The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids
nationalacademies.org
nationalacademies.org
Being unable to research the effects of specific strains and how cannabis is administered beyond oral or combustible methods limits our understanding of the true net effect in reality. Different methods for vaporizing and strains with low THC - high CBD would likely show very little evidence for negative effects on the user. However, consistent tobacco rolled cannabis cigars for a recreational user may show loads of evidence for negative effects on health. Like eating unhealthy vs eating healthy. Not all food is created equal, just like cannabis and its methods of use.
Despite this, marijuana which is in easy circulation on the streets in dubious forms of dosage/strength, has such a political air over it that most countries still won't even look into the medical applications of it!
As a scientist, the double standards are incredibly frustrating!
I always discover something new about the mind when I do marijuana. Or perhaps that is merely how it feels like.
But then there's no LD50 determined for cannabis. So how could one overdose on cannabis?
That said, we've come a long way from the era of Hearst, Anslinger, and the racist "degenerates" rhetoric.
Marijuana-related fatal car accidents surge in Washington state after legalization: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/10/marijuana-re...
You can go ahead and keep thinking weed is harmless, but many drugs have started out being promoted as "harmless" including heroin, which was promoted as a cough suppressant in the early 1900's. What about cigarettes? How much propaganda did you see touting them as "harmless" despite all the scientific research to the contrary? And what about the surge in cocaine use in the 1970's and 80's? People thought it was just a harmless drug people used on the weekends.
While I do believe there are many positive uses for marijuana, thinking its harmless is just being naive.
People are gonna make bad decisions regardless of drugs, it's not like you have a smoke and the first thought that crosses your mind is "DRIVE".
2015 NHTSA: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/pot/2015/02/11/federal-study-d...
This BBC/SpeedTV video from 2010 sums it up, if you have 5 minutes to judge for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzKjFiGFrcU
As always, YMMV.
Unheated Marijuana doesn't have psychoactive effects. And like another poster said, the effects don't work through digestion without it binding to a fat. So just eating plain buds, even if they've been decarbed won't do much of anything.
Edit: Found a study [0] that references the 3g/kg figure. That LD50 is for pure THC, not pure cannabis.
"Lethal toxicity is reportedly rare with the THC LD50 = 3000 mg/kg in dogs.[2, 13] Both dogs that died in this study likely ingested significantly lower doses than the LD50 of THC; however, it is also possible that these dogs were more sensitive to THC or THC butter contains additional compounds that can be fatal in dogs."
[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1476-4431.2012....
http://www.mindthesciencegap.org/2013/03/25/how-safe-is-mari...
I'm no scientist nor a baker so I don't know the details behind it, but as far as I know the THC needs something to bind to before it's digestible, usually a fat - probably why cannabutter is the most common way of getting it into edibles.
And that doesn't even account for the CBD which I have zero idea about with regards to edibles.
If a human were to die of cannabis inhalation or ingestion, it's not clear which of the hundreds of compounds in cannabis would be the one most responsible for the fatality. It's quite possible that it wouldn't be THC.
You would almost certainly vomit long before you hit that threshold.
If you also took an anticonvulsant and just straight-up downed raw plant material, I suppose it's possible... but at that point, we're stretching the meaning of "lethal dose".
Is it possible we could see an overdose at some point once physical volume becomes much less of a factor?
There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• Increased risk of overdose injuries, including respiratory distress, among pediatric populations in U.S. states where cannabis is legal (9-4b)
There is no or insufficient evidence to support or refute a statistical association between cannabis use and:
[...]
• Death due to cannabis overdose (9-4a)
From the full report:
"Accidental ingestion of cannabis by young children can result in respiratory failure and coma, as noted by several case reports (Amirav et al., 2011; Appelboam and Oades, 2006; Carstairs et al., 2011), and the consumption of cannabis edibles has been identified as a contributing factor in the accidental death of at least one adolescent (Hancock- Allen et al., 2015)." ... "among all calls to U.S. poison centers in involving single-substance exposures to cannabis, death was the outcome in two cases in 2012, no cases in 2013, and one case in 2014 (Mowry et al., 2013, 2014, 2015), although the reports do not indicate whether cannabis exposure was a contributing factor in these outcomes. Cannabis was not found to be the main cause of death in any of the fatal intoxications among drug addicts submitted for medico-legal autopsy and toxicological analysis in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden in either 2007 or 2012 (Simonsen et al., 2011, 2015)." ... "In a study on unintentional pediatric cannabis exposure, Wang et al. (2016) described a case where hospital staff members were unable to resuscitate an unresponsive 11-month-old child who presented with tachycardia and metabolic acidosis and who tested positive for THC in a urine drug screen. The authors noted that any relationship between cannabis exposure and the patient’s symptoms or outcome was unclear. Although presented here for discussion, these case reports did not inform the committee’s conclusions on the association between cannabis use and overdose death.
By comparison with the minimal literature on cannabis-related overdose death in adults or children, several studies reported on potentially serious symptoms associated with cannabis exposure in pediatric populations. Le Garrec et al. (2014) reported that, over a 3.5-year period, seven children aged 11–33 months were admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit in Paris with accidental cannabis poisoning. All of the children had central nervous system symptoms, including drowsiness and coma, and three were intubated and placed on mechanical ventilation for less than 24 hours. Between 2010 and 2013, an Arizona poison control center received 49 calls related to unintentional medical marijuana ingestions among children aged 7 and younger (Lovecchio and Heise, 2015). Among the 39 records with complete information, the most commonly reported symptoms were lethargy (48 percent of cases), an inability to walk (53 percent), coma (10 percent), and vomiting (21 percent)."
It would likely kill 50% of the population it was dropped on :-D
Heavy use for enough time will get you in a mist of passivity and poor memory. Every experienced weed smoker would have told you so much, a few years ago. Now there's a resistance to concede even that.
that's what I think of as well. however, many people will interpret "heavy user" as meaning like, someone who smokes a joint with any regularity at all. once a week might count as a heavy user by some definitions.
the disagreement on what counts as heavy use is really the problem here. what you're describing is someone who is basically high all the time. very little disagreement that being high on cannabis profoundly effects your concentration and memory while you're high. a lot of controversy and ambiguity about what happens the day after.
depends on what you're counting as "heavy use" and "enough time". also depends on whether or not you still smoke, and how much, and how often.
I don't disagree that there are some values for those parameters that do lead to "passivity and poor memory". we just don't really have a clear view on what the range of effects is across different values for those parameters, and how much variability there is within individuals. heavy use for one person might only be moderate use for another.
the resistance to conceding those obvious points is really just based on ambiguity. yeah, every experienced smoker is familiar with the cannabis haze. the questions are really more about the specifics than the generals.
My thoughts on it are that once or twice a week, single doses that intoxicate probably aren't that bad.
The issue is that there are some people who ingest cannabis not only on a daily basis, but throughout each of those days they are consistently ingesting it. I can't imagine this not having a detrimental effect, at least while they are using it this way.
The comment is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5bm3kp/colorado_ca...
It isn't your most down-voted comment. It has -3 and you have about 10 other comments with lower scores. In the comment you solely mention the smell of kids. This doesn't mean that they are using cannabis at all. This could easily be similar to kids whose parents smoke cigarettes. Yes second hand smoke is bad for the kids over time, but that doesn't make them stoned by any means.
I don't disagree with you though that there are dogmatists around cannabis. There definitely are and they don't help anything.
My wife works at a low socio-economic status school. They're not using directly, no they're not stoned to the 'whoa, dude' level, it's more of a general 'grogginess' that kind of goes away late in the morning. It's definitely 'anec-data' of the finest sort, but it's something the teachers notice and comment on.
What I don't understand is why no one ever thinks that suddenly 'legalizing' a drug that produces a docile population is somehow more ominous than the previous gov't action to suppress it.
I ask mostly because I could have been that kid. I'm that adult. I smoke now, but my parents didn't and I didn't start while I was in school. My mother fought to get me awake for years: I wouldn't even wake up early for Santa Clause presents. Seriously, I chose to sleep and wait to open them until after we went to Grandma's house.
When we talk legalization on these sites it's usually from a middle class view of harmless recreation, but people who are irresponsible about other things aren't likely to be fastidious in their smoking habits either.
Blanket statements are rarely correct.
I don't thing we have a good idea what the long term effects for a moderate smoker are. So, There is moderate evidence of no statistical association between cannabis use and: • Incidence of lung cancer (cannabis smoking) (5-1) may be true, but again I think the data is rather poor and short term.
Back to your point, statistics linking mental Heath issues to smoking is not causual especially when There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and: • Better cognitive performance among individuals with psychotic disorders and a history of cannabis use (12-2a)
So it's helpful to have a constant reminder that a lot of us regularly consume alcohol, which is has high addictive potential and very negative long term effects, and yet is not demonized by society and moderate drinkers are perfectly fine. The basis of comparison to something that we're very familiar with helps put things into perspective. It's not to say that the negative effects don't exist, but that we as a society tolerate something with similarly negative effects all the time and live normal lives.
