Dr. Matthew Hill

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

higher potency cannabis, even independent of concentrates, if they're not allowing that titration to occur. Also, if you have someone who is just exquisitely sensitive to THC for various reasons, even one or two tokes could be too much for them because at the higher potency, they may not have that ability to titrate quite as well.

And so a lot of people, anecdotally, you talk to people about cannabis and a lot of people who don't like cannabis have said, oh, you know, I've tried the new stuff's too strong.

And if there's someone who's kind of more in our age range who grew up in an earlier decade where things were a bit different, they may be referencing their own experience from when they were younger and what they were able to consume. And now they try doing the same and it hits them like a sledgehammer. Got it. So it's a little different in that sense.

And I don't think it's to say it's like not concerning that cannabis is as high as THC as it is. I just think if I'm going to put my efforts into kind of like public health perspectives of this, I would be digging my feet in much more about the access to concentrates and the issues and the potential harms that are going to come with them than I would about the cannabis flower myself.

That's just my opinion based on what I see with the concerns and what we've seen from the data in humans. And I think the real world ecological studies that the Colorado group have done have been very informative in this sense because, yeah, if the blood levels of THC you achieve from concentrates are double to triple of what you get even from higher potency flour, that's a concern.

Like I think that's where problems start arising because then you're going to start seeing a lot higher degree of tolerance. I mean there used to be more of a debate in the field as to whether people develop tolerance because –

One of the things with cannabis that I do find very interesting is with a lot of chronic users, they don't escalate the way you would see with cocaine or alcohol where there's very profound tolerance that develops. And so, I mean, people definitely see this in cocaine where people can become tolerant almost immediately. And so dosing starts scaling up very fast.

Seriously. Or the cost. I mean, the sheer cost.

Yeah, that is required to be able to maintain that. But with cannabis, it seems like there is some degree of tolerance that people exhibit. It varies from person to person. But, you know, as Meg has said to me many times, you know, the guys that come in her studies, these are very heavy users. And then, you know, they will use this relatively low potency product and still get high off of it.

And so it's not to say that there's no tolerance. It's just it's not as profound as I think we see with a lot of other drugs. And this is probably due to the fact of just like, you know, we definitely see like if we look at some pet imaging studies, chronic cannabis users do have some down.

Not good. Don't get dogs high.

Yeah, so a typical PET study in a human looking at this, they'd give a molecule that's radiolabeled that will bind to CB1 receptors. You can scan them and then look at the emission rates of the radiation to get an idea of the density of receptors that are in the brain. Chronic cannabis users tend to have less. What that means in terms of the functional outcome is unclear.

I mean, there could be some... I think there's a lot of evidence that there's some degree of a reservoir of CB1 receptors that, you know, there might be a lot more receptors there than we necessarily always need or are always using, let's say. So we might be down-regulating a component of this, but maybe not all of the ones that are required to produce the psychoactive effects.

There's clearly some maintenance of the system that allows someone to continue to get intoxicated. And so with cannabis users, we do see that. But you do see much more profound tolerance with people using high potency extracts and concentrates and things like this.

And again, surely I think as a response to the biology of hitting the system that heavily with that much, you know, THC as it comes in because they can't titrate it the same way.

I mean, I'm not going to play with the definition of addiction. I feel like I have enough friends in the addiction space that it's a very contentious field. So, I mean, I will try and not use that word, although I understand talking to the general public, that's kind of, you know, if you say someone has a use disorder versus an addiction, that may not make sense to them.

And so, I mean, an addiction is obviously a very complex thing that, again, I don't want to touch it simply because it's not my space. But that being said, there's no question that people can develop cannabis use disorder. I mean, it's definitely a thing. So if we say, is cannabis addictive in kind of a, you know, normal lay speak, I would say, yes, it is addictive. What does that look like?

How does that relate to other substances of abuse? I mean, certainly... the outcomes associated with it are going to be slightly different than something like opiates or alcohol, because that's a totally different beast. Because you have fatality potential, there's a whole bunch of other health consequences.

But if we look at how we would define a use disorder, the criteria for someone hitting cannabis use disorder is really no different than how someone would hit alcohol use disorder or opiate use disorder in the sense that It can consume their life. It can shift the way that they behave. They can put themselves in risky positions to get access to a drug.

It can consume their time and their energy to have it. Like you said, if they don't have access to it, it can trigger an assembly of behaviors that looks like irritability, anger, frustration, things like that. So, I mean – The numbers in terms of the conversion rate of use to developing use disorder, I would say are not entirely clear.

Showing 201–220 of 614 · page 11 of 31