How Does Smoking Weed Help Anxiety?

By Melissa Sherrard

If you're new to cannabis, you may be wondering how smoking weed helps anxiety. For thousands of years, cultures from all over the world have touted the calming and relaxing effects of smoking cannabis flowers, and as prohibition of the herb wanes, we're starting to understand the science behind how smoking weed helps anxiety. However, we must always remember that everyone experiences the effects of cannabis differently, and that other factors (such as the strain composition, the setting, and your present state of mind) play a part in how much smoking weed will help (or exacerbate) your anxiety. 



It's also important to distinguish between sudden feelings of anxiousness and chronic anxiety disorders when you want to use cannabis to help with your symptoms, as cannabis may affect you differently under varying circumstances. The American Psychology Association defines anxiety as "an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure," but these feelings can come on in different situations for different people. So, if you've ever asked yourself “how does smoking weed help anxiety?” you've come to the right place, for here we list a few ways that science has shown how consuming cannabis helps ease feelings of anxiety.




1. We know that cannabis exhibits natural anti-anxiety properties, particularly the cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) and certain terpenes found in marijuana, such as linalool, myrcene, and terpinolene.

2. A 2014 international study led by Vanderbilt University found that smoking weed increases the production rate of endocannabinoids in the amygdala area of the brain in mice. This is the area of the brain that regulates anxiety, emotions, and our “fight-or-flight” response, and researchers often see a decrease in the production of endocannabinoids in patients suffering from chronic stress or anxiety disorders.

3. Cannabis can help people get off of prescription drugs. In a 2016 Canadian study, medical marijuana was found to help 40% of the subjects to stop using benzodiazepines (a common anti-anxiety drug with many undesirable side effects).

4. Smoking weed has been shown to play a part in memory extinction, the mental phenomenon of forgetting trauma, bad memories, and negative experiences. This has led some to believe that smoking weed can help treat anxiety from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).



Today's Marijuana User Is Likely A Woman — & Maybe A Mom

Britni de la Cretaz

Marijuana use is being destigmatized at an unprecedented rate. Between medical marijuana becoming more accepted and several states legalizing the substance during the last election, people are talking openly about cannabis use in a way we have never really seen. And new data about who, exactly, is using the drug might be surprising to some people. It turns out that the modern marijuana user is likely to be a woman — and maybe even a parent.

 

A new survey from Eaze, a cannabis technology company that facilitates delivery of medical marijuana, analyzed who their consumers are. They found that they are highly educated, employed, and well-off, with almost half of respondents reporting an income of $75,000 or more per year. 

 

They're also overwhelmingly millennials. A higher number of women than men reported using cannabis daily, but perhaps most surprising of all is that one in five marijuana users in their survey were parents — with 63% of those parents reporting using cannabis on a daily basis.

 

Sheena Shiravi, head of PR for Eaze, says that many people are turning to cannabis to replace their opioid prescription for chronic pain.

 

"It's not surprising to think that parents are using cannabis every day," she tells Refinery29. "Think about how often a mom reaches for glass of wine or takes Tylenol or pain killer for a headache or back pain."

 

Rachel*, a 32-year-old mother of five-year-old twins, says she uses CBD oil several times per week to manage her anxiety (CBD is a cannabinoid that does not have psychoactive effects, like THC does). She's based in Colorado, where it's legal, which makes it accessible for her. She says she'd only smoked pot twice in college before discovering CBD oil as a potential treatment for anxiety.

 

"I mostly take the CBD because being a parent with anxiety is hard. Kids trigger it in a lot of ways," Rachel tells Refinery29. "And if I take a [benzodiazepine like Xanax], I can't really function as a parent. But if I take CBD oil, I feel way less anxious but not impaired or like it affects my ability to parent."

 

She says the oil is a great option for her as a parent because she can keep it hidden from her kids.

"I can slip off to my bathroom, put a few drops under my tongue, and my kids see nothing. No vaping, no smoking, nothing out," she says.

