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

The kind of old numbers that used to get tossed around were like nine to 11% of people that would start initiating cannabis use would probably transition to develop use disorder. The more modern numbers, I would say, you know, if we're looking at people who are already using weekly, we're talking probably closer to 30%.

Like, so it's a much higher, I mean, when you're using that frequently, then the rates of people who would qualify as having cannabis use disorder probably go higher.

Yeah, I'd say in that neighborhood, they would probably qualify as meeting criteria for a cannabis use disorder. Because weekly doesn't seem like that often. No, I mean, it depends, again, on how you vary this.

I've had a lot of conversations with the public, and I think depending on someone's experience in their own or in their own inner circles, life with cannabis, the way they would view it is very differently. Because I think a lot of people...

You know, again, regardless of anyone's opinion of alcohol, if someone told you they had a glass of wine with dinner every night, I don't think people would say you have an alcohol use disorder. I think that's not uncommon. I don't think they would.

Similarly, if someone had a brandy at the end of the night or like, you know, a nightcap to go to bed and they did that on a nightly basis, I don't think anyone would say that they have a use disorder. And I think with cannabis, there are a lot of people that kind of fall into that bracket that would use it, you know, even daily, but relatively infrequently and kind of as an end-of-the-day thing.

I think some of them certainly would fall under the criteria of cannabis use disorder because if you start looking and say, well, you know, if you travel to like – Egypt. Are you going to go put yourself at risk of going to jail to get access to cannabis because you can't function without it? If you do, then yeah, you've got cannabis use disorder. Are you going to burn relationships?

Are you going to start failing at meeting responsibilities or getting things done on time because you're preoccupied with cannabis? yes, you're going to hit the criteria for cannabis use disorder. If it's someone who's kind of just intermittently using it the same way that a lot of people casually use alcohol, I would say a lot of them probably wouldn't hit criteria.

But I think to someone who has never had cannabis in their inner circle or in their life, they look at it like a drug like cocaine, whereas they're like, wow, if you were using cocaine on a daily basis, we'd be super concerned about you. And so I think that's this like...

It's just as you go – I mean cannabis is in this really weird transitionary period I would say of going from illicit to not just because of the changes in the legal regulatory framework. I mean in Canada now we're like five and a half years into legalization.

So in many ways I would say the transition has happened where a lot of people view cannabis very similarly to alcohol whereas you go to some states and the perspective is still very different. Certainly if you're still in one of the states where there's no legal access, people still look at cannabis the same way they look at a lot of other – illicit drugs like cocaine or amphetamines or things.

It's ironic, yeah, sadly. It's very, I mean... Obviously, a big push for legalization is not endorsement of the safety of cannabis. It's more the harms associated with prohibition outweigh the harms associated with legalization. I think that's generally the public health perspective. That's certainly what motivated it in Canada. And there was a –

some attempts, let's say, at restorative justice in terms of removing criminal records and things may not have been entirely as successful as people had hoped it would be, but it certainly has changed things. I mean, we can look at our federal data and see that arrest rates related to cannabis are obviously very low compared to what they were.

That obviously becomes very important because there are clearly minoritized communities. They get hit more with this than other communities. And so the kind of perpetual disenfranchisement that happens with a prohibition model in communities that are already suffering from various other things that affect them just potentiates all that.

So I can understand the legal framework behind why there'd be a move to a legalization state over a prohibition state, which again, a lot of people confuse legality with safety, which is a weird, I mean, alcohol is the perfect example of this. I mean, you look at the scale of harms on a public health level, I mean, alcohol stacks at the top.

across the board in terms of harms to the individual, harms to society, it's a lot. Cannabis has harms. There's no question on that. It just would fall lower than alcohol. But the way that people view it, a lot of people are like, alcohol is legal, therefore it's safe, and it's not something to judge people on. Cannabis, at least historically, was illegal, and in some states still is.

So people view it very differently. And I think it's An interesting thing, because I feel like, you know, despite the fact that some people hate the government and hate the way that it regulates their life, there's this weird passive belief that, like, if the government dictates something is legal, that means it's safe.

Yeah. So it depends on how you break this down. So what we've seen in Canada is I would say there's like demographic differences. Proportionately, when we look at the biggest change in use, it's actually elderly communities. It's like 55 plus, especially women over 55 tend to be more cannabis, more cannabis use. Now, granted, their baseline was quite low, pre-legalization.

So if you look at a fold change, it looks like a very dramatic increase. Raw numbers, it's probably not that high. But, I mean, it was like 1% to 2% or something before, and now it's gone up to like 8% or something. So it's a fourfold increase kind of thing. So we do see the magnitude of that seems to be the biggest in terms of where the uses come from.

Definitely the young adult population, like 20, 24, that group has definitely seen increased use as well.

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