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

Historically, cannabis tended to be more male biased. I would say the gender separation there has kind of narrowed quite a bit where you do see a lot more females used than historically had. There is a little bit of difference. Females tend to prefer edibles over males. So males tend to like inhalation over females. So like roots of administration vary a little bit based on who someone is.

But yeah, interestingly, we don't have a lot of – actual indication that teenagers have used more. So like, you know, you look at 14 to 18 year olds, that has been, now granted, our baseline going in was pretty high, as is down here in the States. I mean, Canada and the States both hover, you look at like grade 12ers and, you know, it's somewhere between 35 and 40% of them have used cannabis.

Now, I mean, you even have some that are like probably around 5% are probably almost daily users. So like you do have a pretty high baseline to begin with in that group, but that has remained relatively unchanged. If anything, some of the states when they legalized saw slight dips in teenage use of cannabis. I think, like, that's obviously an important demographic to have tracked.

This was one of the concerns with legalization was you'd increase access. Teenagers would get it from their parents and whatnot or had just, you know, other siblings and stuff. And so you get this big boost in consumption. But we don't seem to see that in terms of raw numbers of teenagers who are using cannabis. So that's good. ER visits, yeah. So we did an interesting rollout in Canada.

We legalized flour for a year before edibles came online. So we have kind of a before and after. Once edibles became available, there was a notable increase in –

unintentional pediatric consumption that resulted in er visits because kids would you know a lot of these look like gummies and candies people are buying them not you know storing them properly kids would find them and eat them and like become very intoxicated i want to make mention of something along those lines um i actually know somebody whose child um

Well, so this was one of the things that also was influenced by legalization is in Canada, like some of the increase in the ER visits was because of the shift in legalization and the change in policy. And so, you know, if your kid ends up drunk underage, It's not the same ramifications as if your kid used an illegal substance underage.

And so people are – once cannabis was legal, people were more likely to actually go into the ER because the consequences were different.

And so, sure, some of this is availability and some of it is just like, OK, I'm not as concerned now about – something happening because I've taken my kid in. I'm not going to have my kid taken away from me or whatnot. So there is, I mean, both those factors I think have contributed to it, but we definitely see the majority at least of kids ending up in the ER is almost all based on edibles.

I can't imagine a situation where that would happen from inhalation. It would be very rare if it would. It's almost always edibles because kids find them.

So edibles... So this throws a wrench in the whole system. And I'll say this in the context of blood levels and then what that means from a regulatory capacity as well because of the impact this has. So edibles are very low doses for the most part. I mean, in Canada, at least, you cannot buy a pack of edibles regularly.

and I think this law might be changing, at least when they first brought it in, no pack could have more than 10 milligrams of THC in it. So that either meant one 10-meg gummy or two 5-meg gummies or four 2.5-meg gummies, you get it. So you couldn't in one package have more than 10 milligrams of THC. Now, for people who are...

I would say relatively naive to cannabis or THC, even people who might use it intermittently, most people will feel five milligrams. Like they'll feel some form of intoxication. You know, some will even feel it at 2.5 mgs. Most people will feel it at five. Virtually everyone will feel it at 10.

Now, if you look at the blood levels these produce, we're now talking blood levels of two to five nanograms per mil. So folds lower than what you get from inhalation. Before you said 100. Yeah. So this is dramatically lower. And so- Also, the time course of this is fundamentally different. So oral consumption, you know, you're looking at a minimum of 30 to 45 minutes for onset of intoxication.

For some people, up to 90 minutes after they've eaten. Now, this is also the reason why... The majority of adverse events that happen with cannabis happen with edibles because people don't understand this. And so they eat a cookie or a gummy. They wait half an hour like, I'm not feeling anything. I clearly didn't take enough. And then they'll double their dose.

And then like 15 minutes later, it starts hitting them. And then like once it fully kicks in, it's just like a steamroller.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was that New York, I think it was Maureen Dowder, someone went down to Colorado and she ate like an insane amount of THC in a chocolate bar, something like 50 or 100 milligrams and spent like the weekend on the floor of a hotel room being like, this was the most aversive experience. Why would anyone do this?

And again, I think people just don't understand the dosing around this. And so This is one of the things we're trying to do in Canada, and I was creating this idea of standardized dosing units so that people have an – like we do with alcohol.

We always say one beer is the equivalent to one glass of wine versus a shot of tequila or something so that there's some comparator that people understand how many drinks are – two drinks you do, you're going to hit legal limit kind of thing. Yeah, it seems very important. Yeah.

And so this is very difficult to do with cannabis because the dosing with oral consumption is just a different ballgame than it is with inhalation. But what happens with oral consumption is like it kind of very slowly leaks out of the GI tract. And it also goes through first pass metabolism in the liver. And what happens there is you get a metabolite called 11-hydroxy-THC, which –

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