 

Shiravi points out that what's interesting about women as cannabis consumers is that they are twice as likely to favor tincture products, like Rachel uses, than men are. They use lower-dose edibles and CBD dominant products 42 percent more than males do. "What we're seeing with women is that they're integrating cannabis as part of their health and wellness regimen," says Shiravi. They're also using it to replace potentially more harmful habits, like a form of harm reduction — parents are more than 50 percent likely to replace drinking alcohol with consuming marijuana and 26% more likely to replace opiates than non-parents.

 

"I use about two puffs at a time, a few times per month, just enough to get a medicinal benefit," says Lea Grover, a 33-year-old mom of three kids, seven-year-old twins and a five-year-old.

 

"When I smoke marijuana, it helps me keep my thoughts ordered, and calm," she says. Grover, who lives in Illinois, also says it helps with some of her PTSD symptoms, like being triggered by physical touch, as well as with her PMDD and menstrual cramps.

 

"For me, marijuana eases away that tension [from PTSD symptoms], and allows me to interact with my kids without pushing me over the line into an unhealthy emotional place," Gover explains.

Legalized marijuana is making it harder for police to search your car

By: Christopher Ingraham, 

Drug policy experts often say that the health risks of marijuana use are relatively minor compared to the steep costs of marijuana enforcement: expensive policing, disrupted lives, violence and even death.

Law enforcement agencies, however, have often been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana legalization. One reason is that the drug, with its pungent, long-lasting aroma, is relatively easy to detect in the course of a traffic stop or other routine interaction. It's an ideal pretext for initiating a search that otherwise wouldn't be justified — even if that search only turns up evidence of marijuana use and nothing more.

New data on traffic stops in Colorado and Washington underscore this point: After the states legalized pot, traffic searches declined sharply across the board. That's according to the Open Policing Project at Stanford University, which has been analyzing public data of over 100 million traffic stops and searches since 2015.

“After marijuana use was legalized, Colorado and Washington saw dramatic drops in search rates,” the study's authors explain. “That’s because many searches are drug-related. Take away marijuana as a crime and searches go down.”

 

In Colorado and Washington, traffic searches of black, Hispanic and white drivers fell significantly after legalization, according to the Open Policing Project's analysis. That pattern didn't hold for states where marijuana use remained illegal.

The Project's data encompasses traffic searches initiated for any reason but excludes searches following an arrest. This makes the data a good barometer of searches initiated at an officer's discretion. The numbers changed dramatically after legalization, as we see in the above chart, suggesting, as the researches do, that suspected marijuana use is often a factor in these searches.

As the chart also shows, legalization didn't eliminate racial disparities in the searches. Black and Hispanic motorists are still searched at considerably higher rates than white motorists. But following legalization, they are searched less often than they were before.

In 2014 a Washington Post investigation detailed how highway police often use suspicion of marijuana as justification to search drivers' vehicles and ultimately seize cash and property from them, regardless of whether any drugs are ultimately found. From 2002 to 2012, the federal government seized roughly $1 billion in cash and other assets related to marijuana cases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That figure doesn't include seizures made by state and local law enforcement authorities who handle most of the nation's drug enforcement.

If legalization leads to fewer searches, that means fewer seizures of cash and property, which could have a significant negative impact on the finances of police departments that have come to rely on those seizures to pad their budgets.

What Jeff Sessions Gets Wrong About Marijuana

Medical use of cannabis is officially accepted -- and is helping to limit opioid abuse.

by

Ashley C. Bradford

and

W. David Bradford

Clinical use.
Photographer: David McNew/Getty Images

Drug abuse is devastating American society. Opioid overdose alone killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. But rather than address this public-health crisis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declared a new war on drugs. He has re-introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and has asked Congress to let him spend money to prosecute people and businesses behaving in accordance with their states' medical marijuana laws.

Clearly, Sessions is out of step with the scientific consensus regarding the medical effectiveness of cannabis.

Because cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, all uses of it are illegal under federal law. People who use it to treat a variety of medical conditions risk arrest and prosecution. In light of the medical evidence this makes little sense.

Consider that drugs designated Schedule I are supposed to have “no currently accepted medical use.”

