1. cortex
  2. Is Pot the New Prozac?

Is Pot the New Prozac?

By cortex on September 25, 2006.

If anxiety is the new depression, then weed might be our next miracle drug. And no, this isn't the same seedy crap you get from your local delivery service. I'm talking about medically targeted spliffs, designed to only affect your amygdala (the neural source of fear and anxiety). Over at the new NY Inquirer, I make a case for the future of medical marijuana:

Despite the fact marijuana was first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago, modern medicine has yet to find a pharmaceutical equal. No other substance melts away our fears with such slick efficiency. But that may soon change. A cadre of neuroscientists is now using the natural potency of pot--its active ingredient is Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)--as the possible basis for a next generation anti-anxiety pill.

Tags
neuroscience

More like this

Smoke Weed in Moderation
That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology: There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly anxiogenic. Besides the behavioural effects of…
Andrew Sullivan
I'll be filling in for Andrew Sullivan this week, so most of my blogging will be over there. I'll try to cross-post some of the meatier posts, like this one: The LA Times profiles the normalization of pot: After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems…
Medical marijuana and the new herbalism, part 1
Three months ago, I wrote about how the Cleveland Clinic had recently opened a clinic that dispensed herbal medicine according to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice. As regular readers might expect, I was not particularly impressed or approving of this particular bit of infiltration of…
Does medical marijuana work? The answer is (mostly) "no" and "we don't know"
My opinion about medical marijuana has been fairly consistent. First, the claims made by its advocates for it far exceed the evidence for its benefit, which is why I've referred to it as the "new herbalism." Of course, it's not really very new, but it is herbalism in that medical marijuana…

Pot maybe the next miracle drug -- but we'll never know.

The DEA's continued refusal to make the drug available for research has stymed almost all research in this area.

Unless things have changed significantly in the last year, even the medicinal chemists at The University of Mississippi (Olemiss) can't do any research with it -- and their department runs the only legal farm in the US.

FYI... my former roomate is a post-doctoral fellow there...

In my opinion, the plant comes out of the ground pretty much ready to use, and beyond some drying time, it doesn't need anything else done with it. Why we need big pharm messing with it, beyond the money, is beyond me. We will only get to use pot legally in a distorted form that assures some large well connected company makes a huge profit off of it. As usual, it's all about the money.

As for the above comment, the idea would be to use THC to target specific anxiety producing brain mechanisms and produce a product capable of doing so in a standardized way with a standardized dose, without the other 'side effects' such as perceptual and cognitive imparements. There will always be a street market for regular pot and the decriminalization debate is a completely different issue.

By Franklin Sayre (not verified) on 26 Sep 2006 #permalink

While I'm all supportive of medical marijuana and have my qualms with big pharma, I don't see why anyone should have any problems with people researching the chemical more. There might be more effective analogs with less side effects. Plus in the very least it would be nice to not force patients to inhale carcinogens as part of their treatment.