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It's April 20. For those not in the know, 4/20 is the unofficial holiday that pot smokers and marijuana-legalization activists around the world celebrate by lighting up.
The plant, best-known for its "feel-good" effects and touted for its uses for diseases, can damage our bodies and minds.
The high you get from marijuana mostly comes from a chemical called tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is found in varying amounts in different strains of cannabis.
Another important compound is cannabidiol, or CBD, thought to cause many of the medical effects of marijuana. There are more than 70 other chemicals in marijuana that could cause effects on the brain and body that haven't been well studied.
Most of THC's effects happen in the brain, where the chemicals in the plant interact with receptors on brain cells called cannabinoid receptors. Our bodies actually make chemicals similar to THC, used in normal brain function and development. THC co-opts these natural pathways to produce most of its effects, which are varied and depend on how much and how often someone uses pot.
Marijuana makes us feel good.
When over-excited by drugs, the reward system creates feelings of euphoria.
But too much of a good thing can become a problem, as the more often you trigger this feeling, the less you can feel happiness for other "rewarding" experiences. It takes a lot of pot use to get to this point, though.
In a recent study of people who had smoked nearly five joints a day, five days a week, for more than a decade, researchers saw that heavy pot smokers had weaker responses to the stimulant methylphenidate, which is used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, than nonusers. The stimulant gave them a less intense "high."
It can be addictive.
A man smokes marijuana during a demonstration in support of the legalization of marijuana in Buenos Aires, December 4, 2014.
New studies have found that pot can be more addictive when used in combination with nicotine (in the form of blunts) or when used through a vaporizer or other means, which may be more potent than smoking. According to researchers, this could mean that physiological effects of vaporized marijuana extracts could be very different from those of smoked marijuana, since the vaporized marijuana contains mostly THC, the main psychoactive compound.
A study in the journal Addictive Behaviors researchers found that compared to marijuana smokers, users who ingest hash oil using a wax, called "dabbing," or by inhaling marijuana oil using a "vape pen," may more rapidly develop tolerance and may also have a greater risk of withdrawal — two signs of addiction.
It blocks memory formation.
This is specifically why the legal smoking age is 21 in the states that have legalized it.
This blockage of memory formation can cause cognitive impairment in adulthood if use happens during adolescence, at least in rats. It can also quicken age-related brain cell loss, though some studies have suggested that marijuana may be able to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
THC messes with your balance.
When these brain areas are disturbed, the user has a harder time walking and talking correctly, becoming quite clumsy.
Cannabis use may increase the risk of depression.
In the long term, smoking marijuana increased depressive symptoms in subjects with a special serotonin gene responsible for increased risk of depression.
Intense anxiety, fear, distrust, or panic are common side effects.
A recent study suggested that this could be about specific ratios of THC and CBD in a given strain, since these two chemicals contribute different effects. Some of those effects are giddy, excited highs while others are more mellow — and some anxiety-inducing.
But it may decrease anxiety too, provided people don't consume too much.
In 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School suggested that that these benefits may actually be from reduced anxiety, which would improve the smoker's mood and act as a sedative in low doses. Beware, though, higher doses may increase anxiety and make you paranoid.
Marijuana use has been linked with psychosis.
There is also possible link between cannabis use and psychotic episodes, but it's impossible to say if pot smoking puts people are risk of a psychotic episode, or if people at risk of a psychotic episode are more likely to use pot.
Even more complicated? While THC seems to induce acute psychotic effects and cognitive impairment, CBD may have some antipsychotic properties, a new paper suggests. This could even explain or temper the link between cannabis use and schizophrenia and psychosis mentioned above.
Audio and visual hallucinations are common.
These audio hallucinations include "looping" sounds, where one particular sound (that is usually one syllable in duration) will repeat over and over again until it is either replaced by a different sound or the effects of THC begin to wear off.
It robs you of sleep.
Inhaling marijuana causes your heart rate to increase.
A London tourist smoking pot in Amsterdam.
This heart rate increase usually subsides relatively quickly, in about 20 minutes. In some cases of acute cannabis intoxication this could have cause fatal cardiovascular complications that ended in death.
It may cause red eyes.
It can lead to dry mouth.
The common side effect, equivalent to the feeling of having a bunch of cotton balls shoved in your mouth, is not just the result of inhaling hot smoke. It turns out cannabinoids receptors are located where our saliva is produced. When these receptors are activated by cannabis use, they inhibit the production of saliva.
You may get the munchies.
Interestingly, a link has been drawn between milk products and cannabinoids. Some researchers think that these cannabinoids in milk play an important role in infant survival, because they stimulate the child's appetite and cause them to eat more and suckle, which could be why THC has a similar effect in adults.
According to a recent study in mice published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, marijuana may effectively flip a circuit in the brain that is normally responsible for quelling the appetite, triggering us to eat instead.
