It’s strange that all of the comments are looking for ways to dismiss this result (and this seems to happen generally with negative cannabis findings online).
Is it not entirely possible a drug and method of consumption which stresses the cardiovascular system increases odds of an adverse cardiovascular event?
We should have had these kinds of studies nearly 100 years ago, but the Reefer Madness era bans stunted our science based knowledge of the plant. Within just a short time frame of the rules being relaxed, we've learned how to extract so many different compounds from this one plant from CBD, CBG, CBN, Delta-8, Delta-9, Delta-10, etc. We now know which compounds get you high, and which ones can be used without fear of testing positive.
There seems to be a mad rush on people being able to do research and be first to publish, so I'd expect some results to be questionable. However, isn't that exactly how it is supposed to work? Do a test, release the results, others verify/validate. If something comes up questionable, refine the test, release the results, verify/validate again.
Yeah. I'm not trying to die of cancer or have reduced mental capacity. I want these studies.
I know from my own anecdotal experience that d9 (reg THC) gives me incredible anxiety but d8 does not. My mental health is better than it was before I had access to it. I don't want to be a guinea pig, but we've been hearing fear, fear, fear for the last six decades.
Reefer Madness was released in 1936, so closer to eight decades. The rule changes in the 60s were more about racial, for lack of better word, control than anything.
Without wanting to sound all pot-head hippy, this plant seems to be pretty magical. If it turns out that the "good" stuff can be used by removing the one part that gets you high, then we've lost so much potential because of fearmongering. It's infuriating that in the 20th century into the 21st we were no better than the days of Capernicus for stopping science because of fear.
while i don’t disagree with you at all, it’s not just from the right. the whole anti-vaccination movement started on the opposite side of the political rainbow.
It started everywhere, for every liberal hippy mom there was a christian conservative mom home schooling their kid to avoid vaccine requirements of public schools.
This transcends politics, humans are dumb fearful critters.
yeah, agreed. that was the point i was trying to make to the parent comment — that this behavior isn’t exclusive to the “right” or “left.” it’s a people problem. or, more exactly, it’s a religion problem (not in the sense of spiritual faiths, but in the tendency for people to seek out and congregate around a shared system of beliefs.. and then stick to those beliefs beyond all reason).
It's not exclusive to right or left but we need to look at which side has the anti-science momentum going on. Which side has leaders who advocate injecting bleach to kill Covid?
I think there’s been a bit of an overcorrection about weed in the last couple years. Weed smokers have been on the defensive against a lot of bullshit (and untrue/hyperbolized) propaganda for almost a century, and thus a lot of them have gotten somewhat inoculated against any negative findings about cannabis, to a point where they will dismiss virtually anything that has even a remote chance of making weed look bad.
I think it's also because many of us have seen extreme exaggerations on the dangers of cannabis that turned out to be wrong. It definitely take me years of using it to acknowledge the (lesser) negative effects after seeing how much of the negative things I was told about it as a kid were fake.
Just because others have made the same mistake in the other direction doesn't mean it's good to do the same thing in pursuit of a different conclusion.
Skepticism is good, but if you find yourself preferring one outcome over another then you should be extra critical of stuff that supports your preferred outcome because you're more likely to want to give it a pass.
Similarly you should be more willing to entertain stuff that goes the other way because you're more likely to incorrectly dismiss something that's actually true.
People like cannabis. Naturally they minimize any suggestion that it's not all good. I do the same with Lisp, smoked meats, and predestination. I see no mystery here.
It’s certainly not all good but I’d put it in a different league from alcohol, for example. Cannabis might cause elevated heart risk over a period of years. Alcohol can stop the heart of a healthy person in a single night of binge drinking.
Indeed, you made no assertions about cannabis; you made an ad hominem assertion that people only minimize any suggestion that cannabis (or smoked meats, or Lisp or anything else) is "not all good" because they like it; as if they could never use any objective tools, like data.
All that oceanplexian's response proved "so nicely" is that people will sometimes fall for ad hominem assertions and try to engage them.
Someone in Seattle said this to me once when I was sitting on his front stoop. I was on the phone and saw him walk up and I jumped and hurried off his steps. I will never forget his words because I was high af at the time
All European preserved meats are categorically terrible for you. It doesn’t matter where the nitrates come from — celery or otherwise. We’re talking a 20% jump in cardiovascular issues so it’s not marginal.
That’s because you can’t have a rational discussion about cannabis online. Anything negative is dismissed, apologised away, compared immediately to alcohol or you are accused of providing anecdotes by the proponents.
This in itself dismisses the credibility of the proponents in my mind.
The funny thing is you don’t see this with alcoholics. They know what they’re doing is bad and admit it easily but can’t stop.
The funny thing is you saying "you can't have a discussion online" as we are having a discussion online and you are responding to someone who said what you were thinking.
I am completely open to the concept that cannabis consumption is not always healthy for people, depending on delivery method, quantity, and the state of mind of the individual.
I also, almost without qualification, will dismiss the health risks as a rationale for continuing its general prohibition. And (wait for it)... yeah, it's because there are myriad substances and behaviors that can cause harm, but we don't outright ban them.
