I have no idea how hard it is really but if it's true it is impossible, it is infuriating. People do research on substances that can kill a person with an invisible amount, blow up buildings, poison vast areas, all kinds of deadly things. But take a drug that any smart high-schooler can (and frequently does) access it - and it's impossible to research it! This is so infuriatingly insane.
There are plenty of pharmaceutical drugs out in the wild that have known side-effects. Chemotherapy completely nukes a person's body but is legal because the harm it induces is deemed worth the problem it solves (cancer).
Despite this, marijuana which is in easy circulation on the streets in dubious forms of dosage/strength, has such a political air over it that most countries still won't even look into the medical applications of it!
As a scientist, the double standards are incredibly frustrating!
In US I think it's even worse - it is known there are medical applications of it but the federal government just pretends they do not exist and still qualifies cannabis as "drug that has no known medical use". They don't refuse to look - they look, see, know it exists and still say "no, it doesn't exist".
"It is often difficult for researchers to gain access to the quantity, quality, and type of cannabis product necessary to address specific research questions on the health effects of cannabis use"
Being unable to research the effects of specific strains and how cannabis is administered beyond oral or combustible methods limits our understanding of the true net effect in reality. Different methods for vaporizing and strains with low THC - high CBD would likely show very little evidence for negative effects on the user. However, consistent tobacco rolled cannabis cigars for a recreational user may show loads of evidence for negative effects on health. Like eating unhealthy vs eating healthy. Not all food is created equal, just like cannabis and its methods of use.
As a computationalist, I believe it is perhaps when we have full understanding of the internal workings of the brain and how different components interact with each other to ensure the proper functioning of the mind in such a degree that it is possible to simulate one with behaviour indistinguishable from that of its biological counterpart then we can figure out exactly what effect THC can have on computations performed by the brain and how that would subsequently affect a person's health.
I always discover something new about the mind when I do marijuana. Or perhaps that is merely how it feels like.
Speaking of alternative facts, this report basically demonstrates the the DEA and NIDA have been promoting "alternative facts" about marijuana and cannabinoids for some time (even self-contradicting themselves by paying UMiss to grow marijuana for glaucoma patients).
I should think the same is true of many psychoactive substances, and effectively all drugs of abuse. Experience and observation tend to bear out this surmise. A more useful question might be why this is such a controversial point when it comes to cannabis, and cannabis alone.
Because it's a popular drug that's mostly harmless for most people in "normal" dosage and there has been a lot of disinformation spread by authorities. Now most cannabis consumers tend to see everything like a government conspiration, not believing even true adverse effects.
Heavy use for enough time will get you in a mist of passivity and poor memory. Every experienced weed smoker would have told you so much, a few years ago. Now there's a resistance to concede even that.
Your last paragraph is conjecture based on hearsay, and I disagree. I know many consistent "users" and all are successful, hardworking people who are engaged in their lives. Is it nice to relax for a night and chill? Of course. But to say that it affects how a person acts throughout their life is just wrong. But, lazy/passive people will find any excuse that isn't personal responsibility, so I think your study is flawed at best.
Consistent users that are successful and hardworking are not usually also extremely heavy users. When I picture a heavy user I picture someone who gets high all day, every day.
If you have to "picture a heavy user" that implies you are using your imagination. That implies you don't know any. I personally know many daily, heavy users that are very successful, research scientists, 3D developers, media production digital artists, producers, and even studio heads. The idea that cannabis makes people passive is simply wrong. The idea that it impacts creativity or drive also simply wrong. If you don't have examples of successful daily pot users, those around you either hide it from you, or your circles do not have any. I work in technology's creative industries, and I have examples all around me.
> When I picture a heavy user I picture someone who gets high all day, every day.
that's what I think of as well. however, many people will interpret "heavy user" as meaning like, someone who smokes a joint with any regularity at all. once a week might count as a heavy user by some definitions.
the disagreement on what counts as heavy use is really the problem here. what you're describing is someone who is basically high all the time. very little disagreement that being high on cannabis profoundly effects your concentration and memory while you're high. a lot of controversy and ambiguity about what happens the day after.
My last paragraph isn't conjecture based on hearsay. It's more like 40 years of (sometimes first hand) experience and observing a lot of people. Ignore it at your own risk.
Weed is a religion. My most downvoted comment on Reddit was about stoned elementary school kids coming to my wife's class in the morning- apparently it doesn't happen and it's all just hearsay and gov't conspiracies.
