Worst of these claims are the (almost literal) "snake oil" companies and sellers that are selling 10mg of CBD to people as a 'dose' and implying or telling them it is anything other than placebo at this level. All professional journal studies that have made claims about CBD do studies that use at least 300mg and more often 600mg as the absolute minimum dose and repeat this daily for weeks. Unfortunately 600mg of CBD (with the THC removed down to <0.5mg levels) is expensive. Literally multiple hundreds of dollars. At the typical dosages sold in headshops and the like CBD is a placebo. It is snake oil.

It doesn't even have an significant affinity for the CB1 receptors at reasonable 0.6g doses. The mechanism of action is actually through binding to the serotonin-1a autoreceptor, much like the atypical antidepressant buspirone.

This unregulated wild west of CBD and non-THC pot products is only going to backfire on the charlatans and ignorant users caught up in it. It's going to hurt the legalization movement.

Unfortunately we don't have enough research to establish much of anything beyond the current FDA approved usage. However, that usage is 600mg/day for an average person (10mg/kg/day). So the claim of 600mg being the "absolute minimum dose" is absurd.

Plenty of studies have occurred at levels as low as 25mg/day and shown effects. The quality of those studies isn't great, but there aren't any good quality studies on CBD to begin with. But considering those poor quality studies together with the body of anecdotal evidence which suggests that CBD's anti-anxiety effects kick in between 15mg and 50mg, I'm inclined to believe that CBD is not a placebo at these levels.

My dose is between 5 and 10mg a day, and I can feel as little as 1mg (I'm hypersensitive to the stuff).

All of that said, I agree with you on your last point about charlatans. There's plenty of woo-woo and snake oil in the CBD "industry". But there are real benefits here that I wouldn't want drowned out.

> I can feel as little as 1mg (I'm hypersensitive to the stuff).

What gives you the confidence that this isn't the placebo affect at work?

This post also ignores how quickly tolerance builds up in the system before leveling off. Even if they truly felt threshold psychoactive effects from only 1mg, that would subside within a month at most. This leads me to believe parent is experiencing placebo effect. I'd bet they haven't done a blind study.

Nothing with any scientific rigor. Of course I, like I'm sure everyone else, believe I have a decent "placebo detector" and to that end CBD isn't behaving like a placebo for me.

But I'll try to add a little more strength to my claim for CBD not being a placebo at the original comment's supposed "low doses".

I've used it in balm form to treat physical pain. I use it at ~50mg topical doses (again much lower than 600mg) to treat carpal tunnel, TMJ, tweaked back, etc. It's been many times more effective for me in that regard than anything else I've tried previously, which includes placebos. I've tried everything from "real" treatments like NSAIDs and menthol rubs, to Chinese "medicines", to snake oil off Amazon. Nothing has worked as well as the CBD balm. So if CBD is a placebo at these doses then it's the best placebo I've ever found.

I had no reason to believe that CBD would be any more effective than my previous snake oil attempts, and indeed I had every expectation that it would be snake oil because of the many comments on HN saying as much.

Besides that we know THC, a related cannabinoid, is effective at these doses (e.g. 5mg). Why wouldn't CBD be? Most drugs that interact with the CNS are active on a wide spectrum, and in fact have different overall effects based on dose. Even in extremely low doses, for example LSD micro-dosing which we've seen a few studies reporting as effective. Is CBD the one special one that cures epilepsy at 600mg but nothing else at any other dosing?

So my general argument is that, though we lack concrete evidence, everything else from related chemicals to anecdotes to weak studies points in the direction of CBD being effective at doses as low as 15mg. So, why would we assume that 600mg is somehow an absolute minimum? And why would we assume that my claim of being able to detect the application of 1mg is entirely placebo? None of this precludes the absolute necessity of rigorous scientific study and deferring to said studies when possible. But I see absolutely no basis for claiming that anything less than 600mg dosing is bunk.

EDIT: I'll add the addendum that most of my CBD usage is "full-spectrum", which highly conflates my personal anecdotes. That doesn't negate any of my other arguments, though. In fact I think all the "weak" studies that we have on CBD are done with pure CBD. I do have CBD isolate that I've tried a few times. I can feel that at low doses as well, but I've never assessed it for pain relief or anxiety so I can't personally make any arguments for or against pure-CBD. Sibling comments suggest that it has effects at low doses though, just like all the weak studies show.

