Godfrey Pearlson
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
There's an association, but correlation isn't the same as causation. So that nearly everybody who uses harder drugs also started on alcohol and tobacco. So people who are risk takers are going to try what's out there. And I think it's fair to say that the majority of people who try recreational cannabis do not progress to more addictive or more harmful drugs.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So epidemiologically, there's solid evidence for that. So the joke that I hear from my cannabis-using research subjects is, if cannabis is a gateway drug, it's a gateway to your refrigerator because of the munchies.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
When epidemiologists have looked at people who use cannabis regularly, you'd expect that they would be couch potatoes who are eating snack foods and eating Cheetos and Doritos while watching TV or playing video games and gaining lots of weight. But in fact, the average user loses a small amount of weight for reasons that we don't quite understand.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Partly that's a generational effect, but exactly as you say, attitudes have shifted. And the modal attitude now in surveys is that cannabis is a safe drug with no harms, which is quite incorrect since, as you and I have discussed, there definitely are harms that should not just be disregarded. But people have convinced themselves in general in the U.S. population that cannabis is harmless.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So that women, for example, feel increasingly comfortable using it to combat nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, which I think is a horrible decision. Or teenagers feel that it's a safe drug to use, which again, in that particular group who's at risk for psychotic symptoms, again, is a very bad decision. We just have to not exaggerate the risks though, because scare tactics don't work.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And people have taken risk mitigation strategies to reduce the harms of alcohol very consciously in terms of social engineering. So for example, in Scotland, There were problems with drunkenness and intrafamilial abuse and fights and so on, violence that were directly attributable to excessive alcohol use.
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
And alcohol was readily available cheaply in very large containers in supermarkets. So the Scottish authorities decided to put a hefty tax on that so alcohol was less available and all of those statistics on fights and violence within a year dramatically reduced so just by social sensible social policies and controlling price points you can have a huge effect on what people use
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
The other side of that, though, is if you price the drug out of the market, people just go back to dealers and away from dispensaries and away from a supply of cannabis that's been vetted in some way in terms of content and contaminants. So you can't push too hard on that. Nevertheless, social policy can really control drug use and moderate harms.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Again, that's a really interesting question. I'm glad you brought that up. With any substance that has psychoactive effects, there are huge inter-individual differences. So most people who use cannabis... will recreationally will just have a sense of pleasant relaxation. They'll chill out. They'll relax. They may become more reflective, feel like being more creative.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
They'll become more giggly and find things funny or silly. And their sense of time will be distorted. So musicians who like to improvise find cannabis a useful drug because they can see the space in between the notes. So there are positive effects. But for some people, it's a drug that immediately produces anxiety and, in some cases, paranoia. And there are people who are not repeat customers.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
People who get anxious and paranoid are just not going to use the drug again. But it's not like there are mean drunks. People may become disinhibited, but it's not a drug that generally provokes violence in the way that alcohol does. That's less of an association with cannabis. It doesn't increase impulsivity to the degree that alcohol does.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So, for example, we've done experiments where we've challenged people with either alcohol or acutely or cannabis acutely in the lab and have them drive on a driving simulator. People who are mildly drunk with a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.1 will speed up on corners and drive really fast and ignore warnings, whereas people who are intoxicated on cannabis will weave more
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
be aware that they're intoxicated and drive a bit more slowly. So they're still involved more in crashes, but not nearly as much as alcohol and for very different reasons. Because different drugs have different psychological effects on people, as you intuited.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
About 15% of the US population have used in the last week. and about 45 to 50 percent of adults, we're talking about adults here in both cases, say they've tried at some point in their life. It's the most commonly used illicit substance in the U.S. and Europe at the moment.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Cannabis is a plant, cannabis sativa. that grows in the wild but has been cultivated by humans for thousands of years initially for food then for fibers hemp to make ropes strong ropes and then later as an intoxicant marijuana is something that was first used in the early part of the 20th century.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
And marijuana is a slang word that was used by Mexicans spelt with an H rather than a J. And it was re-spelt with a J and used in a pejorative sense, like these evil marijuana users are corrupting our youth. So because of those connotations, A lot of people in the cannabis research field prefer to use the term cannabis rather than marijuana.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
The way this progressed is that Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt around 1810. Alcohol was not available because of the culture, but cannabis was. So Napoleon's soldiers began using it. Some of them brought it back to France. So it spread among the elites in Europe as a kind of drug for...