This may be a bit odd, but I looked up this comment pretty easily because I was curious what it said to elicit such a strong response and I feel like you misrepresent it here.
It isn't your most down-voted comment. It has -3 and you have about 10 other comments with lower scores. In the comment you solely mention the smell of kids. This doesn't mean that they are using cannabis at all. This could easily be similar to kids whose parents smoke cigarettes. Yes second hand smoke is bad for the kids over time, but that doesn't make them stoned by any means.
I don't disagree with you though that there are dogmatists around cannabis. There definitely are and they don't help anything.
Hah, I forgot about baiting the French in that WWII thread...
My wife works at a low socio-economic status school. They're not using directly, no they're not stoned to the 'whoa, dude' level, it's more of a general 'grogginess' that kind of goes away late in the morning. It's definitely 'anec-data' of the finest sort, but it's something the teachers notice and comment on.
What I don't understand is why no one ever thinks that suddenly 'legalizing' a drug that produces a docile population is somehow more ominous than the previous gov't action to suppress it.
How does she differentiate between those kids and the ones that simply have a biological clock mis-matched with school? Do they all definitely smell of the smoke?
I ask mostly because I could have been that kid. I'm that adult. I smoke now, but my parents didn't and I didn't start while I was in school. My mother fought to get me awake for years: I wouldn't even wake up early for Santa Clause presents. Seriously, I chose to sleep and wait to open them until after we went to Grandma's house.
Believe me, there are plenty of issues that lead to these kids being groggy- but the faculty also do their best to keep up on who's Mom has a new boyfriend, who's living out of their car, who shows up at school at 6:30 cause that's when the parents leave for work. It's a combination of intrusive, frustrating, and necessary to make sense of what's going on in their lives and how that gets brought into school.
When we talk legalization on these sites it's usually from a middle class view of harmless recreation, but people who are irresponsible about other things aren't likely to be fastidious in their smoking habits either.
Same boat here. My mom had me start drinking coffee in like the 5th or 6th grade because I told her I felt physically ill for the first 3 hours of school every day.
> Heavy use for enough time will get you in a mist of passivity and poor memory. Every experienced weed smoker would have told you so much, a few years ago. Now there's a resistance to concede even that.
depends on what you're counting as "heavy use" and "enough time". also depends on whether or not you still smoke, and how much, and how often.
I don't disagree that there are some values for those parameters that do lead to "passivity and poor memory". we just don't really have a clear view on what the range of effects is across different values for those parameters, and how much variability there is within individuals. heavy use for one person might only be moderate use for another.
the resistance to conceding those obvious points is really just based on ambiguity. yeah, every experienced smoker is familiar with the cannabis haze. the questions are really more about the specifics than the generals.
There's certainly a debate about what constitutes "heavy use".
My thoughts on it are that once or twice a week, single doses that intoxicate probably aren't that bad.
The issue is that there are some people who ingest cannabis not only on a daily basis, but throughout each of those days they are consistently ingesting it. I can't imagine this not having a detrimental effect, at least while they are using it this way.
Everyone knows people from high school/college too who started off as great high performing students and absolutely burned out at least in part due to abuse. Part of the problem is it makes you okay with not improving your condition.
Though cannabis use can increase apathy, i don't think there is a lot of correlation, lots of kids step out of sports and other activities as they age, for many reasons.
I am a daily user and have always had a burning desire to improve myself, my situation and the world around me. My list of hobbies and interests increases constantly and I haven't dropped very many, even the ones I suck at.
Because the negative effects are being used as an argument to support continued prohibition, when full-scale legalization could well cause a reduction in overall negative drug-related social effects -- both from reductions/moderations in worse-drug use (eg, alcohol), and from the negative effects of the criminal justice system.
I say this as someone who doesn't have a horse in this race: because pot is demonized as a "drug" and so the health effects are exaggerated.
So it's helpful to have a constant reminder that a lot of us regularly consume alcohol, which is has high addictive potential and very negative long term effects, and yet is not demonized by society and moderate drinkers are perfectly fine. The basis of comparison to something that we're very familiar with helps put things into perspective. It's not to say that the negative effects don't exist, but that we as a society tolerate something with similarly negative effects all the time and live normal lives.
Because the negative effects are always mentioned around cannabis as justification to keep it highly illegal. If we apply the same standards, then alcohol would be prohibited, and we all know that doesn't work.
Dosage is an important factor though. At low dosage alcohol has minimal long term impacts, alcoholism has a lot of associated mental and physical effects.