> Nothing with any scientific rigor. Of course I, like I'm sure everyone else, believe I have a decent "placebo detector" and to that end CBD isn't behaving like a placebo for me.

This statement invalidates everything that follows after. Do multiple blind trials with a control substance at varying threshold doses, then you can say whether these "feelings" are from the drug itself.

Placebo creates a very real, measurable physiological effect, so relying on your subjective experience is more than "scientifically unrigorous", it's actually flawed reasoning. And citing a lack of evidence doesn't mean you can suddenly use your own anecdotal data as evidence.

I understand where you're coming from, but do you expect all people to discount their own experiences because they don't meet some threshold of validity? Humans don't live daily life like that. I think there's value in anecdotal data, especially when presented with the appropriate caveats. Otherwise, is my entire life a sham unless it is backed up by double blind trials?

It's not about the threshold of validity. It's about the threshold dose used, whose psychoactive effects are generally placed at higher doses.

There is no value in anecdotal data when this is something that can be properly measured, especially when it has to do with medical science and people's lives are involved. OP is making bogus, unsubstantiated claims and does not need to be defended.

Anybody who believes in the placebo effect is not to be taken seriously. If you think you can measure the placebo effect, what did you use as your control in your double blind study? That is, your control group which did not get a placebo, but believed they were getting a placebo, how exactly did you manage that?

> Anybody who believes in the placebo effect is not to be taken seriously.

Uhhhhhh no, sorry. Anybody who believes placebo is not a real physiological phenomenon is not to be taken seriously, because they have not done their basic homework.

> what did you use as your control in your double blind study?

I didn't do one, because I am not here claiming that 1mg of CBD is enough to feel. The responsibility is on OP, not me. But to answer a hypothetical, what would I use as my control? The same solution I would be placing the CBD in, sans the CBD. It's not hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanisms

Please don't take me so literally. I understand you didn't do a study on the placebo effect or anything else. I'm asking something that I wish you would seriously consider.

If you only believe in things that are proven through double-blind studies, and you believe the placebo effect objectively exists, then it must be possible to do a double-blind study proving the placebo effect exists.

Have you read about such a thing, or can you imagine such a thing? Do you, if you look again at my previous comment, see any possible logical problem?

I'm questioning your belief structure - I have no particular opinion on CBD, nor do I think controlled studies are useless.

Not all text on the internet is meant to be a scientific paper. It's totally valid to claim that something works for you without having to do "multiple blind trials with a control substance at varying threshold dose".

Not when we're discussing the effects of threshold doses vs. placebo. Placebo reactions can easily mimic threshold effects.

My experience is mostly with epilepsy, but CBD at dosages of 25-100mg (varying on the intensity of the siezure) really does help better then any prescribed medication my partner has tried. It's not ridiculous to me that it's effect on other systems in your body we don't know much about could be significant.

I do agree though, regularily using 500-1000mg's a week gets expensive.

> This unregulated wild west of CBD and non-THC pot products is only going to backfire on the charlatans

Hopefully, but don't get your hopes up. "Alternative medicine" is still very much alive.

What makes you think it needs to bind to cb1 receptors to be effective? We’re not trying to get high on cbd, we’re trying to achieve other results.

It drives me crazy that they sell CBD at gas stations. It’s not the same as the products I buy at the dispensary and is snake oil.

However, my medical cannabis packages don’t give that kind of dosage information.

I don’t have a high CBD product on hand but it typically says something like “1 dose is a [3|5] second inhalation” or 1mL of a tincture. The whole package typically includes less than 600mg CBD.

Are these studies for shrinking tumor growth? Could you provide links?

As an aside, I met some guys from a company in Colorado that sells pounds of high CBD flower by mail for around $130... can’t imagine that making RSO from their hemp would be hundreds of dollars a week.

There are so many complications when it comes to REALLY understanding the health effects of weed. The science is really tough, and underdeveloped.

One problem is that there are so many varietals, and so many different vehicles for administration (smoking, vaping, eating, tinctures, lotions, etc) — that make it hard to announce, globally, that "marijuana does X to your brain."

