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The first study to suggest that a key cannabis ("marijuana") plant compound, cannabidiol (CBD), can mitigate the interference of Δ9-THC ("THC") with memory formation was lead by Dr. Valerie Curran, PhD, a psychopharmacologist from University College London also studying the effects of cannabis use on creativity at the Beckley Foundation, Oxford, UK.
To test this hypothesis, Curran and her colleagues traveled to the homes of 134 volunteers, where the subjects got high on their own supply before completing a battery of psychological tests designed to measure anxiety, memory recall and other factors such as verbal fluency when both sober and stoned. The researchers then took a portion of the stash back to their laboratory to test how much THC and cannabidiol it contained.
The subjects were divided into groups of high (samples containing more than 0.75% cannabidiol) and low (less than 0.14%) cannabidiol exposure, and the data were filtered so that their THC levels were constant. Analysis showed that participants who had smoked cannabis low in cannabidiol were significantly worse at recalling text than they were when not intoxicated. Those who smoked cannabis high in cannabidiol showed no such impairment.
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Ilan attributes the positive finding of Curran and her team to their more powerful methodology in analysing subjects’ own smoking preferences. In the United States, government policy dictates that only marijuana provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse can be used for research — and it "is notorious for being low in THC and of poor quality", says Ilan.
Lester Grinspoon, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachussetts, who has studied the effects of marijuana on patients since 1967, says that Curran’s study is important."Cannabis with high cannabidiol levels will make a more appealing option for anti-pain, anti-anxiety and anti-spasm treatments, because they can be delivered without causing disconcerting euphoria," he says.
- from "Key ingredient staves off marijuana memory loss," published online, Oct. 1, 2010, Nature. doi:10.1038/news.2010.508
Dr. Curran argues that cannabidiol studies could provide insight into the mechanics of memory formation and reveal therapeutic benefits for disorders involving memory impairments. The research was published October 1, 2010 in the British Journal of Psychiatry ("Impact of cannabidiol on the acute memory and psychotomimetic effects of smoked cannabis: naturalistic study," The British Journal of Psychiatry (2010) 197: 285-290. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.110.077503).
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Dr. Valerie Curran and research team, congratulations on your publication!
The increase in the number of active neural pathways is linked to increased human mental performance (note time point 0:40 to 4:43 regarding Dr. Paulus’ research in “What Makes a Genius – Part 5” by the BBC). Neurofeedback therapies have matured in the 2000s as a result of the addition of supercomputing technologies combined with ongoing research since the 1940s to create sophisticated clinical applications available for the rehabilitative therapy of the brain injured, those suffering memory impairment due to conditions such as “traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s type dementia and other forms of dementia, and depression” and cognitive performance enhancement (“Brain Craze,” Nature 447, 18-20 (3 May 2007) | doi:10.1038/447018a; Published online 2 May 2007). Given the accumulated findings in biomedical research and recent key findings (e.g. “Pre-Clinical Study Shows Marijuana Compound Inhibits Tumor Size, Growth and Metastasis of Human Cancer“), the addition of cannibidiol (CBD) could enhance present clinical protocols of neurofeedback.
Thank you for this!
It would be a hell of a lot easier to study any of this if the PTB would just knock off all the lying BS and legalize it. Then we could get a lot more solid epidemiological data.
I’m *still* pissed off at Tashkin for fomenting the meme that it caused lung cancer for so long, without taking the time to actually check the data.
Shameful!
Good on him for finally seeing the error of his ways, but he caused a lot of damage with his hubris meanwhile.
Smoking marijuana doesn’t kill people. Period. Smoking a lot of marijuana can lead to short term memory loss, and anger sublimation (this can be good, or bad). An occasional person has a bad reaction. An occasional person has a bad reaction to peanut butter, too.
However, peanut butter allergies do actually occasionally kill people.
I could go on and on about the positive effects of marijuana, but nobody (present company excluded) seems to want to hear about that. They want to keep pimping the myths of the evil weed.
This has got to be about corporate money. Can’t Kimberly Clark learn to make paper out of hemp?
Or, perhaps all of the people who are getting rich from prison privatization (or who hope to become so in the near future) could…well, what could they do? What could they do instead?
I’ve run out of comment. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.
Thou Rocketh.
!De nada! Please spread the findings of the good news already published in British media.
These two findings I have written about have huge implications for improving health and welfare at extremely little expense relative to other medical/scientific/technological breakthroughs. I even threw in for free a possible new protocol. It’s up to you and me to make our lives better by demanding it. Start today and don’t forget to bring others along as we are all in together.
Major changes are at hand for marijuana politics
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16239152
Nice long story about the history.
Thank you for that link. Great article.
Cannibidiol and the Internet might be to the 21st century as caffeine and the coffee (and tea) house/salon were to the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Can you imagine what would have happened if caffeine had not been introduced to Europe? Have a look at this:
{snip}
Certainly there would be no Lloyd’s of London or the insurance industry (from “Coffee History,” accesed Oct. 4, 2010):
and
(from “Lloyd’s of London – from Coffee House to Insurance Market,” Oct. 31, 2003)
Of course there is the still-unresolved damaging aspects of “free trade” started back then:
The Columbian Exchange: Food, Livestock and Disease All Crossed the Atlantic,” by Susan Harrison, May 8, 2006
“Guns, Germs and Steel,” Jared Diamond
More food for thought is present by Clark Ford, Ph.D., Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Iowa State University here:
World Food Issues: Past and Present
The following two movies available on Netflix are a must in understanding how and why our anti-marijuana laws got that way and which groups of Americans are leading the charge to keep it a back alley, criminal business.