I don't thing we have a good idea what the long term effects for a moderate smoker are. So, There is moderate evidence of no statistical association between cannabis use and: • Incidence of lung cancer (cannabis smoking) (5-1) may be true, but again I think the data is rather poor and short term.
Back to your point, statistics linking mental Heath issues to smoking is not causual especially when There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• Better cognitive performance among individuals with psychotic disorders and a history of cannabis use (12-2a)
It has been more than a couple of years in Holland, Portugal and other places. People seem to smoke less when it's legal. And we have enough experience by now to see through the silly propaganda when it comes to health risks. The war on cannabis is about profit and control; there are no health risks to speak of; on the contrary, it helps a lot of people live normal lives without poisoning themselves with stupid chemical cocktails.
Why should consumption decrease when the substance is legalized? The only real explanation I can think of off the top of my head is if certain types of legalization are really inconvenient (highly regulated sales and coffeehouses, vs. the black market).
Cannabis use might not have actually doubled. According to your link, "The percentage of Americans who reported using marijuana in the past year..."
The amount of people reporting increased. It is difficult to tell if actual use increased or if people are just more likely to admit they use it because of decreasing taboos.
Have you been to these places lately?
In all seriousness, increased schizophrenia among heavy pot smokers (especially in teenage years) has been consistently reported for a long time, and the effect is extremely significant. I suppose it is possible schizos are drawn to heavy pot use in their teenage years as a sort of self medication, but it seems unlikely.
Honestly I'm not sure why that seems unlikely. People self medicate with it for depression and they are only now scratching the surface when it comes to the mechanism at play.
Same thing with smoking. Schizophrenic people are far more likely to smoke. It turns out that they very recently discovered this was a form of self medication as well.
> In all seriousness, increased schizophrenia among heavy pot smokers (especially in teenage years) has been consistently reported for a long time, and the effect is extremely significant. I suppose it is possible schizos are drawn to heavy pot use in their teenage years as a sort of self medication, but it seems unlikely.
Actually, that's exactly it - people with a predisposition for schizophrenia are known to be drawn to drugs (particularly nicotine) in a form of self-medication. People with depression and ADHD are more likely to smoke tobacco as well, though the link there is a lot less strong than it is for schizophrenia.
The link between cannabis and schizophrenia has also been studied, and it appears that marijuana can catalyze the onset of symptoms, but it won't produce them in someone who wasn't already going to develop schizophrenia anyway.
So yes, if your family has a history of mental health issues, you probably want to stay away from marijuana. But otherwise, you're probably safe.
former GF has a father whose life-long schizophrenia was triggered after heavy drinking during draft military service. no other substance involved. messed up for rest of his life.
if you have it in you, anything can trigger it. legal drugs, illegal drugs, stress & hardships of life and work, serious accidents, failed relationships and so on.
"Trigger" an already existing genetic underlying condition?
Do you possibly think you might have that back to front? Seems pretty likely that people with sudden onset of unusual mental conditions turn to readily at hand psychoactive substances to help manage it.
You're right, many of these studies use weak methods to infer causality that don't fully rule out that possibility. Usually the problem is that they fail to account for poor diagnosis accuracy - someone with (for instance) active schizophrenia might not be diagnosed for quite some time after it presents, and any window where the person is undiagnosed but symptomatic is a period where self medication of symptoms could appear later in the data as having "caused" the symptoms when they are finally diagnosed.
I don't think this is typically deliberate, but it's sloppy, at the very least confidence levels should be adjusted to account for assumed error rates.
Some studies fall apart completely (in the sense that you cannot reject the hypothesis that increased marijuana use is driven by current symptom strength, not the other way around) under reasonable assumptions about how correlated symptom strength and diagnosis probability are.
I don't think this is just a theoretical problem, either. At least anecdotally, most of the people that I've known with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia were undiagnosed for many, many years before finally figuring it out, despite clearly having a lot that was "wrong". There are massive stigmas that make sufferers hesitant to disclose the true severity of their symptoms, even when asked, until they become unbearable.
People with schizophrenia (your "schizos" comment is fucking disgusting, btw) are more likely to be male, and to smoke cigarettes. Both of these are linked to increased cannabis use.
It would be ridiculous to say that cannabis smoking causes someone to be male.
> I suppose it is possible schizos are drawn to heavy pot use in their teenage years as a sort of self medication, but it seems unlikely.
We know that the increased use of tobacco is because of self-medication.
