TWO

Clues from the Research Trail

When you trust your own heart, you generate a deep sense of inner emotional well-being, which gives you the freedom to fully enjoy life’s pleasures.

Marijuana will help you recognize your true nature as your enthusiasm for the moment takes you to new heights.

In this chapter, let’s pivot our focus and spend a bit of worthwhile time exploring how cannabis affects the mind and body at scientific levels of understanding. In reality, as opposed to media myth, what is marijuana’s true biological and psychological nature? What scientific facts about the herb can we state fairly clearly, so that we have a shared understanding of its physical, mental, and emotional impact on our intimate relating?

Sad to say, government-funded marijuana research over the past fifty years has tended to generate quite biased results to satisfy the antidrug funders of that research.¹ I myself got naively involved in a nasty federal NIH data-falsification scheme, and ever since then I’ve been vigilant about questioning research findings that don’t appear valid when compared with actual experience.

In the spirit of seeking honest answers, I’ll be drawing the facts and conclusions in this book from formal studies and reports on cannabis that I know can be trusted – for example, the detailed policy paper delivered to the Canadian Senate recently by a team of relatively unbiased scientists.²

To begin, cannabis is known by more than 1,200 different names around the world, including marijuana, hemp, pot, weed, or grass. It is a prolific f lowering plant that grows naturally throughout most of the world.³ In fact, throughout the Midwest, many county roads are lined with wild-growing hemp during the summer months.⁴ In good soil conditions it can reach as high as twenty feet and may look more like a tree than a weed. Some varieties of the plant have high levels of psychoactive constituents, and some won’t get you high at all.

The 2018 U.S. Farm Bill finally made growing certain strains of what’s known as “industrial hemp” (which Congress defines as having very low levels of psychoactive constituents) legal in this country. State laws vary on that subject. George Washington himself famously grew great loads of hemp, supposedly using them only for making twine and rope. Indeed, hemp fiber is extremely tough and durable and also serves as excellent fiber for clothing. It’s now in vogue again around the world for many manufacturing applications.⁵

The psychotropic (mind-altering) content of the marijuana plant is derived mostly from the bud-like flowers of the female of the species, but in all parts of the plant, even down in the stem, scientists are finding more and more chemicals that appear to be psychoactive or medicinal.⁶ More than 520 chemical constituents have been identified in the plant to date. Those that are unique to the plant, of which there are more than eighty, are referred to as cannabinoids.⁷

Cannabis is the only plant on the Earth known to produce two potent constituents: THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol).⁸

Recent university research has found that a number of cannabinoids have the potential to play with brain chemistry and thus affect our performance and experience. Many are now being studied to identify their psychological effects, including cannabinol (CBN), tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV), and cannabigerol (CBG). THC and CBD continue to reign as the most potent stand-alone chemicals; combining them with other cannabinoids, however, seems to sometimes yield a synergistic effect.

Now that distillation methods can isolate (and deliver for ingestion) these cannabinoids for medical marijuana products, it’s become very important to determine the particular effects of each one. This research is still in progress, but it is seriously hindered by the fact that cannabis remains unjustly classified as a federal Schedule 1 drug. That’s the same category where we find dangerous and addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine.⁹ However, in contrast to heroin, cocaine, and even other psychoactive plant materials (such as peyote, psilocybin, and mescaline), cannabinoids don’t contain nitrogen and aren’t alkaloids. Marijuana is neither a strong psychedelic nor physically addictive. In comparison to other Schedule 1 drugs, it has relatively mild effects.

For decades, the association of cannabis with these other seriously mind-blowing and addictive drugs has caused untold legal and medical problems. It has also made it very difficult to conduct marijuana studies on human beings. As more and more states legalize cannabis, I hope that this antiquated and nonscientific federal legal situation will be exposed and corrected.

AVAILABLE CANNABIS PRODUCTS

Until recently, the THC content of commercial marijuana ran between 1 and 15 percent. However, over twenty years of selective breeding, in combination with the development of new distillation and infusion techniques, the percentage of THC in cannabis plants and products has increased greatly.

