I’m glad this research is being done. I don’t use cannabis, but I also don’t frown upon it. However some of the conversations on the use of cannabis recently have changed from “it’s a drug, but it isn’t that bad” to “it is completely harmless”. Which in my opinion is very dangerous and could harm entire populations before we have enough research. In my opinion, it should be considered similar category as alcohol, cigarettes, fat and sugar, a national health issue and research needs to happen asap on various short term and long term effects.
>However some of the conversations on the use of cannabis recently have changed from “it’s a drug, but it isn’t that bad” to “it is completely harmless”.
Or even worse, "it's nothing but beneficial!". And yes, I'm a semi-regular "user"
This is something I've seen too. There are people that are pro-medical cannabis because of it's miraculous uses to the point of only using different forms of cannabis in lieu of any other medication. While I believe there's some things cannabis is great for, but I'm not convinced it's that magical. Since we've been prevented from studying it properly because of bullshit laws, we've got some things to look into still.
People cannot cope with even the slightest gray area, so they end up saying and doing ridiculous things. Everything has to be 100% good or 100% bad. The political environment makes this worse: if you concede anything at all, it will simply be used as a weapon against you.
Of course, it took decades to get people to acknowledge that the harms of some drugs were far less than the harm caused by policing them, and that the harms had been wildly exaggerated for political reasons, so it's not really surprising that people will jump to deny any harm in case it gets banned again.
Yeah, you censor only ideas you’re afraid somebody might agree with. A related phenomenon is accepting anything a “thought leader” says as long as that person gives (or implies) a “reason.”
> woke cult doesn’t allow any disagreement with any piece of the transgender narrative.
sigh please don't use terms of abuse such as "woke cult" on HN.
And yes, people are being incredibly defensive because there are a number of misinformation campaigns circulating trying to get trans healthcare banned for everyone. The war on drugs, for testosterone and estrogen.
I’m not going to stop using accurate language just because it makes you feel bad.
They are a cult. It’s a group of people who fervently worship an ideology filled with hatred, falsehoods, manipulation and deception. They even have original sin, and excommunication.
All under the guise of protecting oppressed people.
However if they actually cared about the causes they claim, then they would try to make their ideas as easy to digest for the average sane person as possible. But it’s not actually about helping people, it’s about moral superiority and pushing people away who aren’t “pure” enough.
But for starters how about the idea that a trans-man doesn’t just identify as a man, but is a man. In other words, embracing delusion and denying biology.
Or how about girls feeling uncomfortable in their own bathrooms and locker rooms because a biological male is allowed in their safe space?
Or how about the stuff that’s just plain silly. Like this recent Men’s Health article where a straight man is told that his preference for a real vagina is actually a vulva fetish and that he’s actually bisexual since “technically” a woman and a trans-man can both have vulvas.
> I suggest this binary positioning is a very American phenomenon
I really don't think so. Binary thinking is something I've personally noticed and thought about for a while, and I think it stems from the human brain just trying to simplify things. In most scenarios, it is far easier (and time efficient) to only consider the 2 extreme options rather than the entire spectrum of possible options, even if those two extremes are far worse than the alternatives.
Plus, I've seen Europeans do the same thing all the time [0]. Remember, polarization (which is really just an extension of tribalism imo) isn't an American condition, it's a human condition.
Can you post a source for any claim that theyre harmless? I don’t think any reputable researcher has ever said that, but they have started talking about potential for positive effects, which is a far cry from “if you take this it will ruin your life”.
I don't think there are any researchers saying marijuana is anything but beneficial. It's every day people. Same thing for psychedelics. There was a thread on LSD the other day and I had to point out twice that HPPD happens as a result, and is a disorder that can cause significant mental distress. Honestly I think it only does a disservice to the cause to make claims like that
Agreed, it is the general public propagating this. Just go onto Reddit and you’ll see it everywhere.
For cannabis I find the attitude pretty scary, having been a daily user myself several times (including now) and dealing with the side effects. It does have negatives. I would hate for everyone to have to learn that the hard way or for them to misidentify the causes, though even those side effects are pretty mild - some are acutely bad like CHS but it’s more the mild anhedonia as you sober up that I think is the worst.
For psychedelics, having dabbled myself, I can confidently say the worst case scenario is very bad and often not talked about. A bad trip can be an intensely traumatic experience. I think it would be possible to get PTSD from such an experience. Ironically my own bad trip was precipitated by lighting up a bowl about 5 hours after taking LSD.
I also go through phases of daily use. Quit for awhile, then dip back into it to I.e. deal with flu symptoms, special occasion, or when I really feel the need to disassociate from life’s stresses.
I won’t go so far as to say it’s addictive for everyone but it’s is incredibly addictive for me.
