Tag: weed

Marijuana can’t kill you no matter how much humans have consumed. And people have tried to consume large quantities, either through inhaling the smoke of lots and lots of collected flowers, which is where the active ingredients are found, or they’ve tried to extract the active ingredients from the flowers into solvents like butter or alcohol. Well, too much alcohol can kill you, certainly, but the, it’s the compounds in marijuana even if you ingest a high concentrated variety of it, can’t stop your breathing, can’t cause you to have a seizure, as far as we know, possibly in some cases for people who are predisposed, these things can happen. But generally speaking, there’s been no recorded deaths just related to the use of the drug itself in no matter what quantity you’ve consumed.

Now, you can use too much of something if you were expecting a certain effect. Now, if you wanted to have a stress relieving affect with marijuana but still wanted to be functional and, you know, active you could use so much to the point where you become sedated and maybe a little bit agitated and that phenomenon can cause problems for people. And that’s what we’ve called an overdose, in quotes. It’s not an overdose to the point where you have now, you need to go to the emergency room and you need to be pumped, out of your stomach, or the substance, that kind of phenomenon is not what I’m describing.

Also, you might end up having a paranoid or psychotic reaction with a high use of something that has psychologically activating properties. People call that an acute cannabis psychosis, and that’s been described. Often times that does not lead to any chronic, long term change in your psychological status, like where you’re permanently this way, it clears over the course of a day or less. We’re talking extremely large doses, some of these affects.

Everyone has a different pharmacology, different chemistry, different reaction to drugs so the important thing is that people, when they’re using a psychologically activating substance is that they pace themselves, that they know how much they’re using, and wait before taking more. And that very commonly happens when you take marijuana orally, like in foods or dissolved things, there’s a large delay in the onset, sometimes can be up to an hour, hour and a half. And by that time, if you are waiting for an effect and have used more and more, you can have a kind of, an unpleasant surprise, a high amount sedation or, as I was mentioning, agitation.

With smoking or inhalation and vaporization, the onset is more immediate so you’re really able to just gauge in within a minute or two whether this is the right amount, whether you’re trying to relieve a symptoms or you’re trying to achieve a certain psychological state. And that’s important when you’re in a social setting and using marijuana or you’re sharing with other people, people will have different set points and that’s, I think, the key thing to remember.

Marijuana is used to relieve symptoms associated with gastrointestinal distress or disease, has been studied in clinical trials and has been used, found to be a useful treatment by doctors who are experimenting with it with their patients and patients themselves who happen to discover it on their own.

I remember the case of one young man in his twenties I interviewed who had ulcerative colitis. Severe, bloody, inflammatory disease caused him a lot of pain and cramping. He was going towards the route of needing surgery and he told me that once he was at a friend’s house and they said you should try smoking marijuana when he was having one of these really severe exacerbation and he said, “Are you kidding? Really? What’s this gonna do?”

And he didn’t believe it but then he described to me and I took very detailed notes of this interview and recorded it. He described how all of a sudden when he used this marijuana that he had an immediate relief of all the cramping and pain in his gut and he was able to actually sit down comfortably and going to the emergency room and since that time he continued to integrate this into his treatment to the point where his GI doctor, his gastroenterologist had written an authorization letter to allow him to use it for the treatment of his ulcerative colitis. It’s a fantastic thing for a patient like that at a young age who finds a relief from a plant medicine because they’re not, maybe
they will not have to go on to develop a need for surgery or develop all the other problems that come with really worsening ulcerative colitis.

The same thing people report with Crohn’s disease which is kind of another type of inflammatory GI disorder but potentially less severe, in some cases more severe depending on how bad you have it. But basically there was a study out of Israel where they looked at a lot of patients who were using cannabis for crone’s relief and they found a whole range of quality of life indicators got better in those patients. Why is this all working? Because it turns out the GI track is full of cannabinoid receptors which are those chemical locks, the keys that are made in cannabis kind of lock into. And the GI system is full of it’s own nervous system and it’s full of its own lymph tissue, it’s own immune tissue. And in these inflammatory disorders both of those are out of whack or disregulated, and using cannabis, cannabinoids, which are basically a homeostatic system, can help to reduce the inflammation and potentially relieve the pain and cramping that you get through the interaction with the gut’s nervous system.

So it’s a very interesting application and there are studies that are showing it’s a lot of promise and I’m sure if you do a Google search, you’ll find a lot of reports of this and who knows, in the future we might be able to potentially reduce the progression of GI disorders like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis if we’re integrating cannabis and cannabis-based medicines.