THC is produced primarily in the flowering bud of the female plant. In fact, the resin secreted by glandular hairs atop the female bud can be up to 90 percent THC. In traditional marijuana cultivation, male and female plants were grown together. However, as soon as a female plant is pollinated by a male plant, the female plant stops secreting resin and shifts into making seeds. When pot growers realized this, they started removing all male plants from their gardens. With no male plants around, the female plants continued to secrete more and more resin, hoping to get pollinated – and the THC content of each bud went up and up and up. Thus was born the sinsemilla (“without seed”) pot sensation.¹⁰ Thereafter, extremely potent cannabis products became available.

Today, both in marijuana dispensaries and out on the perennial black market, there are many different cannabis products and preparations to choose from.¹¹ They are typically derived from the flowers and leaves of the traditional Mexican weed (which is low in THC) or the much more potent flowering tips of the sinsemilla plant.

Sometimes you can also buy kief, a potent powder made mostly of trichomes – that is, the hairs and fine outgrowths from the female flower that secrete the cannabinoids (kief means “well-being” or “pleasure” in Arabic). Also there’s hashish, which is traditionally made from the trichome resin of the female bud, and distilled hash oil, which is mostly pure cannabinoids.¹²

You can also find very potent tinctures, which are alcohol extracts of the raw plant, and infusions that mix hash oil with fats, such as butter or cooking oil, for edible preparations and various pain-relief cosmetics.¹³

Many marijuana products are rated according to their content of THC and CBD. In general, indica strains of cannabis (from the Cannabis indica plant) are noted for their high concentration of CBD, while sativa strains (from C. sativa) tend to have higher levels of THC. The percentage of THC versus CBD has a strong influence on what type of effect you will experience. CBD tends to have a sedative, analgesic, pain-relieving effect that doesn’t get you psychologically high. THC tends to elicit quite definite sensory, cognitive, and sensory alterations, stimulating a quality of consciousness unique to cannabis.

If you and your loved one are seeking a more energetic, uplifting, socially active experience or a shared intense “insight” adventure, you’ll want to use high-THC cannabis products, which generally are those made from sativa strains.

Much of the labeling on legally marketed cannabis products can be misleading. Try to find a local dispensary or dealer you can trust to provide you with a high-THC, low-CBD cannabis product, and sample several different ones until you find one that you and your partner prefer.

Research is beginning to suggest that a number of the minor chemicals found in the cannabis flower are subtle but important for a maximum high. Unfortunately, most of these constituents are removed in the process of distilling cannabis for use in edibles, oils, and other refined products. For this reason, the traditional method of smoking the fullbud mixture in a pipe, cigarette, or water pipe, rather than ingesting a refined product, is often the best plan. More on that later.

PREDICTABLE EFFECTS

Considering that cannabis research has been legally challenging in the past and today is still in its infancy, what do we actually know about the plant’s effects?¹⁴ To begin, on a physical level, well-verified medical research shows that when you smoke marijuana with a moderate THC level, initially your pulse will tend to quicken and your blood pressure might rise a bit (or a lot, if the marijuana has a high THC content) before dropping back down to normal. Your body temperature will drop slightly, and your breathing will usually deepen. Often you’ll feel whole-body muscular relaxation within minutes of smoking. All of these effects also occur when you ingest a refined cannabis product, but more slowly, usually manifesting within an hour.

Marijuana’s effects are said to be 50 percent chemical and 50 percent psychological – your mood, expectation, personality type, cognitive habits, and other variables strongly influence how your brain and body respond to the chemicals. The overall psychological effect for most people includes relaxation, contentment, sensory pleasure, a shift in mind-set into present-moment sensory or fantasy focus, an altered sense of the flow of time (a sense of timelessness), slight euphoria, and general sense of well-being.

Marijuana is often called an insight drug – it has the power to elicit deep new experience and insight, especially when approached mindfully.

