Dr. Matthew Hill

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614 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard Jul 2024

Dr. Matthew Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks | Dr. Matthew Hill · 8 Jul 2024 podcast

Thanks for having me.

I mean, cannabis is a plant that has been around for some time. It's kind of got like a very rich history of use around the world for different cultures, for both kind of medicinal and spiritual and recreational purposes over several centuries. The plant has kind of become, I mean, in the West, it really wasn't a thing mainstream wise until about the 60s.

And then it became kind of introduced as like a drug of choice that a lot of people started using during the rise of the hippie era. And I think that was a lot of the time that cannabis got popularized. And then I'd say more recently, cannabis has into the 90s and on has become kind of a very heavily used drug by a large swath of people ranging from teenagers on up.

In terms of what it is inside it, I mean, it's a plant with a lot of very complex chemistry and biology behind it. So there's a lot of molecules that it carries in it. We call these cannabinoids. And they come in a lot of different flavors. But the main one that's

the most important one when we talk about cannabis and what drives the kind of intoxicating and what I would refer to as psychoactive effects of cannabis is a Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol or what we call THC. Um, and that really is what dictates, you know, the psychoactive and intoxicating properties of the plant.

And so the amount of THC that is within the cannabis plant will influence the, you know, how high a person's going to get when they consume it. There are probably 70 to 100 and some odd other cannabinoids that are within cannabis. Most of them are pretty trace levels, like, and they vary from different types to cannabis from one another.

But the other one that's had a lot of attention is cannabidiol or what we call CBD. CBD is structurally looks pretty similar to THC, but doesn't behave anything like THC. It's not intoxicating at all. I'm not sure. I would probably say it's not psychoactive in the sense that people can't tell if they're on it or not.

But I would – some people still say it's psychoactive because people claim it can affect anxiety state or mood state or other things. So in that context, maybe psychoactive is still somewhat appropriate of a word to use. Yeah.

And then there's a whole bunch of other things like cannabinol, cannabigerol, and these other minor cannabinoids, most of which we really don't understand any of the biology of. We don't know what they're doing. They may influence some of the effects of THC. They may not. But they're there, and they vary in their composition from different flavor of different cannabis to different flavor.

And then there's those other things called terpenes, which are kind of highly volatile compounds, but they're not specific to cannabis. They're found in tons of other plants. So this is a lot of which seems to contribute at least to some of the smell and the flavors of cannabis. So these are things like limonene, which, you know, gives some cannabis kind of a citrusy flavor. odor or flavor to it.

Pinene, which gives things more of like a earthy tree kind of smell. Beta-caryophyllene, myrcene. And these terpenes are also, some of which do have known biological activity, some don't. And they vary quite heavily across different kinds of cannabis as well. And again, there's some thought that they may be influencing some of the psychoactive or intoxicating properties of cannabis. But

The reality is we really don't know a lot about them at this point. There's kind of some emerging work that's starting to come out now that kind of plays with giving someone THC and adding in one other terpene or one other minor cannabinoid and seeing how it influences things.

You can imagine with the plethora of molecules that exist in cannabis, doing this in a piecewise manner could take decades to kind of really get to a point where we understand all the interactive components of cannabis. But people tend to refer to this as like an entourage effect. That's kind of a phrase that gets used quite widely in the cannabis world. And the idea behind that is that

If you took pure THC, and so there are some like distillate pens and things that exist out there now in the product market, which are basically isolated THC with trace levels of anything of other stuff, would be very different than if you had THC in combination with some of these other molecules and how they might influence how THC itself is working or not.

So, I mean, the way that people would usually describe the intoxicating effects of cannabis is, they would, I mean, people often refer to it as there being some euphoria or some positive mood, not on the same order as what people would describe with, say, cocaine or some other stimulants, but there certainly is some kind of positive aspect.

I mean, if there wasn't, people wouldn't be using it if they didn't feel positive about it afterwards. There can be, you know, other aspects of In terms of changes in feeding behavior, people might find things funnier than they found things. It might change the way they perceive various environmental stimuli.

But it can also, for some people, create a bit of a dissociative state to some degree where people might feel a little bit out of body. So it's kind of a complicated process. intoxicating state to describe, I would say. Because usually if someone's referring to something like a stimulant, they're just like, oh, people feel like they're God. They're like, you know, jacked up.

Yeah, exactly. Like they're very happy and they're kind of jacked up. And I think with cannabis, the way people would describe it would be very different. It's like kind of an introspective state. You might be more aware of your bodily. feelings and states that are going on inside of you, your kind of internal state. But you also have like a different perspective on external stimuli.

You might process information a bit differently, focus on things a bit differently. So it's kind of a complicated state to describe, I would say. Usually when people are assessing if someone's intoxicated, like...

the kind of lab work where people get someone high, they just kind of use a, what we call a visual analog scale, which is like a one to a hundred or something or zero to a hundred and say, do you feel high? Do you enjoy this? Would you say you feel euphoric? Is your mood elevated? So they're kind of scaling things like that.

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