It doesn't seem that unlikely that people are also self-medicating with cannabis.
We do not know enough yet to say which way round the causal link is.
A lot of bullshit has been "consistently reported" for a long time around Cannabis. Can you think of any possible reason why this might be? Any at all?
The dopamine theory of schizophrenia is one possibility. Pot use used to be considered a drug model for schizotypical thinking as well. Why wouldn't spending a long period of time thinking in a schizoid manner have something to do with the etiology of a mental illness involving extreme schizoid thinking? Certainly seems to be the case with downward spiral of some forms of depression.
People are reacting to this as if it is personal, which is a mistake. I've used more than my share in my youth. Obviously correlation doesn't imply causality, but simply dismissing the possibility because it makes you feel bad is weak minded thinking.
There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• The development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users (12-1)
But it will also make you crazier.
To sum it up, you'll become a smarter, crazier version of yourself.
It's possible at-risk people are self-medicating, and that's why the correlation exists. (Or any number of confounding factors, such as at-risk people being more likely to break social norms.)
> Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use the greater the risk.
Very scary! I wonder if age influences this.
This is really weird though:
> In individuals with schizophrenia and other psychoses, a history of cannabis use may be linked to better performance on learning and memory tasks.
Especially given the Psychosocial conclusions that:
> Recent cannabis use impairs the performance in cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention.
And
> A limited number of studies suggest that there are impairments in cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention in individuals who have stopped smoking cannabis.
Hmm, they state this in "Injury and Death":
> In states where cannabis use is legal, there is increased
risk of unintentional cannabis overdose injuries among
children.
But then there's no LD50 determined for cannabis. So how could one overdose on cannabis?
"Overdose injuries" is a ridiculous umbrella classification that covers both fatal and non-fatal incidents. By this definition, the average college student experiences at least one alcohol related overdose injury a week but, oh lord, think of the children!
That said, we've come a long way from the era of Hearst, Anslinger, and the racist "degenerates" rhetoric.
Remaineds me of the joke: Most famous last words: "Hold my beer". And in spite of the ubiquitous alcohol related injuries & mortalities alcohol is peddled 24/7 on every marketing platform to date. Dichotomous & disingenuous argument.
You can go ahead and keep thinking weed is harmless, but many drugs have started out being promoted as "harmless" including heroin, which was promoted as a cough suppressant in the early 1900's. What about cigarettes? How much propaganda did you see touting them as "harmless" despite all the scientific research to the contrary? And what about the surge in cocaine use in the 1970's and 80's? People thought it was just a harmless drug people used on the weekends.
While I do believe there are many positive uses for marijuana, thinking its harmless is just being naive.
I think you're either misinformed or ignoring things if you don't think it's treated as much more trivial than driving drunk and very common, especially among young users.
Sure about that? The first paragraph of your link is pretty ambiguous, both in the vague criterion for "tested positive" in the first 10% and the unspecified doubled number for "had used pot within hours of a crash"... how many hours before for the crash 1st group? A urine or blood test could show up to 2 weeks prior. What number doubled in the second? It also fails to acknowledge that 2013 had the least number of fatalities in Washington State in over a decade[WSTC data, bullet 7].
There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• Increased risk of overdose injuries, including respiratory distress, among pediatric populations in U.S. states where cannabis is legal (9-4b)
There is no or insufficient evidence to support or refute a statistical association between cannabis use and:
[...]
• Death due to cannabis overdose (9-4a)
I guess the full report goes into more detail on "overdose injuries, including respiratory distress".
Read a funny statement in a study the other day. The lethal dose of cannabis for dogs is 3g/kg. Don't know if it translates to humans but if the order of magnitude is about the same then it takes on the order of 300 grams ingested to kill a human.
It's true. Marijuana is actually one of the very few substances with no known LD50. Technically there is hypothesized to be one, but it is so high that it would be literally impossible to ingest that much (you'd suffocate from lack of oxygen first, and that's assuming you somehow weren't incapacitated from being so high that you were able to keep smoking. So medically, that's considered equivalent to "no lethal dose exists".
It starts to get really complicated once you involve edibles, though - you can't just straight up eat plant matter and have it take effect as if you'd eaten a brownie, even though the dosage would technically be much, much higher if you straight up ate a bud.
I'm no scientist nor a baker so I don't know the details behind it, but as far as I know the THC needs something to bind to before it's digestible, usually a fat - probably why cannabutter is the most common way of getting it into edibles.
