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

I can't remember exactly the way that you described it.

I mean, I think this is what happens when you have I mean, obviously, you're familiar with this. In science, there's different, you know, some things that we can be a little bit more definitive about. And then there's some things that we just can't know for certain. It's just the way it is because of the way that we gather data and because of the way humans are.

And this isn't a question I believe we can ask from an animal model perspective in the same capacity. So I don't think anyone would deny, at least anyone who's read the literature, that there's this relationship between cannabis use, especially in adolescents, and the development of schizophrenia.

Now, my perspective on this is, and I'll explain why I have this perspective and how I justify it, is to me, cannabis is fuel on a fire. So if someone is prone to developing schizophrenia, adding cannabis into the mix I think will make it kick in faster and harder. So if there is a genetic vulnerability for developing schizophrenia or some biological predisposition that's there,

I would say in that situation, cannabis can trigger an initial onset of the first episode, and it can make the prognosis of the disease in the long term a lot worse, let's say.

I mean, I've never heard that, but that would be a stressor, and stressors are other ways. I mean, a lot of... you know, the situations where, uh, I mean, some of it's the age, but like, you know, for example, if someone is prone to develop schizophrenia, they move away to college.

Even that stressor can be something that brings on an episode, but cannabis very specifically, like different than any other drugs like alcohol or cigarettes, as far as I understand it, at least the temporal relationship between cannabis use and the development of a first episode can be pretty linked. Um,

But the arguments that I've always had with people in this area who are very definitive on their end of the spectrum that this is a causal relationship is – First of all, we have a few things that like I would leverage as kind of real world evidence that makes this questionable.

So the first one is like I was saying earlier in the episode, I mean, we really didn't have cannabis use in the West like as a normal thing, as one of the drugs that was part of the repertoire of what people use recreationally until like the 60s. So unlike alcohol, which has like been there for centuries, we have a little bit of a before and after. What we can look at. The Grateful Dead. Yeah.

So now, granted, we don't have like really good prevalence data of what schizophrenia was in the era prior. I mean, even nowadays, our prevalence data is not perfect. But if cannabis as a solitary variable was driving the genesis of schizophrenia de novo.

In the absence of any kind of biological predisposition or genetic predisposition, I find it very hard to believe that we wouldn't have seen a shift in the prevalence of the disease as cannabis became more mainstream and more widely used. And generally, schizophrenia rates have remained largely stable.

People can make arguments about that, better care, other things to challenge that argument, sure. So another modern perspective would be, okay, well, let's look at Canada and the States, let's say, where we have, as I said earlier, teenagers in Canada and the States, by grade 12, 35 to 40% of teenagers have at least used cannabis, somewhat sporadically.

And somewhere around 5%-ish are probably using almost daily. So we have... concentrated group of what would be the high-risk population here that are using at a pretty high rate. And then we compare that to somewhere like, let's say, Norway or Sweden or any of the Scandinavian countries where cannabis is like not a thing. Certainly not at a recreational level and not in teenagers.

And I mean, the use rates there are probably under 5% globally for teenagers, like probably closer to 2% or 3%. So you have two countries that have pretty similar social structures and other capacities of things. We're both Western countries. And yet, Our schizophrenia rates prevalence-wise are relatively comparable.

And yet in Canada and the States, our cannabis use rates in adolescents are wildly amplified compared to those countries. So again, if this was causing schizophrenia to develop as a disease out of nowhere, how would that not track? Like how would that not be seen when you just look at individual variances across countries and prevalence rates?

I have no idea.

You could probably use Greece or Italy. I mean, they're going to have cannabis use higher than Scandinavian countries, but it's going to be way lower than North America still because it's just.

I have no idea. I mean, I think it's just part of the culture here. It's just evolved totally differently. The Grateful Dead. No, I'm not picking on The Grateful Dead.

But I mean, like you also have like in Europe, though, alcohol is also much more normal, normalized in general. Like kids will drink. It's not abnormal for kids or teenagers to drink. Alcohol is just much more of a cultural thing as well. Yeah. There are just differences. I mean, it's the same thing. You look at like the opioid crisis that we're going through.

Sure, it's there to some degree in Europe, but it's nothing like it is in North America. We are just a different beast for a lot of drug use.

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