Really, the most we can say after a given experience is something like "Strain Y, when inhaled as a combustible, appears to show effect X."

Another problem is the weed that's available for experiments in the US. There is one — and only one — weed crop that the FDA will approve for clinical studies. From a farm at the University of Mississippi. (https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pot-monopoly-20140529-s...)

And according to a weed researcher I spoke to (Sue Sisley - https://medicalcannabis.com/about/faculty/suzanne-sisley/), that Mississippi weed is very low quality — aged, with a lot of stems, seeds, and adulterants.

None of this is to say that weed can't be beneficial.

But I'd argue that anyone making any global claims about weed's health benefits are, at the very least, overgeneralizing.

Of course. Because my definition of rich/poor is w.r.t. people around and not some world's mean/median. Many people in first world nations cannot afford to have as much kids as even 40 years ago.

It also reduces road traffic and all manner of queues.

Yeah, some rich people don't get why poor people want to have kids and pollute this planet (according to them). Fortune's list suggests that the median number of kids is 2-3.

You don't have to go and look on social media, just come here to HN and say "perhaps weed is not completely safe and we should research whether it could damage the brain" to get downvoted

You'll always have to ignore large categorizations such as safe or harmful anyway, no reasonable person is saying cannabis is as safe as air (well actually some air might be worse) rather they are saying that since society is perfectly fine and acomidating of worse substances such as alcohol and tobacco it makes no sense to prohibit cannabis much less criminalize it.

> no reasonable person is saying cannabis is as safe as air (well actually some air might be worse)

Maybe none of them are reasonable, but there sure are a lot of them. I've met a lot of people who think consuming cannabis is more healthy than not consuming it. I think this is becoming a more popular viewpoint and might even become a mainstream belief in a few years.

You get this with any kind of health-related opinion, on any forum. Just look at anything diet-related, and watch the people spouting vegetarian and vegan propaganda come out of the woodwork.

Health cults have taken over. My theory is that so many people feel powerless in many aspects of their lives, and they fall back on diet and exercise and snake-oil supplements as one corner of life they can over-compensate on.

At the federal level, weed is still classified as schedule 1. The federal government's stance has served to place severe restrictions on exactly the sort of research you seem to be calling for.

There is certainly some evidence for health and even psychological risks, but none that I am aware of for "brain damage", which is why you are likely to be downvoted.

US is not the only country in the world, and there have been studies linking teenage use to psychosis and schizophrenia

What’s the link? Perhaps teenagers with schizophrenia are predisposed to using marijuana.

For instance, 80%+ of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes. Do cigarettes cause psychosis and schizophrenia, or do schizophrenics seek out nicotine due to their schizophrenia? It’s not that simple.

In addition to nicotine, cigarette smoke (tobacco) contains MAOIs. MAOIs were commonly prescribed as antidepressants and antipsychotics back in the 50s and 60s, but fell out of favor for various reasons, despite showing far greater efficacy than SSRIs.

(one of these reasons was dietary: MAOIs have bad interactions with the amino acid "Tyramine", found in aged foods. However, Tyramine content in food has dropped dramatically since the 70s, and this is no longer a significant concern)

When I hear “80% of population X exhibits characteristic A”, my first reflex is to guess on whether I think the size of population X is on the order of magnitude of the presence of characteristic X in the general population. If not, I suspect I am learning something more about pop X than char A.

I’d guess there’s orders of magnitude more smokers than schizophrenics, making it seem unlikely smoking is a primary driver, though I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

I hear 80%+ of all perpetrators of sexual violence engage often with porn, but suspect that if porn drove sexual violence, its rates wouldn’t be decreasing. Most heart attack sufferers drink water within days of their cardiac event. All lottery winners have lottery tickets...

There have been studies linking just about any outcome to any behaviour, anyone with enough money has ever wanted.

That sounds true but is really not - it's just a way to throw out everything because you don't have a counter.

Your healthcare system also treats people who have got into a vehicle accident or a sporting incident - should buses and cycling also be banned? How about alcohol?

Everything has some risk, and the anecdotal evidence is that weed does not affect the vast majority of adults in a way that would result in additional healthcare needs.

And to think that I bought my child a bicycle for his birthday. I should be arrested for attempted murder.... /s

You should know that bikes are a gateway to harder stuff.