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
upper-class people to use for amusement at parties, and then gradually spread to some individuals in the U.S. It wasn't until around 1900, when waves of Mexican immigrants came to the country as laborers, that they introduced it as a drug that was used by working-class individuals for recreation, and that spread to American youth gradually.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
About 15% of the U.S. population have used in the last week and about 45 to 50% of adults haven't. we're talking about adults here in both cases, say they've tried at some point in their life. So this is a very prevalent drug. It's the most commonly used illicit substance in the US and Europe at the moment.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
I'd say I'm down the middle. I grew up in the 60s, so I was... exposed both to the drug and the propaganda from both sides about it. And I'm a naturally skeptical person. So if something has a good side and a bad side, I'm not going to try and minimize one or exaggerate the other.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
You're correct. A plurality of the U.S. adult population now supports legalizing recreational cannabis. More people, in fact, support same-sex marriage. So that's been quite a journey from Nixon in the 70s to the present. And I'd attribute that to a few reasons. One is that people have used it and tried it and found that it had few ill effects.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
A second thing is that the anti-cannabis movement and Just Say No and DARE and similar initiatives so overstated the case against cannabis and demonized it to such an extent that it was clear that much of what they were saying was incorrect. So people became skeptical of the marijuana is bad message.
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
The other thing is adequacy, first of all, on the part of users, but secondly, on on the part of business in terms of companies that want to make a profit from selling cannabis, what people call cannabis or big cannabis analogous to big tobacco. And the other is states in the U.S. that want to have a sin tax and balance their budgets by selling cannabis in dispensaries that they can tax.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So I think it's a combination of all of those things.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Well, some are clearly known and others are suspected, but unclear because not enough research has been done. But the real risks are cannabis use disorder. Basically, people become addicted to the drug and suffer moderately severe withdrawal symptoms when they quit. So they find it difficult to quit. For teens, the main risk is psychosis.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So teenage individuals who smoke high potency cannabis that contains a lot of THC and smoke it often have an increased risk for developing schizophrenia and allied psychotic illnesses. And it's not exactly clear what the magnitude of that risk is, but may raise the odds to maybe three or four times what you'd expect in the population. Then there are risks from motor vehicle accidents and drivers.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Again, compared to alcohol, those risks are not huge, but they're significant. And probably in older people, there are risks of falls just because cannabis does lead to gait instability. then there are suggestions that it may raise the risk for heart attack and stroke in older individuals and possibly raise the risk for certain kinds of cancers.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
But that's very, very uncertain, in part because people tend, in some cases, to smoke cannabis alongside tobacco or use it with other substances. And it's hard from an epidemiologic point of view to separate those things.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
That is a fair statement. So the cannabis we have today is a triumph of selective breeding. Essentially, growers, mainly in California, develop stronger and stronger strains of of cannabis to contain more and more THC.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
And as part of the genetics of the cannabis plant, the more THC you produce, the less CBD there is in there to counterbalance it so that we have more tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical in the cannabis plant that is mostly responsible for getting us high, and less of the CBD that may offset THC's effects.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
But just as a caveat, if people switch from near beer to whiskey, they don't drink pints of near beer. So they want to get high, so they smoke enough of the cannabis to get them high. So if there's more THC in the plant, then they'll smoke less of it.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Many of them are analogous to cannabis in that they have a good side and a dark side. So opioids are still used widely for pain control. In fact, they're the go-to drug for severe acute pain, even in hospitals and orthopedic clinics. And cocaine is still used in eye drops and as an anesthetic drug.
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The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
so the the fact that a substance is abused in some cases and has ill effects isn't to say that it doesn't also have good effects and there is a medicinal side to cannabis and cannabis derivatives so for example cbd that we spoke about one of the main constituents of the cannabis plant It doesn't get people high, but it does have psychoactive effects and calming anxiety.
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
That was recently approved for use by the Federal Drug Administration for treating childhood epilepsy. THC and cannabis may be an effective pain reliever, although the key experiments to look at that in chronic pain have yet to be done in a proper double-blind, placebo-controlled way.
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
So there may be medicinal benefits to the cannabis plant that are quite separate than its effects as a recreational drug.
Something You Should Know
The Objective Science of Marijuana & Understanding the Certainty Trap
Yeah, I'd agree with that, but there's a human urge that's built into most of us to alter our mental state. And people have been doing this for millennia, either with mushrooms or with alcohol. So if you have to pick among your recreational drugs, and most people do, then in many respects, cannabis is a safer drug than alcohol.