Jared W. Young

The missing link between scientific journals and relationship counseling.

The Last Show with David Cooper.

For years now, we've been told cannabis is bad for your brain, that it fries it.

But in a new study looking at one psychiatric condition, bipolar disorder, researchers found that cannabis might actually sharpen people's decision-making.

It's kind of a provocative finding, and we're going to dig into it with one of those researchers, Jared Young, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Jared, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you very much for having me, dude.

Common wisdom, my parents drilling it into my head as a kid, is that cannabis just scrambles your brain, fries it, makes you a poor decision maker.

What made you want to kind of attack that assumption, especially in the case of bipolar disorder?

So what is this Iowa gambling task?

I guess that's the way that you actually checked what kind of decision-making effects cannabis might have on someone.

Shocker on that one.

And it would seem, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that cannabis might impair decision-making in healthy people, but possibly make it better in bipolar people in this test?

I'm curious about the possible mechanism here.

Does it have something to do with dopamine?

Does it have to do with something like you said earlier about cannabis kind of quieting the brain when one is prone to like extremes of mania and depression and that kind of thing?

What could be a mechanism here for this?

I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.

I just think it's important to normalize this stuff and talk about it.

But I shouldn't just run to the dispensary and grab, you know, pounds of cannabis and smoke it.