Hacker News Reader

Comment by pil4rin | Hacker News Reader

Shame on Ars for this clickbait trash- with "In mice at least, although humans might want to be cautious." as a subtitle it is hard to take the rest of the article seriously. Then you find out they were injecting mice with some unspecified amount of THC within Saline solution (please correct me if there is a specified amount, but I had to dig to find this at http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/10/09/1514962112.DCSu...)

"THC (THC Pharm) was diluted in 0.9% NaCl (saline) solution containing 3% (vol/vol) DMSO and 2% (vol/vol) Tween-80 and administered intraperitoneally (i.p.) at a final dose of 3 mg/kg to pregnant females for 5 consecutive days, from E12.5 to E16.5. Control mice were injected with vehicle solution."

This will be on Fox news within a week, and when it is- they will monger fear in older generations (those who typically control laws by either voting or creating bills) that are too lazy to research and come to their own conclusions.

View on HN

A few of the comments on the Ars article are stating the dosage of the THC was given at 3mg/kg- but the word "dilution" along with "intraperitoneally" lets us know it was delivered via liquid injection into the gut directly. Are we sure the amount of THC injected was 3mg per kg of body weight, or was that the diluted solution (of which there was no total liquid measurement for).

This decent question asked within comments:

"Jesus, that dose. 3 mg/kg, An average mouse is 0.0192~ kg if the googles are right. A dose of edibles around 10mg for a 68kg~ (150lb) human will result in a pretty faded human, so that works out to... mm.. 0.147mg/kg if I did the math right.

So the dose being tested here is literally 20 times higher than the average dose a human will ingest. I don't know a single person who could eat 3 pot brownies a day, let alone 20. I'd be willing to wager a lot of money on 20 pot brownies a day, every day, for any length of time would be enough to cause negative health effects!

Silly question - why don't they titrate up? The amount used in this study is a massive, massive dose beyond what even a hardcore recreational user would smoke on a daily basis."-TK

Biologists routinely test with larger concentrations in order to make the effect more visible. Sometimes this creates a new effect where you overwhelm a process. Sometimes it just shortens the test and saves the lives of a lot of mice.

If you are a programmer, think of it as stress testing. I'm testing a concurrent memory allocator right now that I suspect sometimes corrupts itself. I'm hitting with an insane barrage of allocation and deallocation calls, way more than any recreational software user would ever do, trying to provoke it into failing. So far, no luck, but if I can get a failure I will have saved a great deal of time over testing it with normal call rates. On the other hand, if I tested it by just doing an insane number of allocations, I would provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use (out of memory).

provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use

and so ... why bother? (wrt biology, not your programming equivalent)

You have to study the failure and the mechanism that leads to it. Then hopefully you can tell which sort you have.

The difference is your test case scenarios will not result in any policy change that could potentially lead to throwing a person in prison for an unspecified duration.

The irresponsibility shown by this, and other news outlets, allows for (potentially willfully) ignorant candidates and uninformed individuals who want to perpetuate the narrative of "Reefer madness" to do so.

The results are not conclusive regarding any human interaction, but the article states "But at a bare minimum, these findings suggest we should be avoiding recreational cannabis use during pregnancy. ". This was a clinical trial with mice, dealing with a sensitive public issue. Ars fueling the media fire by not underlining the usage of an extreme amount of the underlying chemical does nothing for our overall public health and wellness, but does (possibly unintentionally) exacerbate the drug legality discussion around the world.

Sure ... if I found eating 60 apples per day for 2 weeks isn't a good idea, I'm not in the right to declare apples as a terrible food to avoid.

It depends, did your stomach rupture in an Alienesque scene? If so it might be specifically related to the quantity.

Did you see increased cancer incidence (granted that would be a longer study)? You might have been eating apples treated with daminozide (aka Alar, out of use in the US since 1989 but likely caused a number of cancers before then). Your larger doses exposed a rare but real effect.

The "Alar Scare" is a good example of elevated dose testing. It possibly does cause cancer, but the extreme elevated doses at which it was tested in the '80s probably exaggerated the effect.

A similar study was done on chimps in the late 50's. Chimps were setup with a "oxygen mask" where, instead of oxygen, marijuana smoke was present. Ultimately they reported that the marijuana smoke killed the chimps rather than asphyxiation.

Thank you for posting context where it lacks. I've thought that site has had some, well, issues for a while. Mostly when they decided it'd be a great "scoop" to go deep into their forum archives for anything and everything Snowden had said there. While it was within their rights, and an interesting story as a concpet, the execution was so tabloid and tone-deaf to criticism I figured there weren't the type of site for me.

It looks like the paper says they were given 3mg/kg THC per day for 5 consecutive days. So it does seem the dose is specified.

It's pre clinical and far from surprising but 3mg/kg is a lot of THC, the equivalent of using ~1g of strong stuff by yourself (assuming no THC is lost during consumption).

Yeah I found that- but they never stated dilution amounts or total fluids given to the mice on those days, unless they mentioned it elsewhere.

After looking up the potency of currently popular edibles, the highest dosage I could find per item was the Cheeba Chew Deca Dose(http://www.cheebachews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/deca_1...) @ claimed 175mg of THC per piece (actual was 162.1). As far as I know, this is a heroic dose of THC of which the typical user would not frequent. In order to match the dosage within the mice, I'd have to eat just over 6 of these per days for a working week to produce the same results (obviously without comparing intake medium).

I understand this was to attempt to see if there were any issues that should be researched further, but the Ars article took it at face value and claimed we should (as humans) avoid during pregnancy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com