot is going to do when it gets into your baby's brain. Here, there is a limit to what science can tell you. The simple version of the story is this: We know that a lot of THC is bad for babies, but we cannot tell you if there is a low amount that is safe. After birth, neurons are still being born and forming connections with one another. We have learned recently that a very brief exposure to alcohol during this period in rats damages specific places in the developing brain, leaving the animals impaired for life. So we are fairly sure that exposing a newborn baby to some drugs, even for a brief period, can be harmful. But there is just no scientific data about exposure to low levels of pot during the newborn period. Science so far has no answers here.

To be safe, we recommend that you abstain from pot as long as you are breast-feeding.

Buzzed appears every Wednesday in Salon Health. Do you have a question? E-mail us at buzzed@salon.com.