Morning Wire XX
[0] More than 20 states have now legalized the recreational use of cannabis, while it has been increasingly decriminalized in others.
[1] Arguments for legalizing marijuana come from both sides of the aisle, with advocates often citing its economic upside and the potential for greater government oversight.
[2] But what are the health implications of its use, particularly for young people?
[3] In this episode of Morning Wire, we speak to a professor at Yukon's School of Pharmacy about the growing use of marijuana in the U .S. I'm Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
[4] It's February 26th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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[10] Joining us to discuss the health implications of cannabis use is Dr. Charles Michael White, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice at Yukon's School of Pharmacy.
[11] So Dr. White, we're having more and more medical and recreational marijuana drug use in America as more states move to legalize it.
[12] Are there any harms of chronic use of cannabis that the public should know about?
[13] Yes, I think that one of the things that people should know about, is use overall can be associated with hyper -emesis, which means people who would vomit more frequently or it could even be a really serious hyper -emesis syndrome where people have to be hospitalized or seek specialized care.
[14] You could have an increase in anxiety when you're using cannabis products.
[15] And that's because in a lot of cases, people may feel more relaxed.
[16] In some cases, people will start to become suspicious of other people.
[17] They'll start to become paranoid.
[18] And in those cases, it starts to create some levels of anxiety.
[19] So that can happen in everyone.
[20] What happens in young people whose brains are still starting to develop is that they can start to have psychotic episodes where, you know, they have trouble processing information.
[21] And when you combine with some of the paranoia, people could end up harming themselves or harming others.
[22] Now, in young people, they're not 100 % sure, but they think that the chronic use of cannabis also in the developing brain could increase the risk of permanent changes that could make psychosis permanent.
[23] So we would call those people, people who have schizophrenia.
[24] The link is not 100 % proven, but it's trending in that direction.
[25] And then for young people who are driving a car, and they haven't had a lot of years of experience, with driving, that there's an especially high risk of automobile accidents and traffic fatalities when they're using cannabis products.
[26] And, you know, one of the important things to remember is that unlike with alcohol, you can't do a breathalyzer test and know how much alcohol that you currently have in your system and equate that to the level of impairment that you may have.
[27] So sometimes people are flying blind when they're using cannabis products in terms of how it's going to impact them when they are driving.
[28] So that's something that's important to keep in mind.
[29] Now, we hear a lot about THC and CBD.
[30] What are the differences and how do they affect users?
[31] The risk that people have is related specifically to the kind of product that they're using.
[32] And one of the features is the concentration of the THC, which is the part that can end up getting you high versus the CBD.
[33] that doesn't have the ability to get you high and may actually help to protect people against some of those bad effects that can be caused by the brain.
[34] So people that may have had experience with cannabis products in the 1960s, in the 1970s, the early 1980s.
[35] In those scenarios, usually the THC and the CBD were very closely linked.
[36] The ratio was very close together.
[37] What's been happening over the, the course of the past eight or nine years is that people have been trying to create products that have high concentrations of THC with lower concentrations of CBD to try to increase the buzz that people would be getting.
[38] And inherent in that is an increased risk of anxiety and paranoia and even psychosis in some of those people.
[39] So you may have thought that in the past the effects weren't too bad, you know, that you handled the effects well.
[40] But if you end up coming across the wrong type of product, you may get a much, much higher dose of THC that's not balanced out with the CBD and have a very different response.
[41] There have been some reports on the potential impact on fertility.
[42] Are there any proven effects of cannabis on fertility, particularly of men?
[43] So what they have been able to prove is that there's less semen production and that the motility of some of the sperm is not as good.
[44] And then what they call the morphology or the shape and the way that the sperm looks is not normal like it usually is.
[45] So they have an increased number of sperm where the heads will just break off from the tails or the heads have stranger shapes that would make it harder for them to be able to penetrate the egg.
[46] We don't have large scale studies looking at reductions in overall fertility rates, but what we're looking at for surrogate endpoints is certainly something that people should be concerned with.
[47] Now, in those studies where they were looking at chronic cannabis users, you know, and people who were taking higher overall doses of cannabis when they were looking at, you know, some of those semen factors, or in the test tube when they took sperm and, you know, then they had exposed them to higher THC environments.