Yet in January, a pathbreaking review by the National Academies of Sciences of more than 10,000 peer-reviewed studies found “conclusive” evidence that cannabis (whether it's the whole plant or an extract) is clinically effective at treating a number of illnesses, including chronic pain. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has likewise acknowledged the evidence for the drug's clinical efficacy.

What's more, the clinical use of cannabis stands to bring significant budgetary savings for government health insurance programs. Research that we've recently published in Health Affairs shows that if all 50 states allowed medical cannabis in 2014, Medicare and Medicaid would have saved more than $1.5 billion on prescription drugs.

The biggest savings would come from reduced prescriptions for pain medications -- a large share of which are opioids. This explains why states that have approved medical cannabis have experienced fewer opioid-related deaths. As NIDA noted, “medical marijuana products may have a role in reducing the use of opioids needed to control pain.”

Note that other preliminary but growing evidence suggests cannabis might also help patients with chronic pain who are already fighting an opiate addiction.

Such evidence appears to have affected many people's thinking. Ninety-four percent of Americans, according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll on the subject, support the medical use of cannabis -- including 90 percent of Republicans. It's no wonder that 29 states have looked beyond the federal law and approved the medical use of whole-plant cannabis (with another handful approving the use of cannabis oil).

Ultimately, a war on cannabis would hurt patients who are already hurting. Maintaining the scheduling of cannabis, increasing marijuana arrests and re-instituting minimum sentences for possession would stand in the way of their doctors' expertise and oversight. Even in the states that allow the use of medical marijuana, as long as cannabis remains Schedule I, doctors can only recommend that patients in pain try cannabis instead of opioids and hope for the best. Written or formal follow-up, assistance with dosing, or integration with other aspects of care may still leave the physician in federal jeopardy.

The Trump administration should instead remove marijuana from Schedule I, and turn medical decisions on the use of cannabis over to patients and their physicians.

Marijuana and the Opioid Epidemic: Separating Fact from Fiction

Kevin A. Sabet, PhD.,

Advocates for marijuana legalization have touted cannabis as a cure-all for just about everything. Over the years, claims have been made that the drug can “kill” cancer cells, cure alcoholism and – yes – even eliminate morning sickness. So with the tragic rise in the number of opioid-related overdoses in the U.S., it’s no coincidence we’re seeing heightened promotion by the marijuana industry touting legalization as an easy solution to this deadly crisis. This promotion has coincided with national headlines pointing to a recent study claiming states with legal marijuana have lower opioid overdose rates.

When it comes to addressing our nation’s opioid epidemic, Americans deserve solutions driven by science and evidence, not ideology or anecdotal evidence. So what does the evidence show? Has marijuana really been found to reduce the opioid epidemic?  Or is this another concerted effort by the marijuana industry to leverage an issue of real concern for Americans to advance their agenda to commercialize marijuana?

The answer is that there is insufficient evidence to confirm that legalizing marijuana will reduce opioid use and overdose deaths. According to NIDA:

Some preliminary studies have suggested that medical marijuana legalization might be associated with decreased prescription opioid use and overdose deaths, but researchers don’t have enough evidence yet to confirm this finding. For example, one NIDA-funded study suggested a link between medical marijuana legalization and fewer overdose deaths from prescription opioids.1 But this study didn’t show that medical marijuana legalization caused the decrease in deaths or that pain patients changed their drug-taking behavior.2,3 A more detailed NIDA-funded analysis showed that legally protected medical marijuana dispensaries, not just medical marijuana laws, were also associated with a decrease in the following:

• opioid prescribing
• self-reports of opioid misuse
• treatment admissions for opioid addiction

Additionally, data suggests that medical marijuana treatment may reduce the opioid dose prescribed for pain patients,5,6 and a recent study showed that availability of medical marijuana for Medicare patients reduced prescribing of medications, including opioids, for their pain.7 NIDA is funding additional studies to determine the link between medical marijuana use and the use or misuse of opioids for pain.