It all comes down to a special group of cells in the brain which normally get activated, or switched on, after we've eaten a big meal to tell us we've had enough. In the brain, though, the psychoactive ingredient in weed appears to activate just one component of those appetite-suppressing cells, known as pro-opiomelanocortin neurons, making us hungry instead.
But it keeps you skinny and helps your metabolism.
The study analyzed data from more than 4,500 adult Americans — 579 of whom were current marijuana smokers, meaning they had smoked in the last month. About 2,000 had used marijuana in the past, while another 2,000 had never used the drug.
They studied their body's response to eating sugars: their levels of the hormone insulin and their blood sugar levels while they hadn't eaten in nine hours, and also after eating sugar.
Not only are pot users skinnier, but their body has a healthier response to sugar.
It's better for your lungs than tobacco.
Researchers looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of 5115 young adults over the course of 20 years. Tobacco smokers lost lung function over time, but pot users actually showed an increase in lung capacity.
The increased lung capacity may due to taking deep breaths while inhaling the drug, since any time you are inhaling burning smoke, you are taking in particulates into your lungs.
But here's the good news, it looks like how you take in the drug can also impact how it affects your lungs. A 2004 study in the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics found that vaporized marijuana contained little other than cannabinoids, and a 2007 study found vaporizer users inhaled fewer toxic compounds and carbon monoxide.
It may help control epileptic seizures.
That said, these aren't rigorous studies conducted by doctors, so we can't say for sure if there is a link between marijuana and seizures, or what may be helping control the disorders for those who swear by it.
The Epilepsy Foundation supports the development of cannabis-based drugs under the FDA process, and hopefully more research can isolate how these chemicals work in the brain, especially in the brains of patients and children with seizure disorders.
It relieves arthritis discomfort.
Researchers from rheumatology units at several hospitals gave their patients, sativex, a cannabinoid-based pain-relieving medicine. After a two-week period, people on Sativex had a significant reduction in pain and improved sleep quality compared to placebo users.
Marijuana treats inflammatory bowel diseases.
University of Nottingham researchers found in 2010 that chemicals in marijuana, including THC and cannabidiol, interact with cells in the body that play an important role in gut function and immune responses. The study was published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
THC-like compounds made by the body increase the permeability of the intestines, allowing bacteria in. The plant-derived cannabinoids in marijuana block these body-cannabinoids, preventing this permeability and making the intestinal cells bond together tighter.
THC slows the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
The 2006 study, published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, found that THC, the active chemical in marijuana, slows the formation of amyloid plaques by blocking the enzyme in the brain that makes them. These plaques seem to be what kill brain cells and seem to cause the effects of Alzheimer's.
A synthetic mixture of CBD and THC seem to preserve memory in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Another study suggested that in population-based studies, a THC-based prescription drug called dronabinol was able to reduce behavioral disturbances in dementia patients.
A chemical found in marijuana stops cancer from spreading.
Cannabidiol stops cancer by turning off a gene called Id-1, the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, found. Cancer cells make more copies of this gene than non-cancerous cells, and it helps them spread through the body.
The researchers studied breast cancer cells in the lab that had high expression levels of Id-1 and treated them with cannabidiol. After treatment the cells had decreased Id-1 expression and were less aggressive spreaders. This hasn't been studied in cancer patients, though, and there's no way to be sure that enough of the CBD would get into your body to actually mimic the study.
It can reduce your need for painkillers.
It could be that instead of getting hooked on painkillers, patients who could use medical marijuana turned to the more "natural" pain reliever. The study showed that patients using medical marijuana also used prescription painkillers, but they were using the drugs less frequently, thereby reducing the likelihood of overdose.
Pot use is linked to physical changes in the brain.
The orbitofrontal cortex.
In a recent study, scientists
used a combination of MRI-based brain scans to get one of the first
comprehensive, three-dimensional pictures of the brains of adults who
have smoked weed at least four times a week, often multiple times a day,
for years.
A critical part of the brain that helps us process
emotions and make decisions appeared smaller than in the brains of the
nonsmoker. But oddly, the connections passing through that region of the brain were stronger and thicker.
So does smoking weed every day for a decade shrink your brain and make you dumber? Not quite.
The regular smokers did have lower IQ scores overall when
compared to the people who didn't smoke, but there's no way to know yet
whether or how that might be linked to smaller orbitofrontal cortices or
marijuana use in general.
"We cannot honestly say that that is what’s happening here," Francesca Filbey, the lead study author, told Business Insider. It
could be that other factors affect brain size and shape, and those
factors could be what leads to pot smoking, instead of the other way
around.
It can make you perform better at sports.
So there's evidence that pot can help people deal with pain and inflammation while decreasing anxiety and improving mood, but it also has potentially risky motor-control side effects that could lead to an accident, especially in a sport where a wrong turn (like mountain biking or skiing) could be disastrous.
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