Daily symptoms include:
* wake up more tired
* wake up with mild morning sickness
* wake up a bit foggy
* higher tolerance to caffeine
* less general stamina
* memory a notch worse in general
* less energy for physical activities
* increased anxiety while sober
* slightly higher sense of paranoia/conspiracy
—-
Notably I consume only edibles and tinctures, which I think is the driving factor for the mild morning sickness.
The morning sickness is called Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome(CHS). Well technically the symptoms may need to be more acute (vomiting), but I am pretty sure it’s the same mechanism and cause, just milder.
At my peak of consumption I also had it mildly with morning nausea. Though at the time I wasn’t using edibles or tinctures at all, almost exclusively oil cartridges.
It's not super addictive to me currently. When I was a youth I used to great excess and it eventually drove me to using harder drugs - one of which, xanax, or alprazolam, nearly ruined my life. I had to take anti-psychotics for years to deal with the absolute mental clusterfuck that poly drug use, but especially xanax, left me with. I stopped all psychoactive drug use, even alcohol, for quite a number of years. At least 5.
I currently only use legal D8, D0, and broad spectrum hemp CBD/CBG/etc. tinctures and edibles. Not daily, maybe 2-3 times a week, after work or on weekends. I mix the three, with a small amount of D0, maybe 5-10mg, maybe 35mg D8, and the broad spectrum to near excess. My experience of your symptom list:
* wake up more tired - If I'm up too late (like I am now) the grogginess can be worse.
* wake up with mild morning sickness - Not the stomach thing that people tend to talk about. I even have to take some pretty nausea inducing medications each morning and even those don't give me nausea. Strong stomach, I guess.
* wake up a bit foggy - Sometimes, especially if I take too much tincture, I have a bit of fog and things "glow". A bit like the afterglow of a psychedelic trip in terms of the way everything seems kind of bright and fuzzy and pleasant and I feel a bit dull.
* higher tolerance to caffeine - Hadn't noticed this one explicitly, but I think I have been having two coffees or energy drinks more often since I started using again in the past couple of years.
* less general stamina - I don't get this one, though I think I'm less apt to use the stamina. Physically or mentally it is no problem compared to not using I think.
* memory a notch worse in general - Definitely true. Most noticeable when watching Jeopardy. I totally failed tonight's Knighted Actors category, only getting Sean Connery, when I absolutely knew and could see the faces of the other 4 answers, but just could not come up with their names. It doesn't seem to affect me much in my work - I definitely think the perspective shift and enabling of more creative and abstract and unusual thinking is a net positive despite the minor memory drawbacks.
* less energy for physical activities - I actually find it enhances my desire to do physical activities. Lifting and cycling are both greatly enhanced experiences for me when under the influence, I find.
* increased anxiety while sober - Don't really get this, except perhaps when I drink too much caffeine.
* slightly higher sense of paranoia/conspiracy - Well, my baseline (see intro paragraph...think "holy shit the government is going to assassinate me and is talking about it openly on television") for this is so abjectly high that I don't notice it at all, or I do notice it briefly while pursuing some random stoned line of thought and laugh at the absurdity.
Psychedelic popularity goes in waves, but it never really "takes off" the way stimulant and opiate use does. I suspect it's due to the radomness of bad trips, basically.
There's been some interesting research that for most drugs, effects are heavily mediated by expectation - if you don't expect to enjoy it, you almost certainly won't, and the effect it has on you is likewise very learned - there are many cultures where they don't believe alcohol makes you more social, for instance, and where consequently, it doesn't.
But psychedelics are the big exception. They really do "work". But the flip side of that while you may get a wonderful experience despite not expecting one, you may also get a very bad one. And "guidance" isn't reliable in avoiding it, precisely because it's not expectation driven like other drugs.
I don't know if it's happening more now than in the past, but it's really just magical thinking -- people believing something is true because they want it to be true.
Moderation is so key otherwise you start believing your own thinking
It’s a tool and it’s easy to get into a way of life(the high life). That is what is more addictive I find.
I have definitely come to a point where I can see myself in others usage and it’s clearer to me that while all it’s ‘benefits’ are something great the key is to finding how to bring that into reality without having to invest it.
Question: Are US cannabis dispensaries run by independent qualified medical professionals, or are they simply businesses interested in flogging cannabis to everybody to make as much profit as they can [1]?
Given the (bonkers IMHO) profit motive of the US medical industry, I suspect the latter, though I'd be interested to hear from those with experience.
[1] Given some of the stuff I've read online, I'm pretty sure they would prescribe cannabis for an ingrowing toenail if you asked.
In most states it is a free for all, especially in non-medical stores. A few of the medical only states require them to be dispensed by a pharmacist, but that is the exception.
Plenty of people are, in fact, saying just that. In fact, I was told not too long ago that it kills cancer cells. Oddly enough, the guy who told me that just went in for a biopsy of a growth on his vocal chords...
I think some of the confusion stems from the fact the “medicinal” happened in some places before “recreational” happened. At least that’s how it played out in Massachusetts.
It required a prescription, so doctors were saying to take it, so it gives it more of a vener of safety.