So no, I'm not saying "don't tell me how it could be harmful" - especially as an occasional user, I want to know as real studies (and trusted anecdotes among friends) come about. Just don't use evidence of some adverse effects as a justification for prohibition, which politicians and puritans are quick to attempt.
To clarify a point on the latter, it’s a temporal thing. I used to be a proponent so there’s no Puritanism here.
In my 20s I knew people who used it. I used it myself occasionally. Hell I even dated a dealer once. No problems. Pro legalisation.
In my 30s some of those people drifted away or grew out of it. Apart from a few. They ended up burning their relationships for it due to it being tied intimately to their identity.
In my 40s now I’ve seen the last few people I know who used it suffering through mental health problems. On top of that there have been a few specific events including someone rolling a car onto my front lawn through my fence when speeding. They were prosecuted for drug driving.
I see a lot of people who haven’t tread this path yet and were where I was. This slow decline and the realisation that there are people who genuinely are unable to act rationally and put others at risk suggests that apart from medical use the net benefit to society is negative.
Now the real negative basis is mental health and at least here in the UK there isn’t the care or support for anyone already. Adding cannabis usage to that is a disaster waiting to happen.
Ultimately the long term study is something we’re not going to have the answers to for over 30 years as we see the impact on society. Hopefully by then it won’t be another fuck up like adding lead to gas.
But even ignoring that effect, most people smoke it and smoking is monumentally bad for you regardless of what you are smoking.
My two heaviest marijuana smoker friends are 100% sure that any study that mentions some detrimental effect from marijuana is part of a big-pharma conspiracy. Their argument is that "it's a natural herb, it's impossible for it to do harm".
Pretty sure different companies competing in similar sectors aren't above stoking FUD about their competitors, no matter who they are or what industry they are in.
I heard Tesla fans speculate that coverage of Tesla's cars failing is driven by a secret cabal of short sellers and car manufacturers that are conspiring with the media, which apparently is also out to get Tesla.
Notice this more. When people have a side on a topic they tend to find every excuse for its shortcomings and easily believe every positive.
People seem to have a lot of trouble accepting that things they favor have negative aspects and things they don’t have merit. The world isn’t just good and evil, most of it is striking a balance between positives and negatives and we all need to get better at doing this objectively instead of picking a side and afterwards finding a justification.
I think that many of the commenters are pointing out that this study is poorly done in some key areas, which make any kind of conclusions based on it of little value.
We’re not going to get large scale randomized controlled trials for marijuana use any time soon.
We can definitely debate the methods.. but the findings from this growing body of evidence should probably be the ‘default’ stance, until we see more causal or controlled correlational evidence pointing the other way.
More specifically, whenever such an article hits the headlines most comments will gladly assume that the authors are insultingly ignorant about basic statistics and overlooked a glaring confusion between causation and correlation, which the commenter immediately spotted without even reading the article.
I find the awesome lists not to be that useful. Mainly because they seem to include way too many things.
Rather than 10 library/book/etc. recommendations on every topic, I'd love just a few: "Best beginner book" .. "Best advanced book" and a few alternatives.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get very different results or value from just Googling the same topics.
Ugh, 10 most... Never ever google anything “Top 10” or “10 most ...”. It is filled to the brim with blog spam and autogen articles. Never search “Top” anything on YouTube. You’ll get the bottom of the barrel content. SEO has ruined it for all and forever.
Although I don't find them too much useful either, it's good that there is _something_ which is "curated", so when I point a newbie to it, they can start looking around for alternative solutions / implementations / products-projects of a particular topic.
And when I say "newbie", sometimes, surprisingly, that can mean an experienced professional, who just wasn't exposed to that particular topic ever before...
These lists certainly have the risk of being too opinionated, and the reader being mislead into one or the other direction, so definitely have to be taken with a grain of salt.
I guess the problem with baking it down to "the best x" is that it's too subjective. At least if there's a few choices, and people can add to them relatively easily (a PR with little friction) people can kind of choose the best for them.
You would think – but viruses don't necessarily become less deadly.
The virus wants to maximize transmissibility, and that might require trading off further against the host's health and increasing its death rate.
An example is Myxoma virus. It was intentionally introduced to pest Australian rabbit populations (to cull them) and studied.
After ~30 years of evolution, they found the dominant strain had a 70-95% death rate and left long-lasting lesions. Other strains with higher (~99%) and lower (~50%) death rates weren't as stable & prevalent.
Once a virus is transmitted (enough), what happens to the health of its host is irrelevant.
It basically needs to be extremely contagious without symptoms that stop the spread - like killing the host.
Which in part this virus has, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic are as contagious as symptomatic. If it's enough to spread, doesn't matter much if the host dies after a few days or not.
>Infectiousness may peak before symptom onset (7). Viral loads appear to be similar between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients (8), although the implications for infectiousness are unclear. People experiencing symptoms may self-isolate or seek medical care, but those with no or mild symptoms may continue to circulate in the community. Because of this, those without severe symptoms have the potential to be “superspreaders” and may have an outsized influence on maintaining the epidemic.
