Marijuana is More Than Just THC
by Bruce MirkenOne thing that drives me crazy is the tendency of the media and others to refer to THC as “the active ingredient” in marijuana. While THC is indeed responsible for marijuana’s “high,” it is one of about 80 unique compounds, called cannabinoids, that are not seen in any other plant. Many of these have interesting, potentially significant, medical applications, and are not psychoactive.
Anyone who wants to learn about these other cannabinoids should check out this recent review published in the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences.
The article devotes a lot of space to cannabidiol (CBD), the most studied of these compounds, noting that “CBD exerts several positive pharmacological effects that make it a highly attractive therapeutic entity in inflammation, diabetes, cancer and affective or neurodegenerative diseases.” Notably, CBD has antipsychotic actions, but fewer side effects than “typical antipsychotics.” Lots of other cannabinoids have potentially useful properties as well. For example, cannabichromene has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity, plus “modest” analgesic effect.
The article tends to be a bit dismissive of THC because of its psychoactivity, and focuses mainly on cannabinoids as individual chemicals rather than as components of an herbal medicine that has proven extraordinarily useful in its natural form (biases that are pretty much typical in the medical literature), but even with these limitations, it’s an important read.
Marijuana is More Than Just THC
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Agreed.
I'm really not comfortable with the way that the psychoactive properties are dismissed as obviously undesirable, when they themselves account for some of the therapeutic effects (such as relief of anxiety), and the chemicals in cannabis which are psychoactive also have profound physiological effects. Why are the two so often presented as opposed?
It's also important to remember that THC taken in isolation has different psychoactive effects than the plant when taken as a whole, to the extent that pot smokers generally do not enjoy pure THC nearly as much as actual cannabis. The fact is that the effects are complicated and intertwined, and thus far we've not been able to develop a synthetic which accurately replicates all the beneficial effects of the plant.
Why we would even want to do so is unclear, when the medicines tend to be extremely expensive. If the goal is to give something they can take without inhaling burnt plant matter, why not sell an extraction instead? A pharmaceutical (or natural remedy, or any other) company could very easily produce large quantities of hash oil and sell it to those who want to use it therapeutically, and that oil would have the complex mixture present in the plant, but would not have the carcinogenic plant matter. It could be sold either as a tincture, or with some means of vapourizing it and inhaling the vapours.
- Michael Vipperman
October 25, 2009 6:09PM
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