I have smoked weed heavily in my late 20s, ingested many types of edibles, topicals, etc. I am certainly not as sharp as I used to be. It can cause brain damage indirectly due to changes in your cardiovascular system. It can mimic a temporary sort of vascular dementia, as well as increase your blood pressure to very unsafe levels. Weed can also reduce the amount of grey matter in your orbitofrontal cortex. Not to mention the somewhat bizarre cartoon-like images you see on high doses of edibles. These images can fracture your mind if you see them enough. The risks are very real, and trying to downplay them or censor them is extremely irresponsible.

> in my late 20s

> I am certainly not as sharp as I used to be

It's called turning 30 :-)

No. At your thirties you can be at least a sharp as in your twenties. One of the main culprits of loss of sharpness is sleep deficit, that usually hits when having a full time job and family. It's not the age, it's the environment.

Often nuanced points of view are those that get you criticised the most.

It always fascinates me how powerful the placebo effect is. If people believe false health claims they seem to become true health claims.

Something I read recently is that anti depressants are less effective since their initial release, mostly because of placebo wearing off.

It’s also plausible that we are diagnosing more and more people with weaker and weaker symptoms with the same disease, so in aggregate, the effect will seem weaker.

My first thought when I saw this was of all the people and corporations investing in CBD and whatnot. Most corporations seem to be using adtech and social media (which are really the same) to perform mass manipulation. When that’s combined with all the crazy financial tools people can make a lot of money.

I think if lawmakers actually wanted people using drugs for the effects then drugs would be legal, I would argue they instead want the ability to arrest and incarcerate people at will.

I would personally find it more likely that these tweets are part of the ramp up phase of trying to attract real followers to then spread other messages. These are the sort of tweets that I would imagine are fairly popular with a certain segment and lead to the retweets and followers that give bots more reach.

The market for cannabis is so undeveloped and unstable that it seems unlikely that such marginal market growth tactics would see as much return as they do in more established markets.

Ding ding ding.

People are getting savvy to bots (used here to mean all variety of inauthentic social media accounts). The one-track tweets approach doesn't cut it anymore, you need a modicum of authenticness. That's why we are seeing Deepfake profile pics and much more effort going into fleshed out bot accounts, getting friends and followers, and multifaceted story feeds.

It's a classic infiltration technique. Get in, silently grow your roots under the radar, before deploying the payload.

What lawmakers want isn't some single coherent thing; you're talking about a profession perhaps most famous for getting in fights with each other. Some politicians may want draconian drug laws because they're involved with the prison industry or prison workers union, while other politicians with different interests might want drug legalization for reasons like those described in the grandparent comment. The distribution of politicians across this policy continuum may change quickly, or slowly. Not all change is quick.

Here is my pet theory: many politicians have historically opposed cannabis use because they believed cannabis use makes people lazy and believe widespread use of cannabis could suppress economic productivity. This is the sort of believe that could be challenged with evidence to the contrary; currently several states have legal cannabis and in doing so are putting many beliefs to the test. If/When fears relating to economic suppression are dispelled, some politicians who once opposed it may decide they no longer care.

> Here is my pet theory: many politicians have historically opposed cannabis use because they believed cannabis use makes people lazy and believe widespread use of cannabis could suppress economic productivity.

Or y'know, this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/03/23/nixons-d...

It's both or all 3.

1. Corporate interests want to reduce hemp use for oil and material to help their dino oil products

2. People buyin that its bad

3. Politicians use it as a way to think people are bad

4. One generation later and the reason is whatever is most expediant.

I believe that 80+% of politicians today that oppose legalization do so genuinely because they grew up being told it was bad and a gateway drug. And they're too ignorant to consider the Nixon quote or that their government has always been bought and paid for to maintain a status quo

> I believe that 80+% of politicians today that oppose legalization do so genuinely because they grew up being told it was bad and a gateway drug.

That's fair, and makes the most sense, I suppose

Certainly one of the things that gives me the creeps are the CBD quiosques freaking everywhere selling what amounts to CBD weed, CBD lotions, CBD potions, CBD whatever; I've seen them in airports, in tourist locations and in shopping malls. Mostly completely unpatronized, with a sullen presumably CBD anesthetized employee manning the desk. Just for the rent and employees we're talking something like a hundred millions a year in money flying out the window. To what end? Nobody is buying this shit (outside of tourist locations afaik). Someone is paying for it to happen.

