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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 ha

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.

itsoktocry 4y ago
>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"
- xattt 4y ago
  The same sentiment can be applied to current psychedelics research.
  - taurath 4y ago
    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”.
    - kevinpet 4y ago
      You're missing the point of the conversation if you think this is about "reputable researchers".
    - tsol 4y ago
      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
      - opportune 4y ago
        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.
        tmpz22 4y ago
        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.
        opportune 4y ago
        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.
- taberiand 4y ago
  But surely no one has been saying that cannabis isn't a risk for pregnant women, let alone that it could be beneficial to smoke it, right?
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    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...
  - Auracle 4y ago
    Nearly 70% of dispensaries in Colorado recommended cannabis for morning sickness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5970054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5970054/
    - PointlessLogin 4y ago
      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.
      - sgent 4y ago
        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.
    - taberiand 4y ago
      I stand corrected and also oh my God.
- acomjean 4y ago
  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.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > 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. [1] https://watertown-adult.ethoscannabis.com/stores/Ethos-Watertown-Adult-Use/product/go-drops-5mg-100mg https://watertown-adult.ethoscannabis.com/stores/Ethos-Water...
- harry8 4y ago
  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. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... 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?
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Or even worse, "it's nothing but beneficial!" 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.
  - jdougan 4y ago
    Yeah, this should have been studied 30 years ago.
- pjc50 4y ago
  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.
  - PointlessLogin 4y ago
    > 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. I suggest this binary positioning is a very American phenomenon; the cultural reasons for which I'm unable to suggest a reason for.
    - dumpsterdiver 4y ago
      So you're making a suggestion but you don't know why? Uh... thanks?
      - PointlessLogin 4y ago
        sigh It is possible to observe behaviour without knowing what causes it. "I suggest drinking heavily is a very British phenomenon; the cultural reasons for which I'm unable to suggest a reason for either."
    - d3fault 4y ago
      > 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. [0] I've lived in both the US and Europe
avgcorrection 4y ago
Fat is an essential macronutrient.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  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.
  - Bud 4y ago
    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. Done! Was that really so nuanced? No. It was not.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      Try explaining to an average person how they can identify which food products at the supermarket have noble-gas-fat-products in them and which don't.
      - lolinder 4y ago
        "Check the nutrition facts label. If it has any trans fat, put it back."
        kube-system 4y ago
        Trans fats are now banned in the US so there's not much of a need to look.
        rootw0rm 4y ago
        just went shopping yesterday (Southern California) and much of the peanut butter still has trans fats.
scythe 4y ago
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.
- ejb999 4y ago
  >>the problem is that people don't read it. 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.
- robocat 4y ago
  > 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).
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    > 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.
hollywood_court 4y ago
I agreed with all of that except for fat. You need fat. You don’t need any of the others.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  I need alcohol to be sociable.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Drink, drink! 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.
  - virtuabhi 4y ago
    Hello, Mr. Koothrappali :)
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > I need alcohol to be sociable I always laugh when I see this. Alcohol turns me into an introvert.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      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.
      - vintermann 4y ago
        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.
irrational 4y ago
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.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  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.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    > absent other evidence Perhaps a car embedded in the second floor of a house?
    - ok_dad 4y ago
      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.
  - sigstoat 4y ago
    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.
jamesssssss833 4y ago
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.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  What is stopping them from going after fraudsters now?
  - jamesssssss833 4y ago
    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.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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.
  - jamesssssss833 4y ago
    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.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      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.
HereIGoAgain 4y ago
So much this. It's become so white washed that you would think it's actually good for you if you only listened to media.
eej71 4y ago
Agreed. My baseless and unsourced opinion is that the hardware we call the brain which makes consiousness possible can only take so many hits.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RHSman2 4y ago
  I don’t think the jury is out in that point dear fellow.
01100011 4y ago
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.
sammalloy 4y ago
> 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.
- quantified 4y ago
  The difference between chewing a pound of coca leaf and snorting a pound of cocaine is also pretty stark. The dose makes the poison.
- mertd 4y ago
  You can die from drinking too much water. Dosage makes the poison as the sibling comment said.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    How dangerous could caffeine be anyway? Surely in the case of nuclear war it would never be found in the urinalysis of the one that started it.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      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.
beckman466 4y ago
> entire populations do tell us more what you see
hunter-gatherer 4y ago
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.
pyuser583 4y ago
Personally know someone who began having psychotic episodes after using cannibis. Episodes stopped when stopped using. We need to treat pot like we treat alcohol or tobacco. It’s dangerous. People shouldn’t be using it.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  The plural of anecdote is not data. What if their psychosis was triggered by decades of drug war propaganda?
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    I only presented one anectdote, so why does the plural matter?
- BossingAround 4y ago
  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 :/.
jl6 4y ago
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.
RHSman2 4y ago
There should be a warning on humans: ‘careful, you’ll probably be an idiot’ I’ve had a relationship with this most intriguing of plants and that is what I have concluded at 45 years on this planet.