High-THC cannabis is considered to be psychotropic, which means that it noticeably affects your mind and inner subjective experience and causes changes in mental and emotional functioning. In the past, cannabis was traditionally included in the group of psychotropes known as hallucinogens, but most researchers now agree that marijuana very seldom induces a full-blown psychedelic experience – but high doses can indeed lead to hallucinatory audio and visual alterations and other intense inner experiences.¹⁵

Rarely, but of import, a few users sometimes experience temporary anxiety and even panic when they first try cannabis, probably as a result of the sudden loss of ego control of their inner experience.¹⁶ This shift from habitual mental control of our inner experience into a freer, participatory experience of spontaneous engagement in the moment is, of course, what most of us are seeking when we get high. But for first-time smokers, that effect can be surprising and may trigger anxiety.

A lot of baby boomers whom I’ve worked with had this initial “freak-out” experience when they first tried grass long ago, often in a negative social setting, and they never tried it again. I hope that the suggestions throughout this book and in the High Together app will help those of you with this history to approach the experience of getting high in a confident, enjoyable way. Remember that as a general rule, it’s easier to get too much THC when you eat, drink, or dab a cannabis product. This is another reason to smoke rather than ingest marijuana; smoking allows you to regulate your intake and experiment, puff by puff, to find your right strain and dosage.

It’s true that eating or drinking a marijuana product can generate somewhat similar effects as smoking weed, but there are notable differences: the onset is much slower when you eat or drink it, and the psychological impact is somewhat different and more subtle.

When you eat cannabis, the THC goes first to your liver, where, as recent studies have shown, the chemical is broken down into a metabolite called 11-hydroxy-THC.¹⁷ To date, there has been almost no research on this metabolite, so we really don’t know much about how it affects the body and brain.

Many people who enjoy smoking grass do not like eating it because ingestion tends to make them feel heavy rather than light and sluggish rather than energized. The mental stimulation, erogenous glow, and shared sense of insight and discovery tend to be dulled when you ingest rather than smoke the herb. But, of course, a lot of people eat and fly high – it’s your choice.

NATURAL RECEPTORS

In the late 1960s, Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli scientist, first isolated and identified the chief cannabinoid, THC.¹⁸ The pure compound was then synthesized, making exact pharmacological studies and products possible. Twenty years later, a team of American researchers, led by neurobiologist Allyn Howlett, identified THC-sensitive receptor sites in human brain cells.¹⁹

Those receptors, known as cannabinoid receptors, bind with anandamide, an endogenous (made by the body) chemical that generates effects quite similar to those provoked by THC. As it turns out, the THC molecule is so similar to the anandamide molecule that it is capable of binding to those same receptors. This, then, is the mechanism by which THC triggers a neurobiological response. Cannabinoid receptors are widely distributed in the brain and also everywhere in the central nervous system, which means that THC can readily bind to sites around your entire body, not just in your brain.²⁰

The chemistry is remarkably complex and still not fully understood, but we do know that the natural cannabinoids produced by the body – the endocannabinoids, as they’re known – modulate a large number of physiological processes related to pain, memory, movement, muscle tone, sleep, pleasure, and appetite.

When inhaled (such as when you smoke cannabis), THC and other active cannabis constituents are absorbed rapidly (within three seconds) through the respiratory tract and lungs into the bloodstream, generating an onset of effects in the brain in just a few minutes. With the new hyper-strong buds, most people need only two or three inhalations to move into the “stimulating” first phase of the marijuana experience.

This initial temporary “rush” can feel so intense that you won’t want to even consider driving or any physical activity for fifteen to twenty minutes; it’s best to just kick back and enjoy the experience. The intensity subsides gradually after thirty to sixty minutes, and for most people and most doses the high ends after two to three hours. Subtle effects, such as a feeling of relaxation, may linger for several more hours or even into the next day. Indeed, considerable amounts of THC stay in your bloodstream for several days afterward.

When you eat or drink cannabis, your body absorbs the THC through your digestive tract and much more slowly, with blood concentrations increasing steadily for three or more hours.²¹ You typically won’t feel any effects until at least half an hour, and up to two hours, after consumption.²² Rather than a sudden euphoric effect, the initial impact of eating cannabis is usually a gradual, pleasant slowing-down feeling in the body, a sedate and calm shifting of gears in the mind, and often a much-valued reduction in pain and bodily sensations of all kinds.

A gender note: A careful review of research published in a report on marijuana that was prepared for the Canadian Senate concluded that there are no observable differences in the metabolic effect of cannabis on men and women. Both male and female subjects alike report a sudden shift into an altered state of awareness – and it’s exactly this particular cognitive and perceptual shift and the resulting inner experiences that users value so highly.

THE EXPERIENCE

Let’s look a bit more deeply into reports describing the shift into the marijuana mind-set.²³ At first, especially if you have smoked or vaped cannabis, you will likely feel a sudden unique quality of mild pleasure or even euphoria occurring throughout your body. Your breathing rate and the depth of your inhalations and exhalations change – usually in the direction of more relaxed, deep, and calm, and there predictably ensues a sudden shift in the quality and content of your consciousness.

As the THC takes effect, the ego’s habitual control over what you do and feel and think will temporarily let go, and your focus will shift spontaneously from busy past-future thoughts and plans into a present-moment sense of liberation from your mind’s usual mental fixations.

At the same time, an enjoyable physical relaxation usually takes over your muscles, along with definite and often quite interesting perceptual alterations. For instance, your sense of the flow of time may shift. Time may seem to expand, and a few minutes can seem like an hour – many people report getting “much more experience out of a minute” than usual. (This is perhaps a primary desired effect of the drug, and we’ll explore it experientially in later chapters.)

Also, you’ll probably feel a heightening of sensory alertness and bodily pleasure as a fresh, early-childhood type of raw perception takes over – everything you look at or hear or touch suddenly seems new, interesting, and aesthetically pleasing.²⁴ In a word, marijuana tends to help us see the world through more creative and nonjudgmental eyes.

This expanded sense of time, pleasure, and focus may be accompanied by auditory experiences, such as hearing music or other ambient sounds. Especially when closing the eyes, some people also report mild hallucinatory images, where a pleasurable inner light show, fantasy, or imaginary reality temporarily fills the mind’s inner screen.²⁵

Many marijuana users also report a sudden, quite pleasurable intensification of ordinary sensory experiences such as eating, watching TV, conversation, listening to birds singing, swimming, dancing, walking in nature, and making love.

In a social setting, marijuana is well known for provoking infectious laughter and a humorous perspective on life. The positive energetic discharge that accompanies whole-body laughter is one of the main features of getting high. Even the basic act of conversing with another person, face-to-face, can become intense and especially meaningful, even quite intimate. Especially when you also drink alcohol, your inhibitions can drop away, and socialization becomes more highly charged, and you may feel inspired with bright new ideas.²⁶ (Note: While it’s been proven that consuming one or two alcoholic drinks before taking weed will boost the impact of the weed in your system, drinking more than that will most likely impair your system and prevent you from being present for any meaningful relating.)

In all honesty, most people tend to use marijuana because it makes them feel good. This is one of the reasons it’s so effective in reducing pain and other forms of suffering – it boosts our overall enjoyment of life. And because it has so few negative side effects, marijuana is fast becoming an effective medical treatment as well as a recreational mood booster.

All these altered experiences come together to generate a special sense of shared interaction when you get high with a close friend. In the chapters that follow, we’re going to look more deeply into how each of the seven typical dimensions of a shared high can be guided and augmented in order to maximize the intimate event you’re moving through.

MENTAL PERFORMANCE

A search for scientific information on the cognitive effects of cannabis can seem dismal – you’ll find a lot of negatives and almost no positives. As Dr. Sanjay Gupta points out, “About 6 percent of the current U.S. marijuana studies investigate the benefits of medical marijuana. The rest are designed to investigate harm. That imbalance paints a highly distorted picture.” He further points out that while someone dies every nineteen minutes from prescription drug overdose, there are no records of even a single death from marijuana overdose.²⁷

That said, here’s what we can conclude fairly definitively: Getting high definitely has some trade-offs. On a temporary basis, marijuana intake will affect both your mental and your physical abilities.