It reminds me of when the Israeli spooks were selling toys in shopping malls in 2001 (rounded up after 911 and memory holed)[1]. Maybe it's just RJR ramping up to sell actual weed everywhere, but it sure is creepy.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel...

Do you have a source on the fact that "nobody is buying this shit"? Here in Paris the few attempts at opening CBD shops (now closed by police) were extremely popular.

My own lying eyes tell me this. Though there were a lot of takers in the Lisbon tourist location; I see literally dozens of these across the US northeast with zero customers, ever. Was just staring at the one in the Manchester NH airport. In a freaking airport! "Gee I have to get me some CBD cookies and massage oil to take on the airplane with me."

> "Gee I have to get me some CBD cookies and massage oil to take on the airplane with me."

Where they THC cookies, they'd probably make the plane flight a lot less uncomfortable with a lot of people. I'd wager they're trying to cell CBD to people who hate flying and are willing to try anything to make it less unpleasant. That their products are ineffective, at least in this application if not in general, kind of takes a backseat.

Israeli spooks, I'm reasonably sure, have better things to do than sell toys in shopping malls, despite this crazy article in the "Telegraph."

Washington Post and NYT as well:

https://web.archive.org/web/20011124022514/https://www.washi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20091229000739/https://www.nytim...

Merry Christmas, obsessive Fortran dude!

Happy Hanukkah. Fortan 77 Rules!

Out of curiosity, did you ever upgrade to Fortran-08/18? I used to sling a fair amount of Fortran77 back in physics days and a higher level version of the language might be fun if I can plug it into networks and such without invoking satan. C is fine for PDP-11 assembler, but I'd rather something that lets the compiler do more of the work.

Not really consistent with it all being illegal, is it?

I share some of your cynicism but I think the “sedated” comment is a massive leap to make. However I do sometimes wonder if there has been a push from tobacco manufacturers as a way to booster profits now that smoking has fallen out of vogue. Admittedly I’ve done zero research to back up this suspicion.

Personally I do think laxer drug laws are a good thing. Those that want to get high will always find a way so it’s better to regulate the market than push it underground.

I think at least with regards to HN, it's that the average user is, just being honest, wealthy and from a very privileged background without too much lifetime difficulty. There's a disproportionate number of people here who can and did walk into Silicon Valley and said something along the lines of "give me 10 million dollars and I'll make a phone app", then have the free time and comfortable fall back to write a failure report about "their journey." I'm not saying that's all or even most of the people here, but it's a larger proportion compared to probably any other community on the internet.

I mention this because many of the strongest "let's decriminalize (or even legalize) all drugs" commenters have similar backgrounds. Comfy financial situation and room to experiment with the peace of mind knowing that they have people to help dust them off should they get a little sloppy with their drug use. These people can afford to take a week to enjoy an ayahuasca resort, follow it up with a beach vacation and a little MDMA, then return home to a daily bowl of weed to relax from their hard month of partying and pop a couple addies to get focused and pull an all-nighter on their new web app. They can financially and mentally afford to use drugs as mood and mental enhancers. Loads of people who aren't so comfortable use drugs to numb the rough edges of life. Having been on this site for over a decade, I've seen loads of comments that make many users here seem completely out of touch with what average people go through--many HN users on another plane of existence.

I think a considerable number of people who promote drugs everywhere have good intentions, but they don't really consider the effects for most people. The aspect of being locked up for drugs does do a lot to tarnish lives, but the mere act of having easily available mind-altering substances is also enough to ruin the lives of many.

I agree, drugs can have a negative effect on people but I believe that this affect regarding marijuana use pales in comparison to the negative effect its continued prohibition causes. In the United States it is wielded as an oppressive tool with use "roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."

Those arrested are then affected for the rest of their lives, their criminal history hurting both their social and economic future. The fact that the rich know they are able to get away with it is proof that there is a separate legal system and that legalizing marijuana should be done. I am not arguing that pot cant be detrimental but its very much in the same ballpark as alcohol.