Plus it’s not like it wasn’t readily available for people to try before.
> I think some of the confusion stems from the fact the “medicinal” happened in some places before “recreational” happened. At least that’s how it played out in Massachusetts.
People are actively marketing it as a pseudo-medical treatment (like OTC drugs, or vitamins), beyond the medicinal designation. I searched for a random dispensary in Watertown MA, and clicked the first edible on their site [1]. The description of the item is below…
> Go plant-based pills use an optimal blend of plant medicines, caffeine, and cannabis to create an all-natural performance enhancer for your brain and body. Go’s key ingredients increase blood flow to the brain and body in order to boost mental and physical energy and stamina.
This is not at all uncommon to find at various dispensaries and products. Even for products that don’t have additives (as the above one appears to). If you google “cannabis cure cancer” or “cannabis cure X” you;lol find countless thought pieces about how theres new evidence from one random trial that may blow open the door to curing whatever with cannabis. It’s got a very eastern-medicine meets wives-tales meets snake oil vibe.
Or even worse, "it's a sure-fire one way trip to an early grave via hell. Winners don't do drugs. Just say no." It hasn't gone away, people continue to go to jail because of this belief.
Beyond that when the idiocy of such claims are laid bare and it is evident that it was an insane, designed to scare, mountain of evidence-free lies "for the greater good - if we save even one child...", people stop believing what is said by "authority" on a kind of wholesale basis. Can you blame them? "Weed is a healthfood" isn't really much worse than the just say no truth disaster. People made money out of both sets of lies as well.
The pandemic really laid it in stark relief the amount of "authority propagated claims" that were actually wholly evidence-free and the lack of critical assessment of evidence by such authority (remember the "masks don't work, can't be transmitted through the air" line sprouted by people in white coats with PhD after their name claiming "the science"? Be they WHO, Fauci, NHS and all the rest of them?) We all actually had to go and do all that assessment of evidence and probability for ourselves because the authority was both lying and incompetent. No doubt many of us got our assessment "wrong" in avoidable ways if the highly trained had not also decided to "lie for the greater good" and merely stated what was known with the appropriate estimate of its certainty. [1]
It's always a mistake to knowingly tell lies leaning on the podium of authority, the interest always comes due and the rate is more than just unreasonably steep.
How bad is this one going to be? The incarceration level is bad enough by itself.
"What's the evidence for that?" When this provokes anger rather than being directed to published results, it's time to be /very/ suspicious. There hasn't ever been a reckoning for those who claimed authority to repeat lies, demanding their resignation at the minimum seems appropriate.
Decades of trained and qualified anointed robe wearing doctors and scientific researchers believing and repeating something in a textbook, copied from another textbook which got it from a grandparent textbook and never actually asked "what is the evidence in support of that? Where are the studies and replications?" It's really sobering. Do you think the places where you go indoors have updated their airflow accordingly yet? Do we have government minimum standards in building codes yet or even "in the pipeline?" Will you believe "authority" next crisis?
I used cannabis heavily for a significant portion of my life, participated in cannabusinesses over a decade ago, dealt it, etc... Also glad this research is being done. Pot is not purely evil or good. It's a complex stew of chemicals with varying effects on various people at various stages of their development. We need to continue to understand its effects while being cautious about promoting its use.
We assume that the loss of inhibition will automatically make people more likely to interact. But what if a person would like to interact less in the moment, but feels compelled to do so via social rules? In this case, being less inhibited would make them less sociable, not more.
The loss of inhibition is culturally learned, not biochemical. You can relax and let loose because society judges you less harshly when drunk (and, if you have internalized it, you judge yourself less harshly too). In some cultures it's not present at all, and even in some you may visit it's much weaker. Be aware of this if you get drunk as a tourist.
Alcohol binds to the GABA receptor mimicking GABA, hence providing a calming feeling. It allows people to feel less anxious in situations they might normally feel awkward. That is definitely not cultural.
Drinking regularly may desensitize your GABA receptors and hence cause a person to end up with more anxiety as a result of drinking. I rarely drink because I found it was exasperating my mental health issues.
That binding to GABA receptors "gives a calming feeling" is at best vaguely accurate. And even if it was accurate, there is in any case a mile from that to reducing social anxiety. Other "downer" drugs don't make people more outgoing, despite binding to GABA receptors, because we don't ascribe those qualities to them.
Even emotional states such as happy, calm, afraid etc. are higher level phenomena that don't map nicely onto hormones and neurotransmitters. The same low-level signal may even be interpreted in different ways depending on circumstance. There's a classic experiment with niacin demonstrating this, but like so many old behaviour experiments, it's ignored in favour of more "white coat" neuroscience these days.
It has different effects on people, some even turn violent. But a large group report being less inhibited in social settings. Thing is even a glass does it but few know when to stop, especially when young. Id get drunk sometimes when I was in my 20s and after being sociable for an hour or so I’d get giddy drunk.