To begin, research shows that a person who has taken pot will experience pronounced (but temporary) cognitive alterations.²⁸ Sometimes it will cause you to have deficits in your short-term memory (“What was I just doing?”). However, in exchange, your inner experience will expand, and you may move through a pleasurable free flow of associations. Freed from your usual inhibitions and conditioned beliefs, you can find yourself entertaining fresh thoughts and seeing the world from a unique and brighter perspective.

New ideas and insights will come effortlessly to mind, allowing you to shift into unexpected thought flows, pleasing reveries, and vivid fantasy adventures. The experience of your imagination will seem more real and engaging, combining with your expanded perceptions to stimulate a whole new universe of inner experience.

In the first thirty minutes to two hours after you’ve smoked marijuana, when your mind is engaged in just “being,” formal studies show that your motor skills and reaction times are indeed temporarily slowed down, and skilled activity can be negatively affected. Marijuana is definitely a drug, and it does at times generate serious alterations that can be both bothersome and outright dangerous if not approached mindfully. So when using pot, you’ll probably want to temporarily put aside your daily routines, refrain from driving, and shift from “doing” to “being” for an hour or two, just relaxing into the experience that comes to you.

As noted before, each person responds to the effects of THC in their own unique way depending on their personality, social situation, mood, energy level, and so forth. Your experience will not be the same as anyone else’s; it may not even be the same between sessions.

Within the general parameters of the marijuana high, each time you choose to smoke, dab, or ingest cannabis, an utterly unexpected experience can emerge. When you ingest coffee or alcohol – or morphine or cocaine, for that matter – you can be fairly sure about how you’re going to react because our reactions to these substances are fairly predictable. With marijuana, however, you must be ready for a wide variety of possible physical and mental reaction. This is one of the complex attributes of cannabis.

When you partake of the herb with your friend as a shared adventure, it’s important to remember that your friend/partner will not have the exact same experience as you. Even when you’re sharing an idea and speaking similar words, in reality your inner experience won’t be fully congruent with your partner’s. As you move through a number of shared experiences, you’ll develop a growing appreciation for the fact that you’re actually always alone with your inner experience, even while communicating about it.

One of the beautiful paradoxes of sharing a high session is that you can feel so totally in tune with your friend, even while remaining aware that you’re having different experiences.

Regarding whether marijuana negatively affects your memory, wildly conflicting scientific reports abound. Reliable cognitive studies have shown that marijuana use temporarily impairs, or at least alters, short-term memory. But these studies are very general, and none of them to date (that I know of) have explored whether you can train yourself to maintain a sharp memory while you are high. Also, a 2018 study conducted at the University of Florida found that cannabis actually seems to improve memory – so go figure.²⁹

When they first experiment with grass, many people find that they are unable to make their mind function “normally” when they are high, and they find this upsetting. As I said before, there’s a definite tradeoff happening here – in the same way that you wouldn’t drink a sixpack and then do your taxes, you probably wouldn’t want to smoke a strong strain of grass and then attend a corporate strategy meeting – unless you know that you perform well at that level when you are high. Anecdotally, many people find that they can train themselves to perform well at desired tasks when they are high – it’s largely a matter of focus, practice, and intent.

In order to safely and securely enjoy the benefits of marijuana, most people need to set time aside, relax their normal mental habits, and gracefully surrender temporary short-term memory functions in exchange for unique and powerful shifts in awareness.

AVOIDING DOWNSIDES

Although cannabis has been well documented as being quite benign in its effects, it’s true that it can cause a small percentage of first-time users to slip temporarily into anxiety. When I worked with a team of researchers at Princeton University to study college students using cannabis, we found that about 10 percent of first-time users reacted with a short anxiety/panic attack.³⁰

My own first marijuana experience (a very strong dose of pure hashish) began with a sudden ten-minute anxiety attack because I started imagining the police busting in and catching me in the act of something totally illegal and also widely condemned as immoral. I also was afraid that using marijuana might make me go crazy – permanently. A friend who was in the room saw my reaction, came over to where I was sitting, and calmly took my hand, met my eyes, and smiled – and in just a few breaths I started to feel okay again.