Simply put, it is erroneous to make the claim that people who use medical marijuana are at lower risk of overdose.  As Dr. Keith Humphreys points out, this is a common “seductive logical error” called the ecological fallacy.  According to Humphreys:

Some recent studies have shown that states with more medical marijuana availability have lower rates of opioid overdose and young male suicides. This was interpreted as meaning that people who use medical marijuana are at lower risk of overdose and less likely to take their own lives. If you think that constitutes good reasoning, you should also believe that smoking and being exposed to radon reduces your risk of cancer because in the aggregate, those variables are negatively correlated with cancer rates!…

…Perhaps surprisingly, whether medical marijuana availability at the state level correlates with some other state-level indicator actually tells us nothing about how medical marijuana affects individuals. If a state-level correlation with some indicator is positive (e.g., states with more medical marijuana have higher rates of violence) the individual level relationship can still be negative (e.g., medical marijuana use makes people less violent).

This isn’t the first time one drug has been explored as a potential miracle cure for the deadly effects of another. Decades ago, doctors once sought to treat alcoholism with heroin, and heroin addiction with cocaine. Unsurprisingly, these “cures” compounded the original problem.

The good news is that we already know what policies are proven to reduce the opioid epidemic: increasing access to treatment, prioritizing prevention, and expanding education for doctors who prescribe opioids, just to name a few.  Thankfully, addressing the opioid epidemic is an area of bipartisan consensus in Washington that continues to be informed by science.  We hope it stays that way.

If you or someone you know needs help with a substance use disorder, you can find a treatment facility using SAMHSA’s treatment locator tool.

Cannabis experts Produce "Highway" code of 10 Tips to reduce Health Risks

Eating, rather than smoking, cannabis is better for you 

Ian Hamilton

A new review conducted by some of the world’s leading experts on cannabis provides 10 tips on how to reduce the potential harm of using cannabis.

The latest scientific evidence was used to draw up the Lower-Risk Cannabis Use Guidelines (LRCUG) recognising the lack of research-based advice for the millions of people who use cannabis.

1.  Recognising that there is no such thing as a risk-free drug the guidance suggests avoiding cannabis use as the only way to prevent a risk to health. Although this is logical it is impractical given the millions of people in the United Kingdom who use the drug.

2. Delay using cannabis as most adverse health and social effects are associated with people who started using cannabis heavily before the age of 16.

3. Avoid strains of cannabis with high THC and low CBD

4. Don’t use synthetic cannabis also known as legal highs such as ‘spice’, these drugs have been associated with severe acute mental health problems and proved to be fatal for some people who have used them.

5. Find a different way to use cannabis other than smoking, with up to 77% of UK users reporting that they combine tobacco with cannabis in a joint this exposes these individuals to a range of health problems including cancer, heart disease and respiratory illness. Although calibrating the right dose can be difficult using edibles is recommended as a less risky option.

6. Don’t take deep breaths or try holding cannabis smoke in your lungs known as the Valsalva manoeuvre, as this not only increases respiratory trauma but boosts the toxic material ingested.

7. Reflecting guidance on our other favourite drug, alcohol, have a break. Having 1-2 dry days a week is recommended for alcohol for cannabis the reverse is suggested as in only use 1 day a week or at weekends.

8. Wait at least 6 hours before you drive or get on a bike. Although you may need to wait longer depending on how strong the cannabis product is and how intensely and frequently you have used the drug. Impairment is increased if alcohol has been combined with cannabis so it is recommended that driving should be avoided completely.

9. Some people who are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of cannabis should refrain from using it altogether. These include pregnant women due to health impact on the foetus. Also, those who have a family history of drug problems or of severe mental health problems such as psychosis.

10. Lastly, any combination of the above will increase the risk to health in the short or long term. For example using high strength cannabis when you are a young teenager magnifies the potential risk to health, both physical and psychological.

The authors of this research recognise that the policy of cannabis prohibition has largely failed and there is a need for pragmatic health advice, particularly in countries that have recently relaxed controls on cannabis which may see more people use the drug.

Acknowledging rather than denying drug use is the first step towards health for individuals who have a problem with drugs.

This principle applies equally to governments and their public health approach to drug use, denial is the least effective method of dealing with the population’s health.