itsoktocry 4y ago

>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"

xattt 4y ago
The same sentiment can be applied to current psychedelics research.
- taurath 4y ago
  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”.
  - kevinpet 4y ago
    You're missing the point of the conversation if you think this is about "reputable researchers".
  - tsol 4y ago
    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
    - opportune 4y ago
      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.
      - tmpz22 4y ago
        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.
        opportune 4y ago
        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.
taberiand 4y ago
But surely no one has been saying that cannabis isn't a risk for pregnant women, let alone that it could be beneficial to smoke it, right?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  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...
- Auracle 4y ago
  Nearly 70% of dispensaries in Colorado recommended cannabis for morning sickness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5970054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5970054/
  - PointlessLogin 4y ago
    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.
    - sgent 4y ago
      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.
  - taberiand 4y ago
    I stand corrected and also oh my God.
acomjean 4y ago
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.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > 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. [1] https://watertown-adult.ethoscannabis.com/stores/Ethos-Watertown-Adult-Use/product/go-drops-5mg-100mg https://watertown-adult.ethoscannabis.com/stores/Ethos-Water...
harry8 4y ago
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. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... 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?
dylan604 4y ago
>Or even worse, "it's nothing but beneficial!" 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.
- jdougan 4y ago
  Yeah, this should have been studied 30 years ago.
pjc50 4y ago
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.
- PointlessLogin 4y ago
  > 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. I suggest this binary positioning is a very American phenomenon; the cultural reasons for which I'm unable to suggest a reason for.
  - dumpsterdiver 4y ago
    So you're making a suggestion but you don't know why? Uh... thanks?
    - PointlessLogin 4y ago
      sigh It is possible to observe behaviour without knowing what causes it. "I suggest drinking heavily is a very British phenomenon; the cultural reasons for which I'm unable to suggest a reason for either."
  - d3fault 4y ago
    > 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. [0] I've lived in both the US and Europe

avgcorrection 4y ago

Fat is an essential macronutrient.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
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.
- Bud 4y ago
  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. Done! Was that really so nuanced? No. It was not.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    Try explaining to an average person how they can identify which food products at the supermarket have noble-gas-fat-products in them and which don't.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      "Check the nutrition facts label. If it has any trans fat, put it back."
      - kube-system 4y ago
        Trans fats are now banned in the US so there's not much of a need to look.
        rootw0rm 4y ago
        just went shopping yesterday (Southern California) and much of the peanut butter still has trans fats.

scythe 4y ago

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.

ejb999 4y ago
>>the problem is that people don't read it. 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.
robocat 4y ago
> 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).
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > 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.

hollywood_court 4y ago

I agreed with all of that except for fat. You need fat. You don’t need any of the others.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
I need alcohol to be sociable.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Drink, drink! 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.
- virtuabhi 4y ago
  Hello, Mr. Koothrappali :)
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > I need alcohol to be sociable I always laugh when I see this. Alcohol turns me into an introvert.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    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.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      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.

irrational 4y ago

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.

ok_dad 4y ago
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.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > absent other evidence Perhaps a car embedded in the second floor of a house?
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    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.
- sigstoat 4y ago
  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.

jamesssssss833 4y ago

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.

_-david-_ 4y ago
What is stopping them from going after fraudsters now?
- jamesssssss833 4y ago
  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.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
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.
- jamesssssss833 4y ago
  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.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    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.

HereIGoAgain 4y ago

So much this. It's become so white washed that you would think it's actually good for you if you only listened to media.

eej71 4y ago

Agreed. My baseless and unsourced opinion is that the hardware we call the brain which makes consiousness possible can only take so many hits.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RHSman2 4y ago
I don’t think the jury is out in that point dear fellow.

01100011 4y ago

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.

sammalloy 4y ago

> 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.

quantified 4y ago
The difference between chewing a pound of coca leaf and snorting a pound of cocaine is also pretty stark. The dose makes the poison.
mertd 4y ago
You can die from drinking too much water. Dosage makes the poison as the sibling comment said.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  How dangerous could caffeine be anyway? Surely in the case of nuclear war it would never be found in the urinalysis of the one that started it.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    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.

beckman466 4y ago

> entire populations do tell us more what you see

hunter-gatherer 4y ago

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.

pyuser583 4y ago

Personally know someone who began having psychotic episodes after using cannibis. Episodes stopped when stopped using. We need to treat pot like we treat alcohol or tobacco. It’s dangerous. People shouldn’t be using it.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data. What if their psychosis was triggered by decades of drug war propaganda?
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I only presented one anectdote, so why does the plural matter?
BossingAround 4y ago
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 :/.

jl6 4y ago

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.

RHSman2 4y ago

There should be a warning on humans: ‘careful, you’ll probably be an idiot’ I’ve had a relationship with this most intriguing of plants and that is what I have concluded at 45 years on this planet.