4 ms·

Shame on Ars for this clickbait trash- with "In mice at least, although humans might want to be cautious." as a subtitle it is hard to take the rest of the arti

by pil4rin 11y ago

Shame on Ars for this clickbait trash- with "In mice at least, although humans might want to be cautious." as a subtitle it is hard to take the rest of the article seriously. Then you find out they were injecting mice with some unspecified amount of THC within Saline solution (please correct me if there is a specified amount, but I had to dig to find this at http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/10/09/1514962112.DCSupplemental/pnas.201514962SI.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/10/09/1514962112.DCSu...) "THC (THC Pharm) was diluted in 0.9% NaCl (saline) solution containing 3% (vol/vol) DMSO and 2% (vol/vol) Tween-80 and administered intraperitoneally (i.p.) at a final dose of 3 mg/kg to pregnant females for 5 consecutive days, from E12.5 to E16.5. Control mice were injected with vehicle solution." This will be on Fox news within a week, and when it is- they will monger fear in older generations (those who typically control laws by either voting or creating bills) that are too lazy to research and come to their own conclusions.

6stringmerc 11y ago
Thank you for posting context where it lacks. I've thought that site has had some, well, issues for a while. Mostly when they decided it'd be a great "scoop" to go deep into their forum archives for anything and everything Snowden had said there. While it was within their rights, and an interesting story as a concpet, the execution was so tabloid and tone-deaf to criticism I figured there weren't the type of site for me.
ashrust 11y ago
It looks like the paper says they were given 3mg/kg THC per day for 5 consecutive days. So it does seem the dose is specified. It's pre clinical and far from surprising but 3mg/kg is a lot of THC, the equivalent of using ~1g of strong stuff by yourself (assuming no THC is lost during consumption).
- pil4rin 11y ago
  Yeah I found that- but they never stated dilution amounts or total fluids given to the mice on those days, unless they mentioned it elsewhere.
- pil4rin 11y ago
  After looking up the potency of currently popular edibles, the highest dosage I could find per item was the Cheeba Chew Deca Dose(http://www.cheebachews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/deca_15.pdf http://www.cheebachews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/deca_1...) @ claimed 175mg of THC per piece (actual was 162.1). As far as I know, this is a heroic dose of THC of which the typical user would not frequent. In order to match the dosage within the mice, I'd have to eat just over 6 of these per days for a working week to produce the same results (obviously without comparing intake medium). I understand this was to attempt to see if there were any issues that should be researched further, but the Ars article took it at face value and claimed we should (as humans) avoid during pregnancy.
pil4rin 11y ago
A few of the comments on the Ars article are stating the dosage of the THC was given at 3mg/kg- but the word "dilution" along with "intraperitoneally" lets us know it was delivered via liquid injection into the gut directly. Are we sure the amount of THC injected was 3mg per kg of body weight, or was that the diluted solution (of which there was no total liquid measurement for). This decent question asked within comments: "Jesus, that dose. 3 mg/kg, An average mouse is 0.0192~ kg if the googles are right. A dose of edibles around 10mg for a 68kg~ (150lb) human will result in a pretty faded human, so that works out to... mm.. 0.147mg/kg if I did the math right. So the dose being tested here is literally 20 times higher than the average dose a human will ingest. I don't know a single person who could eat 3 pot brownies a day, let alone 20. I'd be willing to wager a lot of money on 20 pot brownies a day, every day, for any length of time would be enough to cause negative health effects! Silly question - why don't they titrate up? The amount used in this study is a massive, massive dose beyond what even a hardcore recreational user would smoke on a daily basis."-TK
- jws 11y ago
  Biologists routinely test with larger concentrations in order to make the effect more visible. Sometimes this creates a new effect where you overwhelm a process. Sometimes it just shortens the test and saves the lives of a lot of mice. If you are a programmer, think of it as stress testing. I'm testing a concurrent memory allocator right now that I suspect sometimes corrupts itself. I'm hitting with an insane barrage of allocation and deallocation calls, way more than any recreational software user would ever do, trying to provoke it into failing. So far, no luck, but if I can get a failure I will have saved a great deal of time over testing it with normal call rates. On the other hand, if I tested it by just doing an insane number of allocations, I would provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use (out of memory).
  - codeulike 11y ago
    provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use and so ... why bother? (wrt biology, not your programming equivalent)
justaman 11y ago
A similar study was done on chimps in the late 50's. Chimps were setup with a "oxygen mask" where, instead of oxygen, marijuana smoke was present. Ultimately they reported that the marijuana smoke killed the chimps rather than asphyxiation.