Cannabis may reduce use of crack

Research done by the BC Centre on Substance Use in Vancouver shows that using cannabis may enable people to consume less crack

DECCAN CHRONICLE

North America is in the midst of a drug overdose disaster. In British Columbia, Canada, where nearly 1,000 people died of overdose in 2016, officials have declared a public health emergency.

While over-prescription of painkillers and contamination of the illegal opioid supply by fentanyl, a potent synthetic analgesic, are at the heart of the problem, opioid users are not the only ones at risk.

Public health officials in BC are warning that fentanyl has been detected in many drugs circulating on the illicit market, including crack cocaine.

The possibility of opioid overdose is an unusual new threat for people who use crack, which is a stimulant. Its consumption, either through smoking or injection, is not necessarily deadly.

If misused, though, crack can certainly cause health harms, including cuts and burns from unsafe pipes. Sharing pipes can also transmit infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. In the long run, frequent and heavy crack consumption may contribute to psychological and neurological complications.

Despite the estimated 14 to 21 million cocaine users worldwide, the majority of whom live in Brazil and the United States, scientists have yet to find an effective medical treatment for helping people who wish to decrease problematic use of the drug.

Cannabis-assisted treatment
Now Canadian scientists are working on an unconventional substitution for it.
Research done by the BC Centre on Substance Use in Vancouver shows that using cannabis may enable people to consume less crack. Could marijuana become to crack what methadone is to heroin – a legal, safe and effective substitute drug that reduces cravings and other negative impacts of problematic drug use?

Between 2012 and 2015, our team surveyed more than 100 crack cocaine users in the city’s Downtown Eastside and Downtown South neighbourhoods. These are poor areas where crack is common among people who use drugs. We found that people who intentionally used cannabis to control their crack use showed a marked decline in crack consumption, with the proportion of people reporting daily use dropping from 35% to less than 20%.

Data for this study, which was recently presented at the Harm Reduction Conference in Montreal, were drawn from three open and ongoing prospective cohorts of more than 2,000 people who consume drugs (not necessarily just stimulants). They were the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study (VIDUS); the AIDS Care Cohort to Evaluate exposure to Survival Services (ACCESS); and the At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS).

We used harmonised procedures for recruitment, follow-up and data collection. Individuals in these cohorts were recruited through snowball sampling and extensive street outreach in the Downtown Eastside and Downtown South areas.

First, we asked participants if they had substituted one drug for another in order to control or slow down their consumption. A total of 122 participants (49 from VIDUS, 51 from ACCESS, and 22 from ARYS) reported that they had done so at least once in the last six months. These were the subjects included in our analysis, contributing to a total of 620 interviews over three years.

When we analysed these participants’ crack use histories over time, a pattern emerged: significant increases in cannabis use during periods when they reported they were using it as a crack substitute, followed by decline in the frequency of crack use afterwards.

Self-medication
Our findings are in line with a smaller case-series study in Brazil that followed 25 treatment-seeking individuals with problematic crack use who reported using marijuana to reduce cocaine-related craving symptoms. Over a nine-month follow-up period in that study, conducted by Eliseu Labigalini Jr, 68% of participants had stopped using crack.

As in our study, in Brazil cannabis use peaked during the first three months of follow-up, with only occasional use of cannabis reported in the six months after that.

Qualitative studies in Jamaica and Brazil also indicate that crack users frequently self-medicate with cannabis to reduce cravings and other undesirable effects of crack.

Other research has shown that long-term cannabis dependence might increase cocaine cravings and risk of relapse. Rather than contradict findings from Canada, Brazil and Jamaica, these discrepancies suggest that patterns of cannabis use and dependence, and the timing of self-medication with cannabis, may play a role in individual outcomes.

Building on the finding from this preliminary study, the BC Centre on Substance Use is planning more research to confirm whether using cannabis might be an effective strategy for people seeking to reduce their use of crack or other stimulants, either as harm reduction or as treatment.

Canada’s recent move to legalise and regulate marijuana should facilitate this work. For decades, stigma and prohibition have blocked rigorous scientific evaluation of cannabis. Now these obstacles are beginning to disappear, enabling our team to better understand and unlock the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids.