Could legal marijuana be changing how we treat anxiety? A new study in JAMA Network Open reveals that in states with legal cannabis, fewer patients are filling prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications like benzodiazepines.
frequently using marijuana for anxiety has similar drawbacks to frequently using medications like benzodiazepines
That’s because users almost always take too much. One should never smoke anything (you can’t measure any dosage this way), and one should always cut things into pieces: cookies, brownies, edibles; even ¼ of a gummy is often enough. People severely underestimate how powerful this stuff is. It’s medicine and should be respected as such.
I would agree with this advice. Additionally smoking limits the physiological harm substantially. Smoking anything is terrible for you. Vaping is (probably) better, but still harmful.
It is likely that without the extremely long and stupid prohibition on marijuana (that’s still ongoing) we’d have researched proper pharmaceuticals that harnessed the benefits of marijuana while limiting the drawbacks. Medications that limited impairing functionality.
However thanks to our dipshit government and harmful puritanical underpinnings of our society we have almost completely banned marijuana research for the better part of a century. Emotions trump science and people with power unilaterally decided that there was no benefit from this plant and maintained that decision for years.
This has finally started to relax and there have been some medications that work on the endocannabinoid system as a result. Marinol, cannabidiol, sativex, and cesamet. These have interesting and very practical applications such treating chemotherapy induced nausea, inducing appetite in hiv/aids patients, an alternative to opioids for chronic pain, and treating seizures/epilepsy.
These medications often use synthetic cannabinoids which allow for modulation of the endocannabinoid system in ways that naturally derived cannabinoids can’t do. They additionally tend to be absorbed better and are more consistent in purity and dosing. But they were initially developed out of necessity: they bypass legal and regulatory bans on cannabis. Most of the above meds exist because of synthesis of cannabinoids.
Although eventually people figured out they could smoke these too and got them banned in many places (remember k2 and spice?). Except that was much worse because as mentioned actual marijuana is a partial agonist of cb1/cb2 whereas synthetic cannabinoids like the Huffman series that was initially popularized (jwh-018 was the first really big one in spice, iirc) is a full agonist, which is why people would sometimes have seizures and such from it.
Prohibition works!
Just imagine where we would be without this stupid restriction. A host of medications acting on an entire system. THC was isolated in 1964 but the endocannabinoid system wasn’t even discovered until the late 80s because of this moratorium on research funding. And this isn’t just about anxiety. Pain management, neuro degenerative diseases, epilepsy. The opioid epidemic could’ve been significantly reduced. Benzodiazepine abuse could’ve been significantly reduced.
Disgusting.
And then look at this behavior and look at where it’s repeated: after a study showing guns in a home were more likely to cause you to kill a family member than an intruder the NRA strongly lobbied to end federal funding for any research concerning guns at all. They were successful and in 1996 the dickey amendment was passed. In addition to this congress removed 2.6 million from the cdc budget, the exact amount they spent on gun research, a punitive measure designed to send a message.
This was only changed after parkland although the change was to allow some research with no funding provided.
No research on safety, epidemiology, risks, etc. and it’s definitely been totally fine for the pass 30 years right? No gun problems in the us?
And now the USA is essentially moving to cut funding in more severe and drastic ways across broad areas of research. We are doooooomed
We did have that. It was also terrible. Prohibition is stupid.
That said as someone who works in a field adjacent to addiction it would probably be a great idea to heavily regulate the industry. Banning substances is foolish. But allowing them to advertise and create billion dollar industries? That’s far far far more foolish
I worked on research many years ago about impulse regulation in addiction. It was basically put someone in an fmri with a little lcd screen and show them images. When we showed addicts images of things that triggered their addiction (eg alcoholics a bottle of gin, crack addicts a pipe) the parts of their brain that processed the craving reacted much faster than the parts that regulated impulse control. The takeaway was that things like alcohol advertising was potentially damaging for people attempting to quit.
This is very relevant because if you look at alcohol consumption in america by sales it’s shocking. Something like 90% of alcohol is consumed by the top 5% of users. These numbers are off, I’m going off of memory from like 2 decades ago, but it’s basically that a very small percentage of users consume the overwhelming majority of alcohol sold. It was impossible to determine but we suspected
this was similar for other drugs too. Contrary to popular belief there are people who do heroin, Percocet, Xanax, cocaine, etc casually. They do it uncommonly, every once and a while. But a percentage of users consume a huge amount. We suspected that the split was different due to a combination of higher likelihood of physical addiction and much stronger stigma against casual use, but they do exist (and probably would in greater numbers if legalization or decriminalization occurred)
This is another example of our complete failure of a regulatory state. We have research that indicates things like this but it doesn’t matter. The alcohol industry simply has too much money, so it doesn’t change. So sorry alcoholics, your chances at recovery are much much much harder. It doesn’t matter that there is research that shows your brain simply cannot ignore the urge when presented with stimuli. Sorry gambling addicts too. Fanduel makes too much money! We will just force these companies to put a 1-800 number in small print at the end. That’s a good compromise, right?
What’s crazy is that at one point this country did overcome this issue. Cigarette advertising used to be everywhere. But then it became clear how addictive and how harmful it was and relatively quickly it disappeared. We know alcohol is addictive. We know drinking is harmful. But we don’t care. Budweiser is an american icon
Interesting note: the research continued after I left and found that baclofen, a non addictive muscle relaxant, can modify that brain response and delay the craving enough that impulse control can intervene. Others have built on this research and it’s occasionally prescribed for alcohol addiction now
That’s because users almost always take too much. One should never smoke anything (you can’t measure any dosage this way), and one should always cut things into pieces: cookies, brownies, edibles; even ¼ of a gummy is often enough. People severely underestimate how powerful this stuff is. It’s medicine and should be respected as such.