[48] They ended up showing some of those negative effects.
[49] So it's something to be concerned about, but not something that we have definitive proof.
[50] All right, so the age -old question, is cannabis addictive, physically or psychologically?
[51] So unlike opioids, it doesn't have the same kind of withdrawal syndrome or with alcohol.
[52] It doesn't have the same type of withdrawal syndrome.
[53] But people do become psychologically dependent on the product.
[54] And there is some downregulation if you're using higher doses and you're using it for a longer period of time, that when you stop, you end up getting the opposite effects of what people would usually get when they were using marijuana products.
[55] And that makes it very difficult for some of the people to quit.
[56] Now, one of the good things, though, is that with cannabis, if you can make it about two weeks without having used the product, that some of the side effects that people would have from withdrawal would end up starting to go away.
[57] For some people, it's a pretty steep mountain for them to climb in order to be able to get off of the product that they had been using.
[58] But the effects, you know, overall, if you can make it over that two -week time point, end up being, you know, a lot better than if you were trying to come off of something else like alcohol or opioids.
[59] Final question.
[60] Do you feel like we have enough information on cannabis for how much we allow its use in this country?
[61] The degree to which we are allowing cannabis use, the the ways in which we're using it, is there enough research to back this up?
[62] Yeah, one of the biggest risks that we've always had is that by having cannabis be a Schedule I product, it dramatically limited the amount of research that you can do on those products.
[63] So you could do animal studies, you could do studies in a test tube, but doing clinical trials in people has been very limited.
[64] The data that we have for people who have certain types of diseases is actually pretty good.
[65] So if we look at data for the CBD component of cannabis and we're looking at people who have seizure disorders, they ended up coming up with an FDA approved product of a CBD -only injectable product that ends up working really, really well for children who have, you know, rare seizure disorders and they can't be controlled with other products.
[66] A THC to CBD ratio that's very well balanced has worked really well in some people with certain targeted diseases, you know, so people who had wasting syndromes where they couldn't eat, you know, due to cancer or other chronic diseases that they had and that their appetite is stimulated when you use some of those types of products.
[67] So, I mean, in some of those disease states, we know that there's overall effects, but in people who are using therapy specifically for recreational purposes, who don't have a disorder, the information is really, really limited.
[68] And so, you know, the ethical question always becomes, you know, is it better to keep a product that millions of people were going to be using anyway as an illegal product and then have the negative societal effects of arrest and the costs associated with incarceration to do that.
[69] And a lot of states, because of some of those negative effects, have ended up decriminalizing the use of the product.
[70] But because it's decriminalized doesn't necessarily mean that the product is safe.
[71] And we should continue to have additional information so people have a better ability to understand the choices that they're making.
[72] So if people are using THC oil in a vaping product, let's say.
[73] A lot of times it's only THC and you have none of the protective benefits of the CBD.
[74] If you're getting other types of products, you don't know what that relative balances is going to be specifically for you.
[75] We don't have a good way of being able to identify with a blood test or another kind of test, you know, how much cannabis was used and what effect that would have on people's judgments.
[76] So we can detect that, yes, cannabis had been used, but unlike alcohol and someone who you pull over on the side of the road, you know, how does the police officer make the determination of someone who, you know, may smell like they had used cannabis?
[77] Are they actually safe to drive or are they impaired and should not be driving?
[78] And there's a lot of these questions haven't been answered.
[79] And I think a lot of additional work needs to be done.
[80] And, you know, one of the good things about some of that decriminalization is that, you know, some of that work could begin, but there needs to be some onus on someone in society.
[81] And is that someone, the federal government through the NIH, is it the states themselves that are, you know, offering these very lucrative contracts to different companies to say, hey, you know, maybe you should be investing a certain percentage of your sales and helping to do some of this type of research and be able to come up with some of those answers.
[82] Well, Dr. White, thanks so much for talking with us today.
[83] That was Dr. Charles Michael White, care of the Department of Pharmacy practice at Yukon's School of Pharmacy.
[84] And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[85] That's all the time we've got this morning.
[86] Thanks for waking up with us.
[87] We'll be back tomorrow with more news you need to know.