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What to do about marijuana

Friday Funny: 10 hilarious marijuana memes

A lot can and has been said about what the role of cannabis should be in medicine and society so I wanted to just bullet point a few things to try to get everyone caught up to speed

- The main active substances in cannabis are THC and CBD.

- THC is the psychoactive ingredient and depending on the strain, the concentration can be anywhere from 0.2% to up to 30%.  The average THC concentration was 2% in 1980 and went up to almost 9% in 2006 because usually users are looking for a high and producers got smarter about how to make that possible.

- The lifetime dependence risk for cannabis is 9%, but doubles for people who start when they are kids.  Compare that to alcohol (15%), cocaine (17%), heroin (23%) and nicotine (32%).  Is it safer than those other things?  Probably but it also comes down to frequency and dose.  Like if you're using it to relax a few times a week after work, as with alcohol, it's probably not a big deal.  But if you can't fall asleep without it or you need it to get through your work day, there's something underlying that's probably more the problem

- Cannabis does mess with the developing brain so kids shouldn't use it.

- "Reefer madness" is a real thing, kinda - high doses of THC can cause exacerbations of underlying or undiagnosed depression, anxiety, and other mood and psychotic disorders which are often unrealized at the young age people start using.  The same thing can happen with cocaine and other intoxicants too.

- The other part of cannabis, the CBD, is probably beneficial.  I have to say "probably" a lot here just because there's been poor or little research thus far because of how tightly the government has regulated it.  CBD probably counteracts some of the pro-psychotic effects of THC and also functions as an anti-inflammatory to some effect.

- The medicinal varieties come in not just the raw herb forms, which are designed to be smoked in some manner, but also vape pens, and edible forms including foods and tinctures and also topical forms like balms and oils and lotions.  There has been concern about the food because they can look like candy and there were cases of kids eating them accidentally.  As with tobacco, we have no idea what the long term effects of vape pens are but so far there haven't been any.  Though on rare occasions they do explode due to some cheap battery issues.

- Given that we don't have great solutions for pain from a medicinal standpoint as all the prescription medications have their drawbacks, more and more I've seen medicinal cannabis be a good solution for a lot of people.  However, like pretty much all supplements and things outside the regulation of the FDA, it's always tough to attest to the safety of what you're taking.

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