Transcript

Cannabis Myths · Talking FACS

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Welcome to Talking FACS, what you need to know about family,
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food, finance, and fitness.
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This nationally recognized, award-winning podcast is hosted by the University
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of Kentucky Family and Consumer Sciences Extension Program.
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Our educators share research knowledge with individuals, families,
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and communities to improve quality of life.
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Hello, and welcome to Talking FACS, what you need to know about family,
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food, finance, and fitness.
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I am your host, Mindy McCulley, Extension Specialist for Instructional Support
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with Family and Consumer Sciences Extension at the University of Kentucky.
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We are housed in the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment.
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My guest today is Dr. Alex Elswick, Extension Specialist for Substance Use
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Prevention and Recovery. Welcome, Alex.
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Hi, Mindy. Thanks for having me. I'm so glad that you are here today because
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we are going to be the Mythbusters.
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We're going to to talk about cannabis myths.
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And I am sure that this is probably something that many people who are my age
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and probably maybe even your age have grown up with lots and lots of myths that
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we have in our heads that just simply aren't true.
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I'm excited for it too, because as I was putting these together and putting the research together,
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I realized that there are certainly a a lot of myths that I believed when I
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was younger and some that I still believed as I got older before I really got
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into doing some of this work.
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So I think it'll be interesting for people listening to test how many of these
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they've subscribed to at different points in time.
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So maybe you should ask me, is this true or false?
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And see what I think. I like it.
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I'm putting myself out there. This is fun. That's a risk. I won't shame you
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when you get it wrong. Okay.
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Okay. All right. So the first one...
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True or false, cannabis is the gateway drug.
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Okay. I think that this is false, but I always heard that it was true.
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Very good. You thought your way through that one. Yeah. So this is one of the
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most commonly perpetuated myths about cannabis.
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We say that cannabis is the gateway drug.
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And usually when we say that, what we mean is that youth who experiment with
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cannabis are going to go on to use harder drugs.
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And certainly, like 99% of people, let's use the example, let's say,
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who are using heroin today, used cannabis first in the past.
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But if you're using that as your definition for a gateway drug,
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then really nicotine and alcohol are far and away more likely to be the gateway drugs.
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So there's nothing special about cannabis that makes kids more likely to use other drugs.
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Certainly, exposure to drugs in youth is bad for your brain and can lead to
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addictions later in life.
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But yeah, really, alcohol and nicotine are the drugs that people tend to use
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first, which then lend themselves to more drug use later on.
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So if I'm going to use harder drugs, I'm probably going to start with the soft
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things like nicotine and alcohol.
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And I might go on to use cannabis, but I might not. I might just go right on
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to those other harder things, right?
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That's exactly right. Yeah. And there's a variety of reasons why using alcohol
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or nicotine as a young person makes you more likely to get addicted.
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Some of them have to do with the brain and brain science.
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Myth number two. Okay. Myth number two, you can get addicted to cannabis.
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I would think that this would be true, but I always heard it to be false.
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Yes. So interesting here. This is one that I certainly used to believe when I was younger.
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And anybody who's heard me share my personal experience, you know,
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I used a lot of cannabis when I was a teenager and in college.
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And I heard many times people say that you can't get addicted to cannabis,
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that it was different than, and the reality is that you can.
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And the reality is, In fact, we usually talk about addiction in the context
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of drugs, but addiction isn't a drug problem. Addiction is a brain problem.
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So if you have a brain, you can become addicted.
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In fact, we have a colleague at UK who does research on tanning bed addiction,
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which sounds wild at first.
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First, people assume that someone who overuses the tanning bed must be vain,
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must really like having dark skin and being attractive.
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And as it turns out, what's happening is people get dopamine from the UV rays of laying in the bed.
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So they don't realize it, but they're kind of just going and getting high as
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they lay in the tanning bed.
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You know what I mean? So yeah, absolutely. You can get addicted to cannabis.
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We have neuroimaging pictures of the brain where we can see your brain on cannabis
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for someone who's a chronic cannabis user, is not dissimilar from your brain
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on nicotine, heroin, alcohol, anything else.
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Definitely, you can get addicted to cannabis. And really, one other thing to
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say about that is what we really care about when it comes to addictions,
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we don't really measure in terms of how much you're using a drug.
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What we really care about is how much impairment it causes in a person's life,
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social or occupational impairment, impairment problems in relationships and problems at work.
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And so certainly there are people who use cannabis to the extent that it causes
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problems in those domains, and we would call those addictions.
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And as you pointed out, there are lots of different addictions that might be
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even more detrimental to our health than an addiction to cannabis.
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Yeah, absolutely. In fact, in Extension, we do a lot of work with disease prevention,
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diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
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And I think the relationship between overeating and addiction is there's a lot
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more research to be done in that area.
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There's something going on there that's similar. So I think you're on to something.
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Okay. Next, true or false? True or false? Cannabis is harmless.
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Oh, let me think about this one. I think that that is false.
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Very good. You're correct. Saying that something is less harmful is certainly
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not the same thing as saying something is harmless.
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So it is true, most of the reporting that people have heard about cannabis being
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less harmful than, say, alcohol, it does seem to be true across basically every
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measure you would use, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's completely harmless.
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Cannabis is a psychoactive drug. It changes your consciousness,
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certainly puts you at risk when you're driving.
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If you get behind the wheel of a car, it can cause respiratory problems from
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just any kind of combustion.