I would agree with this advice. Additionally smoking limits the physiological harm substantially. Smoking anything is terrible for you. Vaping is (probably) better, but still harmful.
It is likely that without the extremely long and stupid prohibition on marijuana (that’s still ongoing) we’d have researched proper pharmaceuticals that harnessed the benefits of marijuana while limiting the drawbacks. Medications that limited impairing functionality.
However thanks to our dipshit government and harmful puritanical underpinnings of our society we have almost completely banned marijuana research for the better part of a century. Emotions trump science and people with power unilaterally decided that there was no benefit from this plant and maintained that decision for years.
This has finally started to relax and there have been some medications that work on the endocannabinoid system as a result. Marinol, cannabidiol, sativex, and cesamet. These have interesting and very practical applications such treating chemotherapy induced nausea, inducing appetite in hiv/aids patients, an alternative to opioids for chronic pain, and treating seizures/epilepsy.
These medications often use synthetic cannabinoids which allow for modulation of the endocannabinoid system in ways that naturally derived cannabinoids can’t do. They additionally tend to be absorbed better and are more consistent in purity and dosing. But they were initially developed out of necessity: they bypass legal and regulatory bans on cannabis. Most of the above meds exist because of synthesis of cannabinoids.
Although eventually people figured out they could smoke these too and got them banned in many places (remember k2 and spice?). Except that was much worse because as mentioned actual marijuana is a partial agonist of cb1/cb2 whereas synthetic cannabinoids like the Huffman series that was initially popularized (jwh-018 was the first really big one in spice, iirc) is a full agonist, which is why people would sometimes have seizures and such from it.
Prohibition works!
Just imagine where we would be without this stupid restriction. A host of medications acting on an entire system. THC was isolated in 1964 but the endocannabinoid system wasn’t even discovered until the late 80s because of this moratorium on research funding. And this isn’t just about anxiety. Pain management, neuro degenerative diseases, epilepsy. The opioid epidemic could’ve been significantly reduced. Benzodiazepine abuse could’ve been significantly reduced.
Disgusting.
And then look at this behavior and look at where it’s repeated: after a study showing guns in a home were more likely to cause you to kill a family member than an intruder the NRA strongly lobbied to end federal funding for any research concerning guns at all. They were successful and in 1996 the dickey amendment was passed. In addition to this congress removed 2.6 million from the cdc budget, the exact amount they spent on gun research, a punitive measure designed to send a message.
This was only changed after parkland although the change was to allow some research with no funding provided.
No research on safety, epidemiology, risks, etc. and it’s definitely been totally fine for the pass 30 years right? No gun problems in the us?
And now the USA is essentially moving to cut funding in more severe and drastic ways across broad areas of research. We are doooooomed
I, too, look forward to its legalization! Frankly, it’s alcohol that should be banned, but I know we’ll never have that…
We did have that. It was also terrible. Prohibition is stupid.
That said as someone who works in a field adjacent to addiction it would probably be a great idea to heavily regulate the industry. Banning substances is foolish. But allowing them to advertise and create billion dollar industries? That’s far far far more foolish
I worked on research many years ago about impulse regulation in addiction. It was basically put someone in an fmri with a little lcd screen and show them images. When we showed addicts images of things that triggered their addiction (eg alcoholics a bottle of gin, crack addicts a pipe) the parts of their brain that processed the craving reacted much faster than the parts that regulated impulse control. The takeaway was that things like alcohol advertising was potentially damaging for people attempting to quit.
This is very relevant because if you look at alcohol consumption in america by sales it’s shocking. Something like 90% of alcohol is consumed by the top 5% of users. These numbers are off, I’m going off of memory from like 2 decades ago, but it’s basically that a very small percentage of users consume the overwhelming majority of alcohol sold. It was impossible to determine but we suspected
this was similar for other drugs too. Contrary to popular belief there are people who do heroin, Percocet, Xanax, cocaine, etc casually. They do it uncommonly, every once and a while. But a percentage of users consume a huge amount. We suspected that the split was different due to a combination of higher likelihood of physical addiction and much stronger stigma against casual use, but they do exist (and probably would in greater numbers if legalization or decriminalization occurred)
This is another example of our complete failure of a regulatory state. We have research that indicates things like this but it doesn’t matter. The alcohol industry simply has too much money, so it doesn’t change. So sorry alcoholics, your chances at recovery are much much much harder. It doesn’t matter that there is research that shows your brain simply cannot ignore the urge when presented with stimuli. Sorry gambling addicts too. Fanduel makes too much money! We will just force these companies to put a 1-800 number in small print at the end. That’s a good compromise, right?
What’s crazy is that at one point this country did overcome this issue. Cigarette advertising used to be everywhere. But then it became clear how addictive and how harmful it was and relatively quickly it disappeared. We know alcohol is addictive. We know drinking is harmful. But we don’t care. Budweiser is an american icon
Interesting note: the research continued after I left and found that baclofen, a non addictive muscle relaxant, can modify that brain response and delay the craving enough that impulse control can intervene. Others have built on this research and it’s occasionally prescribed for alcohol addiction now