What Happens to Your Body When You Get High on Marijuana

Molly Triffin

As marijuana legalization and tolerance spreads across the country, it’s not hard to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when sparking a J in the evening is as common as kicking back with a glass of cab. 

But despite the fact that a rising number of people are using weed (in the past year, 32 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds and 10 percent of those 26 and older have toked up), its effects on the body remain largely a mystery.

Since cannabis is classified as a Schedule 1 drug and considered illegal by the federal government, “there are still a lot of incompletes in the research,” says Damon Raskin, MD, a board-certified internist and diplomat of the American Board of Addiction Medicine.

But, of course, we do know that it has a profound impact — chiefly on cognitive function. “The primary active compound in cannabis, THC, mimics substances that we naturally produce in our bodies, called endocannabinoids, that help maintain health and balance at a cellular level,” says Dustin Sulak, DO, an osteopathic physician in Falmouth, Maine. “In the brain, endocannabinoids function by controlling the release of neurotransmitters. In other areas of the body, they reduce inflammation, relax muscles, protect damaged tissue, regulate metabolism and appetite, and much more.”

Basically, we have built-in receptors for cannabis — which is what makes marijuana unique compared with other drugs, such as alcohol, which the body treats like a poison. “When an individual uses cannabis, these same physiologic events are triggered,” Sulak explains to Yahoo Health. “The cognitive effects of THC are related to its neurotransmitter-modulating capabilities in areas of the brain that control memory, pleasure, emotion, pain, and movement. The effects of THC elsewhere in the body are often less noticeable, but also significant.”

Exactly what happens when you get baked depends on the type of administration and potency of the weed. “When inhaled, whether vaporized or smoked, the cannabinoids enter the bloodstream fairly quickly via the capillaries,” says Rachna Patel, MD, a medical marijuana expert based in Walnut Creek, California. You’ll feel the effects nearly instantaneously, they’ll build up for the next half hour, and then slowly dissipate over the course of a few hours.

But when pot’s ingested, “it takes about two hours for the cannabinoids to take hold because they get processed in the liver,” Patel tells Yahoo Health. Typically, you’ll feel high for eight to 10 hours once it sets in.

In addition, marijuana is way stronger today than it was decades ago. “In the 1970s, the concentration of THC hovered around 1 to 2 percent,” Raskin says. “Today, it’s about 13 percent or higher.” What’s more, when you eat cannabis, the THC goes through a process that makes it four times more psychoactive than if you’d inhaled it. And with edibles on the rise (The Denver Post reported that THC-laced confections now make up more than 45 percent of the legal marijuana marketplace), people are experiencing increasingly intense reactions.

With all that in mind, here’s a peek at some of the trippy stuff that happens in your bod when you get high on marijuana. (Aside from changes to your mouth and lungs, which are particularly affected if you smoke weed, the rest of these bodily effects occur no matter what form you partake in — joints, bongs, vaping, or edibles.)