The Moderna mRNA vaccine was producing 103 degree fevers (and passing out) in a Phase 1 volunteer. [1]
If that's the reaction in small sample with a healthy 29 year old (most volunteers had high fevers), I can't imagine old or unhealthy people will be unharmed. I was more concerned about the mRNA vaccines being at risk initially.
Phase 1 trials are used to determine dosage. Different participants are given different doses of the vaccine so researchers can identify the proper dosage with maximal efficacy and minimal side effects.
The 29 year volunteer who experienced the 103° fever received the highest dose of the vaccine given out during the Phase 1 trial. Such a adverse reaction is not unexpected during a Phase 1 trial, but the vaccine did move forward to Phase 2 and Phase 3 so it appears that the lower dosages do not trigger such a reaction.
It’s disingenuous to call it “the Moderna mRNA vaccine” when it was more accurately “one early Moderna mRNA vaccine candidate, which was ruled out for being far too high of a dose”.
There was a pretty high severe systemic adverse rate in the high dose group (20%). Severe local response rate was 5% in the middle dose. [1]
I have no idea how this compares to other vaccines, and you can pessimistically extrapolate a bit from this tiny, healthy sample from the high dose (n=15 in middle dose group).
I'd imagine some % of people when this scales to millions will have a bad response, and the high dose group might provide some model of the worst cases.
Fevers are very common in vaccines, normally. It is an indication that the immune system developing an immune response. It is not an indication of complication.
Yes, but at some threshold wouldn’t this indicate a problem?
103F+ fevers are relatively rare from typical vaccines, and from my understanding a lot of the damage from COVID is immune response related.
mRNA vaccines and our immune responses to these are uncharted territory, so I’m not sure how much we can reason by analogy from other vaccines vs. first principles.
High fevers are not uncommon in babies receiving their first vaccines.
I'm not sure it indicates a problem. A fever is, itself, just an immune system response, not a "symptom" of disease.
You are correct that there is a threshold beyond which a fever becomes unsafe, but it's above 103. But fevers of 103 in the test group do not indicate that fevers of say 105 will occur in some patients.
mRNA would not have hit Phase III if found unsafe in earlier phases. If mRNA succeeds things will look really great, since it in principle it can protect against many other viruses and upcoming pandemics with slight modifications. The most reported side effect for mRNA is mild stiffness at application spot.
The idea a vaccine can be safely made in less than a year is absolutely insanity. Many of these things shouldn't even be considered vaccines in the traditional sense.
Are there any vaccines out on the market today that are not one of the two: 1) inactivated virus, 2) attenuated virus (run through another host/egg or a related virus found in an animation that's less harmful to humans)?
Everything I've found indicates all our current viral vaccines are one of those two (excluding bacterial vaccines, which shouldn't be called vaccines either).
The modeRNA vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, a completely new type of vaccine. While theoreticall less likely to have adverse effects, it did have adverse effects, and its efficacy remains a question. These are completely new types of vaccine, that presumably would need even more testing than the relatively well understood attenuated viruses.
Then is it a vaccine at all? Vaccines were traditionally live, dead, or attenuated virus/bacteria injections, some with adjutants, to stimulate an immune response.
Technologically speaking, it's bicycle vs airplane. Similar underlying purpose, entirely different implementation.
Both a bicycle and an airplane are transportation vehicles. Likewise, anything that illicits imunity is a vaccine, regardless of how novel the approach is.
Every time we see or hear an expert on the topic of COVID-19 vaccines, she/he is either circumspect to the point of pessimism (this is rare, but see e.g. Robert Gallo) or obviously trapped in a spiral of wishful thinking (this is common). We've never made anything like this hypothetical drug. Forget about election day. I'll be surprised if we have a commonly-available and effective COVID vaccine in 2021.
Not the question you asked but the Chinese company Sinopharm has started phase 3 trials of a classic inactivated virus vaccine (and Bharat Biotech is starting phase 2 trials as well in India). The difficulty will be mass-producing it, of course, but we aren't necessarily reliant on novel vaccine technologies.
Interestingly this mirrors other disciplines. Consider for example Schelling's model of segregation in social science, which is (probably not by accident) very similar to cellular automata.
Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations.
And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful.
And indeed, creating such models is the true "art".
So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.
yes, this is a starting point. I agree this topic has considerable depth which I omitted.
there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub, Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment Internet learning
you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend many hours on it.
I actually do think most of the topics I mentioned are 'covered'. But many were covered briefly, as a day or week long unit in my personal experience, instead of as a core area.
My point isn't about crossing these items off a checklist, but re-balancing the effort we put towards these core skills, instead of memorizing arcane trivia about U.S. history, literary figures, and some impractical Math/English skills that seem to be more of the focus.
I went to a "good" school, whatever that means, but I've found myself and many of my peers lacked many of the skills and deeper understanding of these topics even during/after university.
I still meet many people who don't quite understand what a stock is, and most people seem surprised to hear Wi-Fi is a type of invisible light. Many people seem to be pretty bad at communication. About 1/3 of the US seems to not be convinced we are actually apes.
Is it not entirely possible a drug and method of consumption which stresses the cardiovascular system increases odds of an adverse cardiovascular event?