Cannabis (seeing through the smoke): The New Science of Cannabis and Your Health

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After completing his medical training at Guy's Hospital London, continuing in neurology to MRCP, he went on to his psychiatric training in Oxford, he continued there as a lecturer and then later as a Wellcome Senior Fellow in psychiatry. He then spent two years as Chief of the Section of Clinical Science in the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in NIH, Bethesda, USA. On returning to England in 1988 he set up the Psychopharmacology Unit in Bristol University, an interdisciplinary research grouping spanning the departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology before moving to Imperial College London in December 2008 where he leads a similar group with a particular focus on brain imaging especially PET.

Another issue the book throws light on is the New Labour record on drug policy. Nutt obviously has skin in the game in terms of criticising the records of the Blair and Brown governments. But, he makes a convincing case for the almost complete failure of New Labour to take effective, progressive action on drugs. In Finland, children don't go to school until their seven years of age and before then they just play. Between 7 and 16, they are given almost no homework and they sit almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is the beating heart of Finnish kids' lives and by law teachers have to give kids 15 minutes of free play for every 45 minutes they are teaching. And the outcome is that only 0.1% of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems and Finns are the most literate, numerate and happy people in the world. As for the cannabis activists, I’m reminded of an aphorism from Nietzsche, which I can only paraphrase: “If you automatically react against something, you are just as controlled by it as if you comply.” Confronted with relentless negative, and at times dubious, information about cannabis from the U.S. government and from anti-cannabis researchers, cannabis advocates have counterreacted and reflexively dismissed concerns about potential harms. Many of these studies are valid and important, or at least hypothesis generating, with major implications for health and harm reduction. Cannabis Unites

A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana

Dr. Grinspoon is a widely recognized expert on cannabis science and drug policy. He regularly appears as an expert on national television and radio programs, including NPR’s All Things Considered , NBC Nightly News , C-SPAN’s Washington Journal , Fox and Friends and Fox News . He is quoted frequently in the national media, in such venues as People , the New York Times, New York Magazine , the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe . He is a TEDX speaker. It does carry risks, such as dependency, particularly if started young and he does state that one in ten can become dependent, but this is much less than tobacco, alcohol and opiates. The Brain and Mind Centre and Discipline of Pharmacology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. Opinion on cannabis, particularly medical cannabis, is broadly positive. Ninety-four percent of Americans are in favor of legal access to medical marijuana. Can you name any other issue about which 94 percent of Americans agree? Can you even imagine it? I’m not sure that 94 percent of Americans believe the earth is round, that we actually landed on the moon, or that the sky is blue. Full Book Name: Seeing through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana

Batista LA, Gobira PH, Viana TG, Aguiar DC, Moreira FA. Inhibition of endocannabinoid neuronal uptake and hydrolysis as strategies for developing anxiolytic drugs. Behav Pharmacol. 2014;25:425–433.Peter Grinspoon, M.D. is a primary care physician and cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a certified Health and Wellness Coach as well as a board member of the advocacy group Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, and has been providing medical cannabis care for patients for two decades. Seeing Through the Smoke provides refreshing insights into the biases that have challenged cannabis research to date. Grinspoon presents both sides of the divisive issues polarizing society today, allowing the reader to reconsider what is and isn’t true about cannabis. Honest, personal, poignant, comprehensive, and totally current, this book emphatically reminds us that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence of effectiveness for this extremely therapeutic botanical.”– Donald I. Abrams, MD , professor emeritus of medicine, University of California San Francisco Beyond this, there is perhaps the issue of classifying and enrolling subjects as regular users or abusers – which are a vulnerable population that some feel should not be enrolled in studies. The final issue is trying to standardize a form and dosage(s) that researchers can study; as an aside, the NIDA/NIH recently published a notice for researchers to measure and report research on cannabis using a “standard unit” defined as 5 mg of THC (6). What areas of research would you like to see covered by future studies?

However, if a patient is specifically taking a cannabis-based compound to treat a given ailment that has insufficient evidence for its use, the patient has the potential to cause more issues. As clinicians, we definitely have a responsibility to continue to educate our patients on best practices and preferred practice patterns. How would you describe the current research landscape for cannabis use and vision? Grinspoon’s Harvard Health articles have reached tens of millions of readers, have been widely referenced in the national media, and have been cited in congressional testimony. His writing has been published in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics.Regulate CBD and other minor/new cannabinoids (e.g., CBN, THCV, delta 8 THC) in a coherent and helpful way, not like we are currently doing. We need to regulate the production of these products, not permit them as “supplements” without any control over their manufacturing or safety/benefit claims.

If you have a particularly good or bad reaction to a particular strain or chemovar, write it down. Journaling is good practice in any case—dosage, benefits, side effects, formulations, and delivery mechanism. Do not use during pregnancy or breastfeeding, if feasible, until we understand this area much better. If you are using, please let your care teams know. Care teams, on their end, must respond with compassion, not stigma and punitiveness. Writing in a conversational and engaging style, Peter couples solid science with personal anecdotes, and tempers cold hard facts with his informed opinions. Bibliographic endnotes document the text, yet scholarly research rarely impedes the flow of the narrative. While credentialed as an MD, Grinspoon is no stuffy pedantic academic. As an undergrad lit major and grad student in philosophy, the medical doctor taps into his creative inner writer throughout the book.

The increase in speed, switching and filtering: this is causing us to constantly switch and filter our focus. As we are now presented with more data, people are struggling to focus less on single pieces of information. Most of the literature has examined occasional users and this where our current state of knowledge exists on most vision functions, such as those mentioned above. Some studies have looked at more regular users – and the law enforcement work has typically looked at recreational, “on the street” usage. In my opinion, there isn’t enough literature examining similar vision functions or eye effects across the different types of users. These types of studies would certainly have value – it is easy to imagine that those using higher doses will experience more severe effects. How should ophthalmologists and optometrists factor cannabis use into patient assessment and care?