Well At least once you're crazy you can improve your learning!
But it will also make you crazier. To sum it up, you'll become a smarter, crazier version of yourself.
It's possible at-risk people are self-medicating, and that's why the correlation exists. (Or any number of confounding factors, such as at-risk people being more likely to break social norms.)
The worst thing that can happen if you smoke cannabis is to get arrested and to never be able to get a good job or get a scholarship to school
I'm not sure legalization has increased usage in those places, but if it has, it will take more than a few years to see the effects.
Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption in the 20s: http://patterico.com/2014/07/28/yes-prohibition-worked-in-te....
(I am not asking this to support prohibition. I support legalization of marijuana).
It might also make it less cool. Teenages might be less likely to smoke if their parents/teachers/etc do (wild guess)
I personally don't understand that, but I guess it's fun to do something rebellious if it's arguably harmless*
*(I realize that I'm using the word "harmless" quite loosely here)
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/prevalence-mar...
I couldn't locate much information with some quick googling, but I don't think rates of schizophrenia have doubled in the same time period.
The amount of people reporting increased. It is difficult to tell if actual use increased or if people are just more likely to admit they use it because of decreasing taboos.
If it's a effect over a long term, it will take quite a while to show up (e.g. cigarettes and cancer).
WA, OR, CA etc aren't recently high consuming states, they have been huge producers and consumers for decades (relative to some other states).
Of course, there's lots of other factors that likely make that analysis hard.
Same thing with smoking. Schizophrenic people are far more likely to smoke. It turns out that they very recently discovered this was a form of self medication as well.
Actually, that's exactly it - people with a predisposition for schizophrenia are known to be drawn to drugs (particularly nicotine) in a form of self-medication. People with depression and ADHD are more likely to smoke tobacco as well, though the link there is a lot less strong than it is for schizophrenia.
The link between cannabis and schizophrenia has also been studied, and it appears that marijuana can catalyze the onset of symptoms, but it won't produce them in someone who wasn't already going to develop schizophrenia anyway.
So yes, if your family has a history of mental health issues, you probably want to stay away from marijuana. But otherwise, you're probably safe.
if you have it in you, anything can trigger it. legal drugs, illegal drugs, stress & hardships of life and work, serious accidents, failed relationships and so on.
I don't think this is typically deliberate, but it's sloppy, at the very least confidence levels should be adjusted to account for assumed error rates.
Some studies fall apart completely (in the sense that you cannot reject the hypothesis that increased marijuana use is driven by current symptom strength, not the other way around) under reasonable assumptions about how correlated symptom strength and diagnosis probability are.
I don't think this is just a theoretical problem, either. At least anecdotally, most of the people that I've known with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia were undiagnosed for many, many years before finally figuring it out, despite clearly having a lot that was "wrong". There are massive stigmas that make sufferers hesitant to disclose the true severity of their symptoms, even when asked, until they become unbearable.
It would be ridiculous to say that cannabis smoking causes someone to be male.
> I suppose it is possible schizos are drawn to heavy pot use in their teenage years as a sort of self medication, but it seems unlikely.
We know that the increased use of tobacco is because of self-medication.
It doesn't seem that unlikely that people are also self-medicating with cannabis.
We do not know enough yet to say which way round the causal link is.
People are reacting to this as if it is personal, which is a mistake. I've used more than my share in my youth. Obviously correlation doesn't imply causality, but simply dismissing the possibility because it makes you feel bad is weak minded thinking.
Very scary! I wonder if age influences this.
This is really weird though:
> In individuals with schizophrenia and other psychoses, a history of cannabis use may be linked to better performance on learning and memory tasks.
Especially given the Psychosocial conclusions that:
> Recent cannabis use impairs the performance in cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention.
And
> A limited number of studies suggest that there are impairments in cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention in individuals who have stopped smoking cannabis.
"There is moderate evidence of no statistical association between cannabis use and: • Incidence of lung cancer (cannabis smoking)"
I thought it was pretty well established that inhaling any burning plant matter increased the chance of lung cancer. But I guess not.
Not surprising was:
"There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and: • The impairment in the cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention (acute cannabis use)"
and most worrisome was:
"There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and: • The development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users"