So I in fact need alcohol chemically, like psychiatrically, under limited conditions. Limited. I payed for and received medical advice, that when I went out and partied, make sure to take my medication with me and take it then too, alcohol is too risky for and deficit too much downside. It's synergistic sometimes.
In a lot of ways in the US i see the issue here coming down to prohibition. If Marijuana was legal and regulated then the FDA could prosecute fraudsters that claim the drug is “completely hazard free miracle herb that doctors HATE”.
Of course irresponsible fools are taking advantage in a gap in the law to make short term profits.
The FDA could go after any merchants making those claims, but for the most part those memes are spread by randos on reddit/etc. The FDA doesn't and shouldn't go after random people saying stupid shit they probably earnestly believe.
The FDA does and should if the person spreading the bs about the Miracle Cure That Has Doctors Mad is also selling the miracle cure. Thats the real issue.
I feel like a lot of the boots-on-the-ground evangelist/sales people in this industry are themselves victims of fraud who have been sucked into pyramid schemes (now more commonly referred to as multilevel or network marketing for obvious optics reasons) and that society wouldn't especially benefit from bringing the hammer down on them.
I think there's a deeper problem here with the relationship between patient and doctor being undermined by a dysfunctional medical system, such that doctors can't spend any time with patients, patients can't afford to see doctors, and even when the stars align patients can't always rely on doctors to believe them and take them seriously. I think there's a reason why the particular empathetic and loving rhetoric of new-age bullshit is so appealing; it counters the sterile and often kafkaesque experience people have navigating the medical system.
I can totally imagine how much nicer it might be to drop by a friend-of-a-friend's house, in my neighborhood, where they give me a tarot reading, listen to my problems and validate my perspective, sell me something at a price that won't bankrupt me and that feels safe and natural, and they have all the time in the world to explain their theory on how it all works.
Obviously it matters whether or not the medication works and whether or not the provider knows what they're doing. But I think the problem is that there's a dysfunctional relationship here, not that law enforcement aren't cracking down sufficiently. And also that the people likely to have their lives turned upside down are losing money on the whole proposition, and are themselves just probably well-meaning people who are trying to hustle for a better life, and don't understand the harm they're causing.
Oh I completely agree with you there. Thats the way underground/illegal economies work generally. They identify a need not met by the legal market and charge a premium for something that they say addresses it.
Personally im fine with it if you (bad/nonsense example) buy tree bark from your guy marketing it as organic aspirin. I take more an issue when whats being sold as organic aspirin is closer to sugar flavored with arsenic
As I said, the FDA can go after the merchants. But most of the people spreading dumb meme beliefs about cannabis aren't selling it. If the FDA wants to make a meaningful dent in the spread of these beliefs, they'll have to earn the public's trust and convince people of the truth.
The FDA deals with enforcing standards on anything that is medicine (or claims to be) regulating vendors and suppliers. They’re able to enforce standards on any legal drug, however mj is still illegal at the federal level, leaving it to the DEA to enforce and they dont really care about standards and safety so much as seizing large sums of money from drug deals.
This. I have been having these conversations with my peers for over a decade. For aong time the narrative from my cannabis-using peers basically fell into the narrative that it wasn't bad at all for physical of mental health. I always took a more nuanced view, and point out that little research had been done during the illegal years. I always had a feeling that there was a cat to come out of a bag, and cannabis users have fought me tooth and nail on that point.
Fat includes transfat. This back-and-forth does an excellent job of underlining GPs point about those being complex subjects that require study and nuanced explanation.
Transfat? What is that? Oh, it’s that dietary fat which is illegal where I live and hence completely irrelevant to me.
There is hardly a back and forth here. Fat is essential and a lot of is not harmful.
The best you could do is to point out that heavily processed vegetable oils are harmful and probably give you too much omega-6. The cure? Just switch to things like olive oil and animal fats.
Compare this to sugar (also mentioned by the poster).. Which is... not essential to anything. Your body does not need it. It is actively harmful. Carbohydrates however can be fine, and fiber is good, but the particular kind of carbohydrate known as sugar (like the two molecular compounds more or less) are no bueno.
It's not that complex, actually. The vast majority of fats, all the natural ones, basically, are fine. Healthy, even. The weirdass plastic fats created by injecting hydrogen into vegetable oil are not fine.
Palm oils in particular are not very healthy and are suspected to be a leading cause of diet-induced heart disease. Not all fats are created equally, or in equal proportions. Palm oils are high in specific saturated fats that are linked to cardiovascular disease.
Palm oils are some of the most common fats found in prepared foods, especially foods that need solid fats at room temperatures. The majority of peanut butter preparations on shelves in the US have had all of their peanut oils removed and then replaced with palm oil for "better" texture and to prevent separation.
Plenty of Skippy's products have palm oil in them instead of peanut oil, and when I've looked, the "creamy" varieties of peanut butter tend to use palm oil for texture and stability. Store brands do the same thing in my experience.