Surveys have documented that a surprising number of everyday Americans have a mostly buried fear that taking a drug that pushes them into an altered state of consciousness will cause them to become crazy. Early antimarijuana propaganda played upon this fear, actively pushing the idea that pot use could induce a sudden psychotic break or even permanent mental illness.³¹

Even with loads of proof to the contrary, many people are fearful that they might go crazy or do something bad or harmful if they surrender their habitual ego control, even once, to a psychotropic drug.

Is this in any way a valid fear? Studies show that very large doses of pure THC sometimes produce symptoms of temporary psychosis in rigid personality types or in unstable personalities that are genetically prone to schizophrenia.³² Symptoms such as confusion, amnesia, delusions, hallucinations, anxiety, and agitation do sometimes emerge when a person is under the influence of pot – especially if the environment becomes threatening or confusing. The same thing often happens with an overdose of alcohol.

THC-intensive cannabis can temporarily induce some of the more benign symptoms of schizophrenia, in which time stretches out, colors become more vivid, and mental fantasies manifest as visual images. In fact, many people seek out and fully enjoy these altered states.

Other so-called “psychotic” experiences are also occasionally part of the overall marijuana high, especially with large doses. These include temporary difficulty in making decisions, trouble focusing or paying attention, problems with working memory, sensory distortions, unusual thoughts, and quite vivid fantasies. For most people, these symptoms are short-lived (lasting a few minutes or so) and often quite pleasurable and insightful. Only in extreme cases or when eating very large doses of THC do such symptoms persist for longer than half an hour, and they do not continue after the effects of the drug have worn off.

The current mainstream psychiatric opinion in the United States is that cannabis on its own does not cause schizophrenia or other psychiatric disorders and it is a fairly safe drug in regard to mental health.

The inner experience of temporarily letting go of ego control and trusting the flow of the marijuana experience is almost always a good feeling, a positive learning experience, and a liberating, insightful, and predictably healthy adventure. More and more people now use marijuana recreationally with this clear intent of temporarily “getting out of their mind” and relaxing into a more laid-back, spontaneous, enjoyable marijuana high.

In sum: Everyone has his or her own unique experience with the herb, and the experience is usually very enjoyable. Using marijuana is always an adventure to be approached with respect and a bit of mindful caution – but with no need for worry.

PHYSICAL HEALTH

Is marijuana entirely benign in terms of its effect on our physical health? Current research indicates that moderate smoking of cannabis poses minimal danger to the lungs, although heavy daily smoking might possibly lead to complications. Unlike heavy tobacco smokers, most heavy cannabis smokers exhibit no obstruction of the lung’s small airways, indicating that most people won’t develop emphysema from smoking cannabis.

Australian studies show that people who smoke cannabis throughout the day for years on end but don’t smoke tobacco are only slightly more likely than nonsmokers to make outpatient visits for respiratory illnesses.

Similar studies that adjust for sex, age, race, education, and alcohol consumption suggest that daily cannabis smokers have a slightly elevated risk of respiratory illness compared to nonsmokers. But curiously, studies of cannabis smokers in New Zealand and at UCLA found that smoking cannabis on a daily basis for an average of twenty years actually led to a lower prevalence of emphysema and asthma than in the general population.³³ And THC itself doesn’t appear to be carcinogenic.

