Throwback Thursday: In 1979, NOAA Studies Pot Smoking in Scuba Divers
In 1979, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent $6,000 — $24,529 in 2022 — to see if smoking pot had a bad effect on scuba divers.
This spending earned the unit of the Department of Commerce a Golden Fleece award from Sen. William Proxmire.
Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
While the spending wasn’t particularly high, one might wonder if the people who awarded this funding were.
The money was part of a $726,000 federal grant to the University of Hawaii, looking into “human performance in the sea,” Proxmire’s announcement said.
“Ten pot-smoking men … aged 21 to 28 were recruited from a large class at the university,” the senator said when awarding the tongue-in-cheek honor. The researchers looked at “the effects of marijuana smoking after one or two-hour exposures to both mildly cold water and cold air were undertaken.”
The men were immersed in the water for an hour, with only their head above water.
“This was done three times, each on a separate day with a day in between, after smoking pot, after smoking a placebo and after no smoking at all,” Proxmire described the research.
Similar experiments were performed, lasting two hours. The men wore only bathing suits and were connected to temperature gauges on nine places on their bodies and researchers took tests with the men holding their breaths.
They found that core body temperature wasn’t affected by the marijuana, but there were “significant losses of body heat, elevated heart action and shivering after smoking pot,” Proxmire said.
“Marijuana did not produce simple hypothermia during cold exposure at rest,” the study found. “However, the consequences of tachycardia … may be consequential.”
This finding upset Promxire, who said, “In my view, the government was at sea on this one. What the study tells us is that if you smoke pot, don’t go swimming, scuba diving or mountain climbing.”
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