There are people currently non violent offenders spending decades in jail for selling marijuana, something that those same people from comfy backgrounds are now getting rich from. The genie is out of the bottle, its far less detrimental now to just legalize it federally, apply rules similar to those applied to alcohol and let all non violent marijuana offenders out of prison.

Society often looks at people through an odd lens. A rich white guy sitting drinking a couple of scotches at night is approved of, a group of black guys sitting around drinking a couple beers is reason to call the police. Marijuana prohibition does nothing but entrench this view.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/sentencing-reform/...

elon musk smoking weed with joe rogan is really just a slap in the face to every poor black kid in jail over pot

Hopefully you realize then that the solution is to stop punishing "poor black kids" for smoking weed, and not to throw Musk in prison.

I believe that's what OP is saying, That neither party should be in prison for a crime that is just a crime for some people in some places and legal in others.

i think what's really out of touch is assuming that poor, unprivileged people are like children, who need to be babysat and protected from themselves, else they spend all day just getting high. this is classist and incorrect. many people find it simpler to blame the individuals without considering the systemic causes of addiction, but that is putting the cart before the horse.

Just because the people making the argument come from privileged backgrounds doesn't invalidate the argument itself.

I came from Canada where drug offenses of all kinds are penalized much less harshly than the US. Even in cases of addiction, the social safety net to deal with it is much better: free hospital stays, free counseling, cheap college, better employment insurance, etc.

Effectively, everyone in Ontario can be considered as privileged as the people in your example in terms of leeway given even though I've never been given 10 million dollars for a phone app. We made that decision as a society and since I left the government has started selling marijuana: www.ocs.ca

So when talking about lives being ruined, we have to start asking if the cure of prohibition is worse than the disease of addiction.

Anything that can be abused is finds its population to do so. Banning is not a solution though, but more research and education on the subject. Think about how alcohol abuse and even sugar abuse are treated by society: people are aware of the dangers yet some can’t stop having them.

> I mention this because many of the strongest "let's decriminalize (or even legalize) all drugs" commenters have similar backgrounds.

How is this relevant? Many of us who support decriminalization do so because of the impact it has had on less fortunate communities. Those who are privileged should be using their privilege to help those communities by promoting decriminalization.

LSD is sedating? Spoken like someone who never tried LSD.

Recently, a friend came to me with a list of all the health benefits that are attributed to cannabis. I sent him back a list of all the health benefits attributed to good old ginger - and they matched almost one to one. Health claims concerning cannabis are usually just for those who want to consume a drug and feel better about themselves.

Can you blame them? Last time I checked ginger wasn't subjected to 70 years of war on drugs propaganda. Never heard of anyone thrown in jail for consuming ginger.

Maybe people want to consume a drug without being labeled and stereotyped by people who say all drugs are bad and that getting high is a sin.

Propogating false health claims doesn't help people either.

I can claim that good old whisky is the cure for cold if you are mountaineering in extreme climates, but it certainly isn't going to help anyone.

Of course but I don't think there's any debate about which side has been subjected to more propaganda over the years.

Regardless this furthers my argument - that there is not enough research because of said propaganda for any claims to be made in the first place which is the real travesty.

There's idiots on both sides, and peddling unsubstantiated rumors as medical fact doesn't somehow make up for anti-reefer madness. Rather, it legitimizes the fearmongering.

I've seen dispensaries coming dangerously close to claiming it eradicates cancer. Heard activists encouraging driving under the influence because "it makes you chill out and take your time, man." There's no excuse for this shit.

> Heard activists encouraging driving under the influence because "it makes you chill out and take your time, man." There's no excuse for this shit.

Eh this doesn't bother me. You know how many people are on the roads dosed up on legal pain killers way worse and more sedating and addictive than weed?

My point was that idiots on one side are putting the idiots on the other side in jail.

Like I said I don't blame people for being defensive. I think it's clear which side is more in the wrong - the people fear mongering on the government's side.

From what I understand, alcohol hastens the onset of hypothermia but at the same time in some circumstances it may delay the onset of frostbite. The mechanism should be the same in either case, the dilation of blood vessels near the surface of the skin, particularly in the extremities, which leads to more heat transfer between your body and the cold environment. This warms your skin but at the expense of cooling your core.