The Cannabis Report released in 1999 by the Swiss Federal Commission for Drug Issues (EKDF) concluded that cannabis is probably the most widely smoked substance in the world after tobacco, and its main adverse effect is its definite negative effect on psychomotor performance. Cannabis, the report concluded, usually (but not always) slows your reaction time and interferes with your muscle control, thereby impairing your ability to drive a car, play sports, or perform any activity that requires coordination or strength.³⁴

As predicted, studies have documented that THC can produce dose-related impairments in a wide range of cognitive and behavioral functions relevant to skilled performance, such as operating machinery. These impairments include slightly slowed reaction time; lax information processing; impaired perceptual-motor coordination and performance; weak short-term memory, attention, signal detection, and tracking behavior; and distorted time perception.³⁵

A number of related reports conclude that cannabis can impair performance in simulated driving settings, but studies of the effects of cannabis on actual on-the-road driving performance have thus far found only slight impairments.³⁶ People who are cannabis-intoxicated (by a very high dose) tend to drive more slowly and cautiously, whereas people who are alcohol-intoxicated generally drive at faster-than-normal speeds and take more risks. But of course, the mix of alcohol and pot can produce very nasty effects for anyone who is driving.

In our media, hardly a week goes by without some magazine or newspaper carrying a questionable story about marijuana, that “dangerous drug,” shrinking the amygdala, rewiring the brain, or otherwise destroying young minds. This often unfounded reporting makes everybody afraid of pot, even as more serious research shows that in most cases it isn’t doing any noticeable damage at all. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technologies, researchers at several universities have now reversed a number of earlier studies and found almost no evidence of brain damage in people who enjoy regular high times with cannabis. Brain-wave patterns of chronic cannabis users versus those of non-users show zero differentiation, even though cannabis definitely lights up an fMRI scan in unique ways for a person who is high.

In fact, cannabis may actually have neuroprotective qualities. Professor Yosef Sarne of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine documented that low doses of THC protect the brain from long-term cognitive damage after injury due to hypoxia, toxic drugs, or seizure. He showed that low doses have a positive impact on cell signaling, preventing cell death and promoting growth factors. Sarne’s current research indicates that low doses of THC may also prevent damage to the heart caused by cardiac ischemia.³⁷

In sum: From the best research I can find to date, it appears that even long-term heavy use of cannabis by adults produces no evidence of debilitating impairment of cognitive function when users are not high.

SENSATION BOOST

Does marijuana give people the munchies? Will you get fat if you smoke pot? I would have to say that it depends. If your self-control is weak and you keep too many snacks readily available, you are indeed at risk of overeating (though, of course, that’s true whether or not you are using marijuana). However, a 2013 study found that Americans who smoke pot actually have smaller waists than people who don’t. So who’s to say?

Regarding the munchies, it’s true. In one study, college-age subjects smoked either a placebo or active cannabis twice a day. Those subjects who smoked active cannabis increased their food intake – and doubled their snack consumption – during both private and social periods, with the greatest rate of change in caloric intake occurring in social settings.

In fact, many people smoke cannabis regularly because it improves their appetite. Otherwise, for various medical reasons, they wouldn’t eat properly or enough. So yes, cannabis does increase our appetite for food, just as it often increases our appetite for visual stimulation, music, and physical pleasures, such as sex.

Evidence shows that grass can intensify pleasurable sensations of all kinds. It can, in a word, serve as an aphrodisiac, ranging from moderate to extreme, for any of the senses or all of them at once.

Marijuana makes everyday pleasures more pleasurable, and as various studies have documented, the key to understanding this temporary enhancement of pleasure lies in the way that marijuana intensifies our focus of attention toward a unique mix of present-moment experience, imagination, and memory. Our power to guide our marijuana experience lies in our ongoing choice of where we focus our attention. If we focus on food, we’ll probably eat. If we focus on springtime flowers, we’ll enjoy that rush of visual pleasure. If we focus on the physical presence of our loved one, sexual pleasures will perhaps arise. We’ll explore in later chapters how to manage our focal choices in order to generate the experiences we want to have when we are high.

OTHER WORRIES?

Obviously, if cannabis could be proven to be detrimental to any aspect of our lives, opponents to pot legalization would have presented their case loud and clear. In fact, cannabis used in moderation doesn’t create serious health concerns for most people, and from what we currently know, it has a positive impact on many mood disorders.

