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

And someone would use the product, whatever it was, in their own property, in their own time, and then come into the Canavan to have blood taken, to look at what their THC levels are, and to undergo testing. And so it was actually like...

I think this was a great advance in the field because it was this huge innovative approach that allowed us to start comparing what we've learned from lab-based settings with this kind of old-school weed that was coming from NIDA with what is being used on the street.

And I mean, my view is you need both because you need the in-laboratory for the control because we all need control over various things. But you also need the ecological validity to see how it shakes out and make sure it looks the same.

A novel experience where someone's intoxicated with cannabis can also create a very different altered state. I would want to be stoned in a laboratory. I'll tell you that much. I feel like there's pluses and minuses to both sides, but I think the data together is very compelling, and that's where we get a lot of advance in the field.

So what Kent and Angela and Cinnamon did with the Canavan was kind of create the situation that allowed this – research to occur. And what we found fascinating, I remember talking to Meg Haney about this because all the people in her lab studies tended to always hit around 100 nanograms per male using this relatively lower potency cannabis.

When Kenton and Angela and Cinnamon started studying this in the people and taking blood, despite the fact that these people are now using cannabis that's 20 to 30%, their blood levels are the same. So they're still coming in around a hundred nanograms per mil because people are really good at self titrating. Now where things fall apart is with the concentrates.

So then you go into things like dabs or these like high potency products that are now like, cause cannabis itself, realistically, From what I understand from the botanists that I've talked to, you can't really grow a plant that's gonna exceed more than 25 to 30% THC just by sheer biology. So it taps out there. That's about as high as it's gonna go. Concentrates can go up to like 90, 98%.

So you can get really, really- These are tinctures? Like, yeah, various just in oil-based forms that are very, very high-potency products. Those are incredibly challenging to titrate. Like, they cannot be titrated because the sheer volume of THC that hits the system, even from a single hit, is so overwhelming.

And so, when the Colorado group looked at those, their blood levels were closer to 200, 300 nanograms per mil. So, wow. With cannabis plant, there does seem to be this ability for people to relatively self-titrate.

And then my buddy Ryan McLaughlin, who's also at Washington State, he was really one of the ones that pioneered these vape chambers and rats and created this really cool model of self-administration, which was like,

A very important thing to actually establish because it was very challenging to get rodents to self-administer cannabis if you're doing like an IV approach or something else because they found it quite aversive. But when you let rodents actually tighter their ability to get vape hits, they will like work for this the same way they will other reinforcing drugs.

So it was a really important finding that you could do this. And what Ryan found was he actually did one study where he gave them access to a low-potency product, we'll call it medium, and then a high. And what you ended up, if you look at the data, is the one the rats liked the best was the medium-potency product. Interesting.

And if you gave them the high-potency product, they would actually take less vape hits off that than they would off the lower ones. And again, all their blood levels tended to cluster in the same range because they – Like even at the rodent level, they're able to titrate because of the lag between inhalation and feeling the effects is only on the order of a couple of minutes.

People can titrate better. I mean, not just people, it seems like the rodents can as well. So the higher potency cannabis, where it becomes a problem is if someone's highly inexperienced and they consume a whole bunch of it without allowing that time lag to occur. And then they can probably exceed the levels they intended to and consume too much and then have probably an adverse response.

I wouldn't say that. There's definitely some degree of tolerance. The tolerance is definitely more prominent when people start using concentrates. There's no question about that. I mean, we can talk about the concentrates, I guess, separately after.

Because I would say if we're talking about a harm reduction thing, that's more where we need to focus a lot more is this idea of these high potency products.

I think you're far more likely to go overboard and have an adverse response. But also I think the problem is if you're using a product of that –

potency and that much THC floods your system on a regular basis, the biological changes from that are going to be very different than what you get if, again, you're titrating your THC from inhaling plant at roughly the same level, whether that's a 10%, 5%, or 25%, people generally tend to scale.

So the joke I always make to people is I say, go watch a Cheech and Chong movie from the late 70s. Look at the size of the joints that they smoke in movies like that relative to what you would see someone on the street consuming nowadays. It's just, I mean, so the advantage that existed from a titration perspective was with like 70s weed, there's a large window to titrate.

So people could, you know, take small amounts and not overconsume, let's say, because there was a much lower concentration of THC in the plant. So they're able to consume, you know, even if they were doing it relatively fast, because of how little THC was coming into the system, it was a little easier to scale that. So there certainly is the propensity for people to overconsume

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