Doctors would never dare recommend alcohol for somebody operating in the cold since it hastens hypothermia (which is deadly) to delay frostbite (which, while potentially deadly, is a less severe/immediate concern.) But, despite the aversion medical professionals have to liability, it's seems theoretically possible that there could be scenarios where consuming alcohol would be a minor net benefit (they would have to be scenarios where it's trivial to step back inside to warm up.)

That is an interesting take on it but if you had a source to warm you up, why wouldn't you use the source for frostbite as well.

I have to agree with this. If exaggerating health claims about a plant is what it takes to convince the country that you shouldn't be thrown in prison for choosing to consume that plant, then have at it.

The older generations will find it much harder to vote against legalization while they're rubbing CBD cream on their aching joints. If that's the trade-off, it's a good deal.

Maybe not the best example, ginger seems legitimately medicinal to me. I've not found anything better for settling an upset stomach than real ginger (not "ginger ale" soda pop.)

Ginger is actually considered as a medicinal herb and is an active ingredient in many traditional medicines across Asia. I think in South Asia ginger tea is considered a very good beverage for relief if you have common cold.

OP found a perfect example to show how cannabis share same of the benefits as ginger. So he’s actually suggesting his friend to get weed if he cannot take get ginger :)

Wow, next you're going to tell me Aloe Vera is a scam, too.

Ginger actually does have a lot of health benefits though?

> The worry is that all the online chatter about cannabis’s beneficial qualities will have offline consequences, ultimately influencing attitudes and behaviors, Allem said

I doubt this is a realistic consequence... I mean, who is following these bots? Would people really listen to a bot? I presume most people would be able to tell bot-controlled Twitter accounts from friends and legitimate followers.

I think the study should have included impact from those tweets, such as number of likes, retweets, quotes, and replies, as well as count of human followers.

> I doubt this is a realistic consequence... I mean, who is following these bots? Would people really listen to a bot?

I'm not sure if you're serious, but misinformation in general is a big global concern that has tangible, unexpected and sometimes coordinated effects on political and social systems worldwide.

When misinformation becomes cheap to produce with software and easy to distribute via social media, and sophisticated enough to be indistinguishable from a real person, a) it's very difficult for an outsider to know whether they're being misinformed, and b) does it really matter if it's a human or a bot spreading it at that point?

I'm not sure what the short term solutions to this are, as it's easy to fall into the regulations trap (and some certainly are needed), but in the long term we need better educated individuals with a healthy dose of skepticism to combat this.

You’re right that further research is required here but it’s also worth barring in mind that there is already a good body of evidence available that supports the power of social media bot accounts have public opinion. I mean this isn’t the first story like this to break in recent years ;)

Is there any actual evidence of this? I’ve heard that claim, but it seems like most trump voters were Republicans, not democrats who got duped by bots.

To be fair, that "certain" fact is wildly disputed. It's like the political equivalent of "reefer madness" in that it's easy to throw around, yet hard to quantify or present as a valid case for/against.

I mean, look at the absolute circus a controversial point such as "how did Trump get elected" has caused in the US and even world-wide. We're nearing the next election and I would argue it's still no where near resolved. In fact, I'd argue it's caused a bigger divide than anything else precisely because it's so un-pinnable to being either true/false or good/bad.

Well yeah. So long as the federal government keeps classifying cannabis as a tier 1 controlled substance (cocaine is tier 2), no research money will flow to academics to do the relevant research.

In the meantime, we will continue seeing claims like RSO curing all cancers and other diseases (http://www.trueactivist.com/this-is-the-cannabis-oil-recipe-...). Being able to research effects of cannabis is reason number umpteen to decriminalize/legalize it at the federal level.

What kind of cancer? That’s like saying “RSO cures illness”. Fire cures cancer too I’d you apply it directly to just the cancer cells, but we can agree that setting a can we patient on fire isn’t exactly a worthwhile therapy. Also any actual sources aside from KillYourCancer.org? I am not saying RSO doesn’t work. Just that it has not been proven or disproven by anyone reputable.

Flat earthers are everywhere on the Internet too. Does that mean the earth is flat?

Loads of things kill cancer cells if you expose cancer cells directly to them. Fire, alcohol, radiation, etc. The trick is to expose just the cancer cells to them. I agree that a lot more research could be done, but at this point we know that RSO is about as effective as ethanol at killing cancer.