‘High: The True Tale of American Marijuana’ (2008) Director John Holowach
‘Grass’ (2000) Woody Harrelson
Awesome and thank you! More “mental edibles” for my study list!
Always a pleasure. Keep up the good work.
I find it interesting that even though California just passed a new law making possession of an ounce or less a $100.00 fine with no criminal or judicial consequences, it is still a back alley business. Imagine if alcohol possession of a fifth or less was a $100.00 fine but could only be purchased on the black market?LOL
That’s why a yes on CA Prop. 19 is still a must.
Yes, making anything a back alley business is a corrupt practice constructed to profit a handful of people who knowingly do so off the disenfranchisement and suffering of others. Those who run corporations– and the politicians and government officials purchased by them– know exactly what they are doing:
- from “A Short History of the Corporation,” accessed Oct. 4, 2010
There are many good things about legalizing Marijuana that will go a long way toward dispelling the myths that have grown up about this plant. One of the major things is doing away with the punative measures that have put so many people in jail
There is also some downside to the effects of Cannabis that need to be taken into account, and society and our laws will need to adjust to these things. Marijuana is not Alcohol and the affects on the human body are different and obvious to any rational person.
Just to name a few:
1) You cannot drive under the influence of Marijuana. You might think you can, but you can’t.
2) You will not be able to do anything that requires precise motor skills and logical reasoning. You might think you can, but you can’t.
3) The affects of Marijuana last much longer in the body than Alcohol. It’s not like you can toke on a joint, wait an hour, then go for a drive with very little residual affect. You might think you can, but you can’t.
4) Lastly, if you are doing anything that requires skill and concentration and you are stoned, it will look wonderful and you will think that you have completed and finished everything in beautiful form with no earthly errors whatsoever, you will be sadly mistaken. And if it is truly rocket science, and your life depends on it working right the first time every time, then you are in deep s#@t, and you will most likely die.
This article is about a specific biochemical component, cannabidiol (CBD), that can occur in particular strains of plants of the cannabis family. “Marijuana” is an imprecise term to designate the strains of cannabis which may contain a specific cannabinoid, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (“THC”). In humans (animals can have a different metabolic character than humans), those psychoactive properties have now been shown by Dr. Curran’s recent research to be attributed soley to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (“THC”).
I find your assertions to be a more vague form of generalization from a biochemical standpoint as each person reacts differently to a biochemical substance and dosage. No person has an identical metabolism although there are identifiable trends within the human population that allow researchers to group them based upon their biochemical response(s) (e.g. American Indians aren’t fast acetylators compared to most Caucasians and therefore respond to the same dosage and concentration of alcohol differently).
So, please be a bit more specific in your assertions (e.g. Are they your personal experience of THC-containing cannabis?) and provide citations for them.
Aloha, mzchief…! Mahalo for writing this…! So, discarding the tech lingo, for a sec… Plants high in THC content like BC Electric, White Widow, etc… also, has the higher concentration levels of the cannabidiol (CBD) too…? The USG’s ‘authorized’ weed is certainly of poor quality, and a piss poor standard to utilize for research purposes…! 8-(
Aloha and he mea iki, CTuttle!
You ask:
The short answer to your question is “we don’t know.”
In the research reviewed in this thread and in “Pre-Clinical Study Shows Marijuana Compound Inhibits Tumor Size, Growth and Metastasis of Human Cancer,” it is explicitly stated that what the research labs are growing is not the same as what’s available to the public in the UK (see this link) and in the US (second quoted paragraph from the above post beginning with “Lester Grinspoon, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachussetts, [..]“). We also know from what Dr. Robson explicitly tells us is that the cannibis plant can only make more THC at the expense of producing cannibidiol (CBD). So, if we believe Dr. Robson and the statement that ‘[..] it “is notorious for being low in THC and of poor quality,’ then we deduce that the US government approved-for-research strain of cannabis is very low in THC and, therefore, must have even less cannibidiol (CBD). However, unless there is cannibis grown for a “standardized extract” and there is laboratory analysis (“certified”) for what’s in it and how much, one can only guess. But, in general, we know that if a cannibis is extremely low in THC, it only can have even less CBD which renders the stuff essentially biochemically equivalent to industrial hemp.
*heh* Lucky I live Hawaii…! Btw, I’ve heard that that ‘industrial hemp’ was only grown in Kentucky, the Blue ‘Grass’ State, right…? ;-)
Edit: Grown and ‘processed’ by one of the numerous cigarette company’s in Kentucky…
I think your list applies to indica rather than sativa, Thc conntent vs CBD, Stoned v High.
Dr. Robson was very clear that here that it’s about the combination of THC and CBD in a given preparation for the desired therapeutic effect relative to the need and biochemical profile of the patient. Further, according to Dr. Curran’s research reviewed in this article, pure CBD renders a patient neither “stoned” or “high”– only THC appears to be doing that.