However, for the 10 to 15 percent of our population who are already at high risk of mental problems (such as borderline schizophrenia or latent psychosis), marijuana can provoke an outbreak of these conditions. It is wise to be aware of this possibility. Also, even if you’re fairly stable emotionally, be careful not to overdose on the edibles, as that is what causes most panic attacks.

Hold in mind that psychological studies show that if people have a panic attack caused by their first experience with cannabis, they usually have just one. If you have one, don’t be afraid that it will happen again.

Note: If you or a partner have a panic attack or any other upsetting reaction to getting high, before rushing off to the emergency room, I recommend following the steps outlined in “8 Ways to Counteract a Too-Intense Cannabis High,” which you can find on the Leafly website. Usually a cannabis-induced panic attack will dissipate in five to ten minutes.

To make sure that you’re not caught up in worrying when you use marijuana, let’s look at some other media-provoked worries, most of which have been proven invalid. For instance, do people get addicted to pot? A review of the research shows that the answer is almost never, especially if by “addicted” you mean physiologically dependent, as with alcohol, amphetamines, tobacco, opiates, and many prescription drugs, where withdrawal from the substance is extreme.³⁸

However, abrupt withdrawal from marijuana following very heavy daily use has been shown to sometimes cause temporary withdrawal symptoms such as irritability, nausea, perspiration, trembling, insomnia, and loss of appetite. These withdrawal symptoms are relatively minor and short in duration, lasting usually just a day or two.³⁹

Psychologically, any substance taken regularly to induce a positive inner experience or to escape from negative emotions will generate psychological dependence, especially if the person is using the drug to avoid painful inner experience and neurotic emotional patterns.

We’re all dependent on a variety of substances and experiences that we’ve become habitually fond of ingesting or receiving – and we resist the loss of these things or experiences. We love our comfort zones! But beyond everyday habits that we’re attached to, some of us are more prone to acute states of habituation than others, based on our genes, childhood, and physiology.

Several decades ago, a colleague of mine in New York conducted a landmark study for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) related to heroin use. He found that about 20 percent of America’s adult population seems to have a strong addictive tendency related to the drug – their body, not just their mind, craves the drug at cellular levels.

However, if given ready access to heroin, about 50 percent of the population might use it now and then recreationally but would not become physically addicted; in other words, they can take it or leave it. Another 25 percent will become nauseous upon taking heroin – they cannot tolerate the drug. A recent government report states: “The genes a person is born with account for about half of that person’s risk for addiction. Gender, ethnicity, and the presence of other mental disorders also influence risk of addiction.”⁴⁰ I mention this information just to clear up a common misconception that anyone using cocaine or heroin will immediately become addicted. Marijuana is not physically addictive.

In sum, concern about addiction to marijuana is not an issue for most people, although psychological dependency is always possible when marijuana is being used to avoid the need for emotional growth.

If you want to keep up on the science of cannabis, you can easily monitor the research online, but we’re still years away from getting all the necessary research funded and completed. For our Cannabis for Couples theme, where a moderate dose of cannabis is taken no more than once a day, the evidence is quite strong that you have nothing to fear and loads to look forward to. Check our website for postings of important new updates.

As a final note, a recent personality-type study using the Myers-Briggs questionnaire has dismissed the media stereotype that marijuana users tend to be introverted, withdrawn, passive, quiet, lazy, and shy. Quite the contrary. The study, in which more than two thousand marijuana users were interviewed, found that the dominant personality type among them was extroverted, not introverted. In the general population, 50 percent of people score as extroverted; among the marijuana users, that number was 80 percent.

Contrary to the stoner stereotype, the majority of cannabis users enjoy interacting with people, maintain a wide circle of acquaintances, and gain energy from social situations. They tend to be social by nature and are often charming and witty. They tend to be creative, resourceful, spontaneous, and impulsive. Rather than being withdrawn and quiet, they are outgoing risk takers who are curious about almost everything. And they want their relationships to be full of excitement and adventure. So . . . another stereotype bites the dust, and the personality of cannabis users shifts in our minds.