As for the rest of your comment, I don’t know if you will find this place particularly friendly towards the rhetoric that there is some illegal world government controlling everything. Try /r/conspiracy.

I actually have RSO in my fridge this very moment. The guy who made it told me about a little girl he was helping out right now who developed a brain tumor causing her to go blind. He advised her mom to try RSO but she refused initially. After things got worse and she basically had nothing to lose, she decided to give it a shot. After two weeks of small daily dosis, she called my friend at 4am in the morning telling him her daughter stood up by herself to go to the bathroom. She was able to start seeing again. Try that with ethanol.

I am not saying it doesn’t work. I am saying it isn’t studied by anyone that anyone should trust. How do you actually know that girl’s change in vision was actually the result of RSO and not some other factor?

Well I guess it's up to each individual who or what they trust. Personally I trust the researchers mentioned in the video combined with the evidence of people using it and actually getting cured. Not just from stories on the Internet but also from closer at home. I'm also for complete legalization so that research can be done freely so we can get even more confirmation. The fact that it is still illegal is a serious crime against humanity. So much suffering could be prevented and lives saved by something growing freely in nature.

Cannabis and THC aren't particularly bad for you.

The addiction potential is low to none. Obviously, you shouldn’t get high and then drive or load ordinance onto fighter planes on an aircraft carrier, but the direct harm potential of THC is quantitatively lower than the risk you take when you climb a ladder or drive to the store.

I do agree that cannabis health “benefits” are often exaggerated but this happens with any substance. Also, social media bots spam about many things all the time. Should we then talk about all the topics spam bots post about?

Those bots are expensive and complicated to operate at scale. Some topics are there to make them look legitimate, others because you have large clients supporting a change in opinion and willing to spend social-media agencies to promote it — or discredit it with a ham-fisted campaign.

It’s hard to sort them apart but that example, for me, echoes a BBC documentary/sci-fi speculation from 10 years ago about cannabis legalisation and more generally licensing psycho-active molecules for entertainment purposes. The title was “If drugs were legal” or “When” as most specialists had little doubt this would happen soon.

Both cigarette and pharmaceutical companies came out as very ready for the idea, with teams dedicated to lobbying for it, of course, but marketing, products ready for the day. Overall, they were clear large players with established industrial assets and experience in large-scale distribution would completely take over.

They even speculated that some tests on new drugs were done without permissions. A couple of years later the “Bath salt” craze and the mention most of those were molecules no one had seen before also echoed quite loudly.

> “We want the public to be aware of the difference between a demonstrated, scientifically backed piece of health information and claims that are simply made up.”

The problem is that many of those spreading these kind of messages are the type of people who are convinced that the entire medical industry (Big Pharma) are trying to make everybody ill so they can sell them expensive treatments and that they don't want to develop a cure from cannabis because they wouldn't be able to make money from that, or other such nonsense.

It's quite sad to see home many people swallow such bullshit.

I know a woman who was successfully treated for brain cancer and she is an anti-vaxxer and one of those who spreads memes about the medical industry wanting to keep everyone sick. I just sit there thinking "you're literally living proof that the medical industry is saving lives and yet you sit there at your keyboard insulting the very people responsible for saving your life."

The article seems quite happy to jump in and call these claims "false" rather than "unproven" or "unscientific".

Additionally, neither the abstract, nor the article bother to actually name the strength or statistical certainty of the effect.

Neither of these serve to give this article much credibility when talking about how to responsibly talk about science.

So, Twitter should not be considered a reliable source of information, on its own?

Are statements of the form "Social media bots often tweet fake claims about <insert more or less anything you like here>' really newsworthy? Asking for a friend who bought a course from Siraj Raval...

These comments highlight why I never feel like I fit in with other engineers.

Yikes, I know what you mean. You've got engineers, and you've got hackers... Hackers place enormous emphasis on personal liberty and sovereignty. Sometimes I feel like a hacker in an engineer's body. At any rate, I looked through your comment history and I think we would get along fine. Got a point of contact?

So who's bothering to run cannabis-promotion bots? There's no one dominant seller, so it doesn't make sense as advertising.

The full paper is paywalled ($24).