Godfrey Pearlson
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Godfrey Pearlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
So there may be medicinal benefits to the cannabis plant that are quite separate than its effects as a recreational drug.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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