10 October 2020

The New York Times: “Can CBD Really Do All That?”

Mechoulam concluded that our bodies must produce their own cannabinoids — endogenous molecules that, like the native opioids and nicotinelike molecules our bodies also make, engage the cannabinoid receptors throughout the human body. In 1992, he identified the first one. Mechoulam, who is often called the godfather of cannabis research — he was a senior scientist on the Brazilian CBD epilepsy trial that inspired Jacobson — and his colleagues christened it “anandamide”, after the Sanskrit word for “supreme joy”. They suspected that the molecule played a role in the formation of emotions.

The native network of cannabinoid receptors and transmitters described by Howlett and Mechoulam is now known as the endocannabinoid system. It’s central to homeostatic regulation, that is, how the body maintains, and returns to, its baseline state after being disturbed. If a person is injured, for example, native cannabinoids increase, presumably in order to resolve the inflammation and other damage signals associated with injury. They also increase after strenuous exercise, another stressor, and some scientists have argued that they, not the better-known endorphins, are really responsible for the pleasant postexercise feeling known as runner’s high.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Fascinating article about a research area that many would probably consider controversial. I don’t think I knew before reading this about the two different active molecules contained in marijuana, CBD and THC, and their opposite effects on the human body, nor about its history in the United States, where it was heavily restricted in the Prohibition era in the 1930’s. It will be interesting to follow future research into medicinal use of CBD, particularly as cancer treatments or at least alleviating the side effects of chemotherapy.

Various products that have been advertised as containing CBD
Various products that have been advertised as containing CBD. Jamie Chung for The New York Times. Prop styling by Anna Surbatovich.

It’s reasonable to ask why the CBD naturally present in cannabis doesn’t protect recreational users from the negative effects of THC. In older varieties, where the CBD-to-THC ratio was closer to 1-to-1, maybe it did. But today’s strains typically contain about three times as much THC as the cannabis smoked recreationally even as recently as the 1990s, while CBD concentrations have fallen by about half in the same period, according to a recent University of Mississippi study on black-market marijuana. And precisely because the proportions between the two cannabinoids have become so skewed — the ratio of THC to CBD has risen to 80 to 1 from 14 to 1 in two decades — lots of modern cannabis is potentially much more toxic for the brain, says Hurd, who is the director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai.

Some years ago, Hurd discovered that THC could, as opponents of marijuana legalization have long maintained, prompt heroin-seeking behavior in rodents, acting as a proverbial “gateway drug”. But she also found that CBD reduced drug-seeking behavior, which led her to change the focus of her work. Now she studies how CBD could help opioid addicts kick the habit.

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