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 this is something I think that's been seen a fair amount is there is some co-relationship in the way that these track at a heredity level. And so I don't know that area really well enough to be able to comment on it. And from the cannabis perspective, bipolar is definitely much less studied and focused on than schizophrenia is.

But I think also to the comment about the high THC thing, I think this is the other part of the argument that's emerged out of this. And this is the other part where I see a lot of the causality arguments kind of crumble onto themselves to some degree. And there's been others who've made these very similar arguments to what I'm making here, which is

So the push that came out of this, out of the UK at least, was much more that it's this high potency kind of skunk cannabis they referred to, which first of all was based on a smell, which they didn't really hadn't done a lot of analytics on. So it was people make the assumption if it smells stronger, it's more potent cannabis. That's not really true because THC doesn't dictate the odor.

So I was saying more of a terpene thing, but certainly I'm sure some of the skunk cannabis they're referring to is high potency cannabis. And so the analysis on this, if you actually go back to those papers and read, is they often use like hash or low potency cannabis as their control where they show no association with cannabis.

And so that's what's used this argument that it's the high potency cannabis that has driven this. So now the problem with this argument, in my view, again, I look for what is the – Answer that fits in with the data, like what's the most parsimonious explanation here that everything can be explained by?

And so the problem with that argument is if you look at the cannabis schizophrenia literature, everything goes back to this one 1987 Lancet paper out of Sweden, where in that paper, they essentially looked at, they have really detailed life records and health records, and this was Swedish conscripts.

And they essentially found that if someone had used cannabis, the rate, the risk of developing schizophrenia had gone up and up. And so this was based on a cohort of people when it was published in 87 that the data would have been collected through like the 60s, 70s, early 80s. So we're talking about Sweden and cannabis together.

It's not a country that has high cannabis use rates and in an era when cannabis was hovering in a 2% to 5% THC range. That was the initial finding that provided this association between it. And yet the cannabis in that study that they would have been referring to would have been incredibly low potency compared to what has happened or like what it is today.

So if the argument is that it's only related to high potency, how would that initial finding have ever been found? because it doesn't make any sense.

Whereas the alternate explanation that others have put forward, which I agree with and is far more sound, is that there is some biological reason why individuals who are either prone to develop or who have schizophrenia like cannabis, and they will tend to seek out the highest potency product they can get access to. So in the 70s in Sweden, that would have been two to 5% THC cannabis.

Nowadays, it's higher potency cannabis.

It could be, but... I mean, they also... There's no question there's a lot of nicotine consumption. I mean, individuals with schizophrenia use... They smoke a lot of cigarettes. I mean, that's also much higher than the general population rates.

And there could be other reasons. You know, again, there may be some reason why they like it. And I think this is... something that I think we just don't understand. It's a very challenging thing to figure out why it is that individuals that have certain diseases may like certain substances. Is it helping them?

I mean, some people have argued that perhaps nicotine, for example, might enhance cognition in individuals with schizophrenia, and that may be why they like it.

Well, yeah. Nicotine is a whole other thing, which I – yeah. We'll have you back to talk about nicotine. No, I would definitely do not know enough about that to have any kind of informed conversation. But so I don't know. I would say to me at the end of the day, if I put all the data together, what I would kind of – the perspective that I have on this is –

For some reason, be it genetic architecture or biological predisposition, individuals who are prone to develop schizophrenia also seem to be prone to use cannabis and use it, possibly at excessive levels or possibly at higher potency products they seek out. Using cannabis, if someone is prone to develop it, may initiate or trigger the onset of the disease.

And I think in the long term, it will likely make the prognosis of the disease worse. So

If you were a psychiatrist in a clinic and you consistently see patients presenting saying, I didn't have psychosis, I used cannabis and now I have psychosis and it converts into schizophrenia, I can understand why the association would be made regularly that there's kind of a domino effect here and causality becomes attributed.

But I think when we take a step back and look at the larger data in its kind of entirety, to me, it's a very tricky argument to make because there's a lot of things that you just can't explain from that perspective. And this is also one of the things that I find absolutely bizarre about cannabis in general is it's a wildly polarizing thing. topic of conversation.

And people have incredibly deep-rooted opinions on both sides of the spectrum. And for some reason, if I don't say cannabis is the devil and causes disease, that means I'm an advocate. And then on the other side of the coin, if I don't say cannabis cures everything, I'm a prohibitionist. So I'm in this fun position where I get hate mail from both sides.

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