And that doesn't even account for the CBD which I have zero idea about with regards to edibles.
THC is far from the only compound in cannabis. There are hundreds of them, with virtually all of them having had far less study done on them than THC has.
If a human were to die of cannabis inhalation or ingestion, it's not clear which of the hundreds of compounds in cannabis would be the one most responsible for the fatality. It's quite possible that it wouldn't be THC.
It's also that THC isn't very psychoactive until it's been decarboxylated. The process of heating it within a particular temperature does this (e.g smoking, vaping, baking)
> If you eat it you can ingest the dosage confirmed to kill dogs
You would almost certainly vomit long before you hit that threshold.
If you also took an anticonvulsant and just straight-up downed raw plant material, I suppose it's possible... but at that point, we're stretching the meaning of "lethal dose".
Don't know much about the extracts, but I know in legal states concentrates of various types have been developed and people are getting progressively better at concentrating them further.
Is it possible we could see an overdose at some point once physical volume becomes much less of a factor?
Unheated Marijuana doesn't have psychoactive effects. And like another poster said, the effects don't work through digestion without it binding to a fat. So just eating plain buds, even if they've been decarbed won't do much of anything.
Edit: Found a study [0] that references the 3g/kg figure. That LD50 is for pure THC, not pure cannabis.
"Lethal toxicity is reportedly rare with the THC LD50 = 3000 mg/kg in dogs.[2, 13] Both dogs that died in this study likely ingested significantly lower doses than the LD50 of THC; however, it is also possible that these dogs were more sensitive to THC or THC butter contains additional compounds that can be fatal in dogs."
tl;dr: Quite rare but non-zero instances of vomiting, respiratory distress, or coma, in some cases requiring intubation (which, if you've never had that done, is a pretty annoying intervention, and can cause airway injury), or mechanical ventilation.
From the full report:
"Accidental ingestion of cannabis by young children can result in respiratory failure and coma, as noted by several case reports (Amirav et al., 2011; Appelboam and Oades, 2006; Carstairs et al., 2011), and the consumption of cannabis edibles has been identified as a contributing factor in the accidental death of at least one adolescent (Hancock- Allen et al., 2015)."
...
"among all calls to U.S. poison centers in involving single-substance exposures to cannabis, death was the outcome in two cases in 2012, no cases in 2013, and one case in 2014 (Mowry et al., 2013, 2014, 2015), although the reports do not indicate whether cannabis exposure was a contributing factor in these outcomes. Cannabis was not found to be the main cause of death in any of the fatal intoxications among drug addicts submitted for medico-legal autopsy and toxicological analysis in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden in either 2007 or 2012 (Simonsen et al., 2011, 2015)."
...
"In a study on unintentional pediatric cannabis exposure, Wang et al. (2016) described a case where hospital staff members were unable to resuscitate an unresponsive 11-month-old child who presented with tachycardia and metabolic acidosis and who tested positive for THC in a urine drug screen. The authors noted that any relationship between cannabis exposure and the patient’s symptoms or outcome was unclear. Although presented here for discussion, these case reports did not inform the committee’s conclusions on the association between cannabis use and overdose death.
By comparison with the minimal literature on cannabis-related overdose death in adults or children, several studies reported on potentially serious symptoms associated with cannabis exposure in pediatric populations. Le Garrec et al. (2014) reported that, over a 3.5-year period,
seven children aged 11–33 months were admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit in Paris with accidental cannabis poisoning. All of the children had central nervous system symptoms, including drowsiness and coma, and three were intubated and placed on mechanical ventilation for less than 24 hours. Between 2010 and 2013, an Arizona poison control center received 49 calls related to unintentional medical marijuana ingestions among children aged 7 and younger (Lovecchio and Heise, 2015). Among the 39 records with complete information, the most commonly reported symptoms were lethargy (48 percent of cases), an inability to walk (53 percent), coma (10 percent), and vomiting (21 percent)."
There are no valid conclusions to be had there. I'm old enough to remember the "this is your brain on drugs" ad's from the 80's, these "studies" are all of a piece with that nonsense.
One of the most surprising findings in this report for me was:
"There is moderate evidence of no statistical association between cannabis use and:
• Incidence of lung cancer (cannabis smoking)"
I thought it was pretty well established that inhaling any burning plant matter increased the chance of lung cancer. But I guess not.
Not surprising was:
"There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• The impairment in the cognitive domains of learning, memory, and attention (acute cannabis use)"
and most worrisome was:
"There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
• The development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users"