Adding a little for texture is very different than removing the peanut oil and replacing it with palm oil. If that were the case, the saturated fat/total fat ratio would be much higher and the palm oil wouldn't be the 3rd ingredient listed after sugar.
What an interesting, and dare I say nuanced, point.
Let’s add to it how good fats can become bad through releasing free radicals, which happens at approximately the same temperature that a lot of animal fats are cooked at.
A few years ago, I did some reading on PubMed to figure out what fats are best to cook with. Came to the conclusion that extra virgin olive oil, which papers use the acronym "EVOO" for, is best for frying, whether that's pan or deep frying, and cooking in general.
It's high in monounsaturated fats and studies found that various compounds in EVOO prevent the formation of free radicals, volatile organic compounds, aldehydes like formaldehyde, etc compared to other cooking oils.
One study looked at the use of frying oils over time, since the longer the oils are heated, the more they decompose into harmful compounds. EVOO won out on that, too, and significantly inhibited the creation of harmful products. This would be relevant for restaurants, which tend to reuse oils over long periods of time, or anyone that cooks big meals for themselves or others. If you're going to be standing over a pan cooking for hours at a time, it's worth reducing the amount of harmful compounds you'll inevitably breathe in.
Typically refined oils are preferred for frying because they can be used at higher temperatures, but I've found cooking with EVOO to be just fine, just don't cook things at temperatures where it might start smoking.
Adam Ragusea does a lot of well researched videos around food science, and did one around using olive oil, even past the smoke point, fairly recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aFHrzSBrM
Some good interviews with food scientists, etc. Interesting for anyone wanting to learn a bit more on this subject.
I've swapped to using EVOO for most anything where it won't be too overpowering of a taste.
I recently bought ghee for the first time from Organic Valley. Looking at their website, I don't see how it's 30% palmitic acid, could you please clarify?
Palmitic acid is called like that because it was first isolated in palm oil but it's naturally occurring in animal fat and breast milk because it's naturally produced by them.
Its not they are adding palm oil to butter and ghee, it's the because palmitic acid is not unique to palm oil (well some unscrupulous producer do adulterate ghee with palm oil but let's not go there yet what I'm saying apply to pure ghee)
Very interesting point. Do you have any of your preferred research papers handy?
I went searching just now out of curiosity and did find this one [1] which indeed affirms what you're saying.
Personally, I reach for ghee when I want a neutral oil (e.g., for cooking scrambled eggs). And, like you, I reach for some fancy EVOO for everything else. I have to confess my approach to get here was a lot less scientific though; I mostly settled on these two using the metric of deliciousness.
Last one is about acrylamide, which I believe there is little evidence to believe it's harmful (it's been a while since I've actually looked at studies on it), but I assume the conditions that produce it also end up producing compounds that can be harmful.
Your body produces palmitic acid on its own, 30% of your fat is palmitic acid yourself produced. Reducing consumption of palmitic acid mostly reduces your quality of life, a balanced diet with a good biscuit and noeccessive calories does much more than eating dry, sandy biscuits and excess on sugar later on.
> Excess carbohydrates in the body are converted to palmitic acid. Palmitic acid is the first fatty acid produced during fatty acid synthesis and is the precursor to longer fatty acids. As a consequence, palmitic acid is a major body component of animals. In humans, one analysis found it to make up 21–30% (molar) of human depot fat,[16] and it is a major, but highly variable, lipid component of human breast milk
Yeah but I bet people that are sold on palm oil is evil are on low fat diet. And that the calories from fat they don't consume come from carbohydrates, not proteins.
That's a strange assumption and certainly isn't true for me. I limit carbohydrates as much as possible. The majority of my calories come from fat and protein.
Olive and avocado oil, flax seed oil, oil from fish and meat. I think there's a difference between eating palmitic acid that's part of a larger fatty acid profile in meat, and being conscious of just how much saturated fats you're eating, versus refined palm oil that's mostly been refined down to palmitic acid itself. If you're eating peanut butter, you might be literally eating refined palm oil by the spoonful, versus a relatively small amount of palmitic acid in meat.
Fine, true, palm oil is one of the rare exceptions. But the point is, this is not a tremendously complex issue. A person of average intelligence can learn about partially hydrogenated trans fats, and one or two other fats to avoid, and master this whole issue in a few minutes.
That describes both partially and fully hydrogenated fats, but only the partially hydrogenated fats contain trans fat. As far as I know fully hydrogenated fats are not any more unhealthy than other saturated fats.
- Genetic predisposition to heart disease / diabetes
- Types of fat and quantities consumed
- What else does your diet consist of
Edit: and these are just some risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. There's plenty more nuance still if we want to talk about quality of life, energy levels, digestive function etc...