by pil4rin 11y ago

6stringmerc 11y ago

Thank you for posting context where it lacks. I've thought that site has had some, well, issues for a while. Mostly when they decided it'd be a great "scoop" to go deep into their forum archives for anything and everything Snowden had said there. While it was within their rights, and an interesting story as a concpet, the execution was so tabloid and tone-deaf to criticism I figured there weren't the type of site for me.

ashrust 11y ago

It looks like the paper says they were given 3mg/kg THC per day for 5 consecutive days. So it does seem the dose is specified. It's pre clinical and far from surprising but 3mg/kg is a lot of THC, the equivalent of using ~1g of strong stuff by yourself (assuming no THC is lost during consumption).

pil4rin 11y ago
Yeah I found that- but they never stated dilution amounts or total fluids given to the mice on those days, unless they mentioned it elsewhere.
pil4rin 11y ago
After looking up the potency of currently popular edibles, the highest dosage I could find per item was the Cheeba Chew Deca Dose(http://www.cheebachews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/deca_15.pdf http://www.cheebachews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/deca_1...) @ claimed 175mg of THC per piece (actual was 162.1). As far as I know, this is a heroic dose of THC of which the typical user would not frequent. In order to match the dosage within the mice, I'd have to eat just over 6 of these per days for a working week to produce the same results (obviously without comparing intake medium). I understand this was to attempt to see if there were any issues that should be researched further, but the Ars article took it at face value and claimed we should (as humans) avoid during pregnancy.

pil4rin 11y ago

A few of the comments on the Ars article are stating the dosage of the THC was given at 3mg/kg- but the word "dilution" along with "intraperitoneally" lets us know it was delivered via liquid injection into the gut directly. Are we sure the amount of THC injected was 3mg per kg of body weight, or was that the diluted solution (of which there was no total liquid measurement for). This decent question asked within comments: "Jesus, that dose. 3 mg/kg, An average mouse is 0.0192~ kg if the googles are right. A dose of edibles around 10mg for a 68kg~ (150lb) human will result in a pretty faded human, so that works out to... mm.. 0.147mg/kg if I did the math right. So the dose being tested here is literally 20 times higher than the average dose a human will ingest. I don't know a single person who could eat 3 pot brownies a day, let alone 20. I'd be willing to wager a lot of money on 20 pot brownies a day, every day, for any length of time would be enough to cause negative health effects! Silly question - why don't they titrate up? The amount used in this study is a massive, massive dose beyond what even a hardcore recreational user would smoke on a daily basis."-TK

jws 11y ago
Biologists routinely test with larger concentrations in order to make the effect more visible. Sometimes this creates a new effect where you overwhelm a process. Sometimes it just shortens the test and saves the lives of a lot of mice. If you are a programmer, think of it as stress testing. I'm testing a concurrent memory allocator right now that I suspect sometimes corrupts itself. I'm hitting with an insane barrage of allocation and deallocation calls, way more than any recreational software user would ever do, trying to provoke it into failing. So far, no luck, but if I can get a failure I will have saved a great deal of time over testing it with normal call rates. On the other hand, if I tested it by just doing an insane number of allocations, I would provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use (out of memory).
- codeulike 11y ago
  provoke a failure completely unrelated to normal use and so ... why bother? (wrt biology, not your programming equivalent)

justaman 11y ago

A similar study was done on chimps in the late 50's. Chimps were setup with a "oxygen mask" where, instead of oxygen, marijuana smoke was present. Ultimately they reported that the marijuana smoke killed the chimps rather than asphyxiation.