Imagine living with chronic inflammation or anxiety, or dealing with the chronic pain associated with cancer or HIV. Now imagine a single medication that could help manage, if not help heal, all of these problems. Don’t think it exists? It does, and you’ve most likely already heard of or tried it. We’re talking about cannabis, particularly two cannabinoids called THC and CBD. Cannabis, which you might call marijuana, pot, or weed, is one of the most common drugs for people to encounter in college. But it’s also a drug that can help mitigate many medical issues.
According to Dr. Beatriz Carlini, senior research scientist at the UW’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI), people in a college setting likely smoke or consume cannabis for the psychoactive properties it produces. These psychoactive effects, the “high” feeling that changes one’s perception of reality, is due to THC in the strain. When people are seeking out cannabis to help them with a medical problem, however, a strain with higher levels of CBD in it may provide added medical benefits. CBD has a neuro-protective and an anti-inflammatory component. It also controls pain and has anti-epilepsy, anti-convulsive properties; but she said that THC shouldn’t be discounted in the medical context, either.
“THC in itself has very important medical properties,” Carlini said. “It’s a very important cannabinoid in terms of pain control. This is important for us to not just think it’s that simple, to not say ‘We are against THC and favor CBD.’ It’s not that simple at all. Right now we have two FDA approved medications that are THC only.”
She added, however, that the effects of choosing a strain with a balance of THC and CBD can particularly help patients reap the optimal effect from using cannabis.
“CBD, for some kind of mechanism that is not totally understood, kind of tames the THC effects: the paranoia, the anxiety, and the out of control [unpleasant] high,” Carlini said. “When you have high levels of CBD, these kinds of feelings are diminished quite a bit. It works as a buffer to hide THC levels.”
UW architecture student Kalen Hopkins was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Dercum’s Disease his freshman year. The disease, which produces benign tumors called angiolipomas that constrict blood vessels in the body, was causing him a lot of pain. In turn, he spent a good portion of his freshman year getting surgeries to remove these tumors and had to take a quarter off. CBD is what helped him return to his normal life as a student.
“I came back the next quarter and started taking all the pre-reqs, but was still getting a bunch of those surgeries,” Hopkins said. “And so I wanted to do architecture, obviously, but it was tough to get out of bed. So after like the 20th surgery, I started just rubbing CBD lotion where each tumor was, which helped a bit, and I used a [CBD] oil pen. I wouldn’t get stoned, but the pain would go away so I could go to class and focus. I ended up doing well enough to get into the [architecture] program.”
Hopkins mentioned that he much preferred the effects of CBD over opiates such as oxycontin, which, when prescribed, would dull his pain but negatively affect his ability to do school work. He also stays away from cannabis with high volumes of THC, which he found disrupted his ability to stay focused on school.
Carlini said that the current cannabis on the market in dispensaries has incredibly high levels of THC in it, which might be off-putting to someone who is trying to stay productive at school or work.
“The last two decades, the THC levels have been increasing, increasing, increasing,” Carlini said. “And since legalization, the ability to extract very high amounts of THC to be used at once became more available. It was available before, but at a very small scale. We are seeing way more psychotic [breakdowns] and panic attacks after the very high potency of THC became available in the market. It’s increasing in the emergency room visits, it’s increasing in terms of calls to the poison center.”
Problematically, researchers in the United States are only granted access to testing government-provided cannabis.
“You cannot, for instance, use the cannabis that is being used commercially … There’s only one [government] provider, University of Mississippi,” Carlini said. “And this cannabis has pretty much been the same for the last 60 years. So the cannabis that we can do research with doesn’t mimic the cannabis people are in fact using, and this limits even further any understanding of what will happen in the long term use.”
These side effects of THC explain why Hopkins and others might choose to stick with CBD-dominant cannabis, despite some of the positive effects THC can have for medical patients.
Brendan McGill, who is the chef and owner of Hitchcock Restaurant Group, has made a new menu option available at the downtown location. When you get a coffee or tea at Cafe Hitchcock on First Avenue, you can choose to add 10 milligrams of CBD for $4.
“When you just isolate the CBD all by itself, it’s such a mild effect,” McGill said. “It’s so distinctly different from being stoned.”
McGill believes the positive effects of CBD might be helping some of his customers who deal with high-stress jobs.
“It’s real popular, and it’s interesting because the store that we rolled it out in is on First Avenue in downtown Seattle and technically it’s central business district,” McGill said. “And so it’s like real estate brokers and people that I know who might have had a beer at lunch are now having a matcha latte with CBD in it. They’ll report back to me ... that they immediately feel relaxed as they they’d had a beer at lunch, but it didn’t crash him in an hour.”
While people 21 years and older have had the ability to buy cannabis legally in Seattle since 2012, and really since dispensaries started popping up in the city in 2015, there is more to cannabis than just the stoned feeling that is traditionally associated with it. Popular culture has made cannabis something of a joke, but the medicinal properties it possesses are important to recognize as well.
Reach Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Gross at wellness@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @becsgross