It never fails to amaze me how the benefits of hindsight can cause us to forget how little we used to know or how long it took us to learn. This is the exact type of science that we’re arguing needs to be extended to cannabis.
Go feign surprise somewhere else, mate. Fat was the dietary scapegoat for decades because the powers that be wanted to sell us cereal-dominated diets, not because there was some amazing science that proved (at the time) that fat was bad and carbs were good.
There's many brands which have fully-hydrogenated oil, but I'm not aware of any still using partially-hydrogenated (what people typically mean when they're talking about trans fats), and I don't believe they're allowed to now.
It’s a symptom of polarized mindsets. For years the mainstream sentiment was “cannabis is evil and deadly”. Instead of correcting to a less extreme position, we overcorrected to an equally extreme position in the opposite direction.
> In my opinion, it should be considered similar category as alcohol, cigarettes, fat and sugar
You should look closer at the risks of caffeine. Someone was in the news dying from an accidental ingestion of a large dose just a few days ago. And there’s been some evidence for a while now that high doses of caffeine in energy drinks can lead to delusional behavior.
Coffee is not just caffeine, it contains many other psychoactive chemicals and some of them like to stay in brain fatty tissues for extended periods of time.
Your data is not representative, but your conclusion sounds reasonable to me. The fact that cannabis is forbidden while much more destructive drugs like alcohol are promoted in our culture is ridiculous. If only we treated cannabis the same we treat tobacco or alcohol :/.
The primary positive effect of cannabis in the general population is probably that it tends to interfere with alcohol consumption, due to excessive sedation. This probably explains the lack of negative population-level effects of cannabis legalization. The most concerning effect of cannabis is its tendency to increase heart rate.
Quite a bit of research is available on the effects of cannabis use — the problem is that people don't read it.
Bronchitis? I've known a lot of marijuana smokers, and I don't recall any of them ever having bronchitis.
>Mental health (associated risk of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, Cannabis use disorder)
Small but >1 ORs for a rare disorder like schizophrenia (base rate ~0.02%) sound scarier than they really are. Many recreational activities are associated with a similar increase in the risk of concussion (base rate ~1%), and yet they are actually recommended for general health. Correlation of recreational drug use with depression/anxiety has a causal direction problem.
Others in this thread have linked studies about the effects on the heart. It remains to be seen what the long-term risk profile is.
That might be the complete slide but it is not the complete picture. This disorder for example causes pretty extreme digestive issues, and it has not been in the medical literature for very long.
some haphazardly chosen references from a 2013 bibliography on the subject, compiled by someone who probably doesn't want her name showing up in an internet forum.
Aryana A, Williams MA. Marijuana as trigger of cardiovascular events: speculation or scientific certainty? Int J Cardiol 2007;118:141-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcard.2006.08.001
Bachs L, Morland H. Acute cardiovascular fatalities following cannabis use. Forensic Sci Int 2001;124:200-3.
Cappelli F, Lazzeri C, Gensini GF, Valente S. Cannabis: a trigger for acute myocardial infarction? A case report. J Cardiovasc Med 2008;9:725-728.
Jones RT. Cardiovascular system effects of marijuana. J Clin Pharmacol 2002; 42(11 Suppl.):58S-63.
Sidney S. Cardiovascular consequences of marijuana use. J Clin Pharmacol 2002;42(11 Suppl.):64S-70S. (Found no association.)
Tormey WP. Royal College of Pathologists’ autopsy guidelines on sudden cardiac death: roles for cannabis, cotinine, NSAIDs and psychology. J Clin Pathol 2012;65:187-188.
so there's a starting place to look into it.
maybe the intervening 9 years have demonstrated that it isn't an issue.
> I'm not aware of any proponents of driving while high.
> Again, who's advocating for pregnant women to consume cannabis?
I thought the comment was making clear what was considered a risk, not what is being advocated? People certainly do drive while under the effects of cannabis, I've known a few. I don't know anyone who consumed it while pregnant but I'm sure they do exist.
> I'm not sure anyone thinks you should smoke a bunch of drugs before studying for finals.
> The most concerning effect of cannabis is its tendency to increase heart rate.
Can you please tell me why you think heart rate is more concerning than the psychological effects? Effects which the paper itself mentions and you seem to downplay for some unobvious reason to me.
For me, the difficulty is discerning causation from correlation. Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious mental issues. I am interested in knowing the root cause of mental issues, because then we are given the opportunity to affect behaviours to improve people’s lives. A correlation is often little help to anyone but other researchers.
I didn’t read the paper but the abstract didn’t allude to any insight into causation versus correlation. If an abstract of a paper ignores that issue, then I often don’t bother reading, because there is not enough value from studies measuring correlation (for my personal use for any information).
> Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious mental issues
If there’s a causal link, I wonder in which direction is more common? I know kids from my neighborhood who now smoke a lot of weed. I think most of them had issues long before trying weed and weed was more of an escape for them, much like booze is for many.
Psychological effects are, in general, reversible. Also, they tend to be dose-dependent, and rather obvious. It's easy to avoid them by limiting consumption. I stopped smoking weed for other reasons, but I didn't really care if my memory formation was impaired after 9 PM. Effects on the heart, on the other hand, can build up for years without much warning, since most people don't get regular EKG.
> Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious mental issues
Do they have actual, diagnosed "mental issues", or are you judging that some of their behavior is out of the norm for your experience and thus it must be a mental issue?
Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with diagnosed mental illnesses that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.
Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with no psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.
Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with “undiagnosed” psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.
No, I am not a professional psychological specialist.
Yes, I have some experiences to be able to make intelligent “non-professional” judgements about psychological problems. My definition of a psychological problem is one where the problem is seriously negatively affecting ones life, and ones skills are not successfully mitigating or correcting the problem. Environmental issues have a part to play in that. My friends and acquaintances have a wide range of ages.
You seem to be fishing for something - perhaps you could have just made your point instead (with caveats).
Disclaimer: I don’t use any form of THC or CBD. No strong reasons against it, just not my thing. I certainly have nothing against those that want or need to take THC or CBD.
Sure, I was fishing. I guess I should have just outright said "Your individual experiences with individuals in a group are invalid when discussing things that can be empirically studied, such as the effects of using cannabis on various groups," and went on with my day.
By the way, labeling an undesirable group with "mental issues" has been done many times in the past, sometimes even with "good" intentions.
A well-designed study may be more revealing, but the individual experiences are legitimate and should not be discarded solely because studies are possible.
A strong enough signal will show in a sample of one.
With a correct model, cause and effect can be predicted without any samples (scientific progress often occurs this way).
And some people’s intuitions are remarkably astute. Albeit there are a lot of people who have incorrect intuitions and don’t know it.
A cannabis example would be strong paranoia after one sesh. More ingrained paranoia (qanon?) that I have seen linked to regular heavy usage doesn’t feel to me to be a stretch of the imagination.
More likely, they probably can't wade thru the noise to find it - search cannabis and health and be prepared to search thru hundreds, if not ten's of thousands of pages of propaganda claiming that it is nothing but good for almost any health condition you have - real or imagined.
If you search PubMed, you will find case reports of other similar incidents. Now, no denying this is an extremely rare adverse effect, but still a quite frightening one. (Also worth stating, many of these reported cases of cannabis-induced psychotic penile self-amputation involve no known history of gender dysphoria.)
I have a feeling that these individuals (I could only find two in my pubmed search) were suffering from schizophrenia, not cannabis-induced psychosis. Maybe you could make the argument that the cannabis caused the schizophrenia, but that's still a different diagnosis.
In the case you link the guy had smoked weed for two years prior with no apparent issues. Yes his psychosis resolved after he stopped using cannabis, but he was also treated from that point onward with anti-psychotics (the kind you would treat schizophrenia with). It was probably the anti-psychotics, not the cannabis cessation that made him not psychotic.
I hear this argument every time someone does something bad on psychedelics and cannabis. I’ve also heard that, if the patient had no history of schizophrenia or related disorders, they must have just had it latent and were bound to get it anyway.
Bottom line is there is no way for any individual to really know if they have latent schizophrenia anyway, and I think it’s a conveniently non-disprovable explanation for why psychedelics and cannabis aren’t bad.
I think calling cannabis bad or good is a false dichotomy. Sometimes peanuts kill children, that doesn't make peanuts "bad". Maybe cannabis causes schizophrenia in rare cases, does that make it "bad"?
In this specific case, the authors started him on a treatment for schizophrenia and he got better. Why continue him on this treatment if they thought it was simply the cannabis that caused it (as he would abstain from then on). Also, they increased his dose prior to discharge.
I'm not arguing that cannabis didn't cause his schizophrenia, just that this doesn't sound like cannabis induced psychosis, which is a different diagnosis with different prognosis.
I've long had this sense, that if I started smoking weed every day, I probably would develop psychosis sooner or later. I feel like my connection to reality is at times somewhat tenuous, and heavy cannabis could easily disturb it enough to break it entirely. I suppose I could be wrong, but that's a hypothesis I'm not going to test.
I do think some people can have that "latent" potential yet have the good fortune of never activating it – and cannabis definitely has the potential to do so (although most recreational drugs probably can given sufficiently heavy long-term use).
(I tried cannabis once, years ago, I could see why people like it but I didn't feel any great urge to repeat the experience – and worries like this also discourage me – which is probably for the best.)
See this paper – Veeder TA, Leo RJ. Male genital self-mutilation: a systematic review of psychiatric disorders and psychosocial factors. Gen Hosp Psychiatry. 2017 Jan-Feb;44:43-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2016.09.003 Epub 2016 Sep 14. PMID: 28041576.
To quote its abstract:
> Data were obtained from 173 cases: genital mutilation (n=21), penile amputation (n=62), castration (n=56) and combined amputation/castration (n=34). Common psychiatric disorders included schizophrenia spectrum (49%), substance use (18.5%), personality (15.9%) and gender dysphoric disorders (15.3%)
So, while it is almost 50% schizophrenia spectrum, substance use is the second most common cause (although personality disorders and gender dysphoria are not far behind, and the difference between the three might not be statistically significant.)
Thanks, I searched for cannabis specifically which would explain why this didn't show up. I imagine much of the substance use auto amputations are in people who do things like PCP.
Good point, I edited it to add a note. I should have warned people but I forgot.
Also, my mother is a doctor, and when I was a teenager (even tweenager) I used to love to read her medical journals and textbooks–it has made me rather immune to the unsightly images they sometimes contain–although, interestingly, images which I can view nonchalantly in a medical context will still freak me out if divorced from that context.
I know some who don’t touch a drop of alcohol. Maybe some early 20 yos do but that lifestyle can’t be too productive, pot and alcohol amplify eachother’s effects and get you seriously intoxicated
It’s still a DUI if you drive on it. The week after it was legalized in my state, a person managed to put their car through the second story of a home. The toxicology report showed the only thing in their system was cannabis.
Cannibis can be in your system for weeks or months, so take the authority reports that the accident was caused by cannabis intoxication with a grain of salt, and assume that absent other evidence it might be that the user in this case wasn’t high at the time.
I’m not saying this to say no accidents has been caused by cannibis, but that there’s currently no way to tell current level of cannabis intoxication. Authorities will use the lack of nuance in their favor.
> Cannibis can be in your system for weeks or months
No.
You are confusing the tests for cannabis metabolites (that can tell if you smoked weeks ago) to tests for THC, the substance that gets you stoned and leaves the bloodstream as you sober up.
A driving impairment test will test for THC, not metabolites. Nobody cares if you smoked last week, only if you are under the influence when driving.
In the UK, having 2ug / litre of THC in the blood is a drug-driving offence. At a minimum you will loose your licence for 1 year.
> 2ug / litre of THC in the blood is a drug-driving offence
So I can have up to 8ug of THC in my blood? If I took 0.1mg (100ug) of THC (and would be very NOT high in this case, as it is 1/100th of a "normal" dose) I would probably be over the limit in that case, so sure they may be able to test for THC in the blood, but the limit is so laughably low as to effectively ban cannabis users from driving.
this is probably the second-most studied thing in forensic toxicology after alcohol use.
> Cannibis can be in your system for weeks or months
and the levels of active compounds[1] in somebody recently using, vs someone months away from use look very different, and their nature will generally work to the benefit of the defendant when reviewed by a competent forensic toxicologist.
[1] - not a yes/no from shitty screening methods; that kind of information comes off of quarter-million dollar mass spectrometers. they should be able to separate all of the inactive and active compounds from each other, enumerate them and list their exact concentrations in the blood.
Show me that they could tell if I was smoking one hour ago versus one day ago? That’s the point here, I bet they can’t even reliably tell one week versus one hour. Maybe they can tell off I had only smoked several months ago, that won’t help me tomorrow if I smoke today before dinner.
A traffic collision is not evidence of inebriation, though, since people get in collisions when not inebriated. I'm talking about someone following them that saw them weaving, not holding a phone, perhaps nodding asleep, or maybe even someone saw them smoking a joint, then a just-lit joint was found at the scene.
Driving high and drunk are idiotic to equate. Not saying you can't be impaired high, but people can also drive after a joint better than anyone after equivalent alcohol intoxication.
This smells like teetotaling more than evidence-based discourse.
This is an interesting claim, or I'm reading it wrong. Wouldn't "equivalent intoxication" mean the driver in both cases equally shouldn't be behind the wheel?
Somewhat related, but I'm still curious how they test marijuana intoxication level in drivers. Is there an equivalent BAC-type test, especially considering how long weed stays in the system?
> Wouldn't "equivalent intoxication" mean the driver in both cases equally shouldn't be behind the wheel?
No, "equivalent" here is general-purpose intoxication, not something calibrated to driving. Since the effects are so different, we should expect significantly different levels of driving impairment to be likely.
That the drugs work in very different ways so we shouldn't assume they have the same intoxication profile? I feel like that's basic knowledge.
For where I say we're looking at general purpose vs. driving-specific, that just seems to me like the most reasonable statement they would have been making.
I think the confusion might lie in the use of your term "equivalent intoxication" then. Especially when you then mentioned their different intoxication profiles. How exactly would you define equivalent intoxication levels in something with different intoxication profiles?
Not my term, but some kind of test might make sense, or the average of several things. I mean, how do you define intoxication levels at all? You can't just, like, measure reaction time and say you're done.
Yeah it's not easy with alcohol either. Many people have almost no impact on their cognitive abilities or reaction times with a BAC of .08, while others could be legal to drive with a .06 but shouldn't be.