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If you light something on fire and you inhale it into your lungs,
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it's not typically recommended by your doctor.
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Cannabis is less harmful, but not only does it have some specific harms,
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but it's specifically harmful to certain groups of people.
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So in particular, cannabis is much more harmful for the young brain than it
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is for the developed brain.
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So when I'm doing prevention programming, my first wish for kids is always that
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they'll just not experiment with it all.
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But since that's not always something that is going to come true,
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my second wish is that they just wait.
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They just wait a really long time.
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And it's like, Instead of experimenting when you're 16, if you would wait until
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you're 26, you drastically reduce the likelihood that you'll have a problem
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with whatever it is you're experimenting with, even if it's a harder drug.
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And it's just because your brain has had time to fully develop.
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And then one more group that's interesting is people who have a family history
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of or the genetic material for psychosis.
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So schizophrenia and related
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disorders that have psychotic features cannabis can
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basically trigger the onset of psychosis okay a myth related to that sometimes
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people say cannabis causes psychosis and that's not quite correct because if
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you don't have the genetic material for it it can't cause psychosis but it can
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trigger the onset if you do have the genes for it so all that to say in simple terms,
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for people who have a family history of psychosis, cannabis is actually a pretty,
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risky and harmful drug. Sure. Okay.
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All right. Give me another one.
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True or false? People cannot overdose on cannabis.
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Oh, I would think that would be false too.
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Yeah. So people, I'm getting all the double negatives twisted around in my head,
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but the reality is people cannot overdose on cannabis.
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In theory, there is a level of THC toxicity that we could reach,
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but the problem is you're not going to achieve it by smoking it and you'd have
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to eat a whole, whole, whole lot of edibles to actually reach that point.
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We've had a few cases where young, and you've probably seen it sensationalized
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in the media at some point, where a young child has taken an edible,
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consumed a THC and has died.
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And sometimes that's reported as a cannabis overdose, but it's really not accurate
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reporting in those cases.
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And this is disturbing to even think about. So I'm sorry for even saying this,
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but likely what's happening is kids are choking, they're aspirating and choking and dying.
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So we don't have in the history of mankind, we don't have a single confirmed
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case of a person overdosing on cannabis and cannabis alone.
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Still not the same thing as saying that it's harmless, but that's a nice feature of that drug.
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And so when we start to look at the medical properties, that's why some states
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have started programs where they're taking people who are using opioids to control
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their chronic pain and they're initiating them on cannabis.
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And what they're finding is that rates of overdose have gone down in those programs
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because then people are using cannabis, which they can't overdose on,
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to treat their pain instead of opioids,
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which they can overdose on, and in fact which many people do overdose on.
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So it's kind of the... Okay.
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There are,
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Less harmful drugs to control pain. That's right.
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And more harmless, but less harmful. That's exactly right. There are still some
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potential side effects.
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It's still individualized, still matters. Your own genetics,
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your own mental health, your own trauma history, all those things.
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It is controlled by a medical professional,
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That's probably another important point, right? It's a critically important point.
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If you remember from, if you took like psychology classes in high school or
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college and you talked about schedules of reinforcement, so like intermittent
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reinforcement versus all that stuff. Right. right?
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So yeah, intermittent reinforcement is the most effective kind of reinforcement schedule.
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And that's actually what people are doing when they're addicted and using out
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on the street or not under the supervision of a doctor because they're not taking a regularly,
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dosed medication at regular time intervals, which that predictability helps
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reduce the risk associated with the side effects of any drug.
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So yeah, so you're exactly right. Under a medical doctor, it can be much more effective. Okay.
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All right. Next myth. Okay. Next myth. I got two more. This one is really relevant.
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This is something we've seen a lot of discussion about recently,
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or at least I have in my world in the news.
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True or false, there is fentanyl found in cannabis.
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I would say no. False. You're correct.
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There have been some recent reports about... There's been reporting about fentanyl in everything.
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There's a lot of sensationalizing around fentanyl. I think we've even talked
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about this at some point.
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Just a lot of really histrionic, exaggerated reporting around fentanyl,
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and it's extended to cannabis.
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And so the reports are that police departments have confiscated cannabis that's
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tested positive for fentanyl, or that someone who claims they've only used cannabis,
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has overdosed on fentanyl.
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And there's a lot of reasons why this isn't true.
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The first is that we don't have a confirmed case. We don't have a lab confirmed
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case. We have cases where people think that's what happened,
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but they don't have any evidence of it.
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And one of the biggest reasons why this really probably isn't true is because
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it's like simple science is really basic science, which is fentanyl and cannabis
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burn at different temperatures.
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So if you were to really put fentanyl in the cannabis and then try to smoke
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it, by the time you lit whatever you're smoking, it would have already burned up all of the fentanyl.
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It burns at a lower temperature, so you wouldn't even be able to effectively smoke them the same way.
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Part of the reason why I think it's worth mentioning the myth is because fentanyl is plenty harmful.
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We don't need to sensationalize the reporting. We can tell the truth about fentanyl
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and let it be as bad as it actually is. Okay.
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Last one for cannabis. Okay.
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Also interesting because of all the legalization that's happening across the country.
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So true or false, cannabis is legal in Kentucky. No.
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Although it's kind of like the answer. I mean, it's kind of a trick question
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because the answer is sort of like, sort of.
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We still do not have any legislation that's been passed that legalizes cannabis
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for recreational or medical use.
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The Beshear administration passed by executive order a measure which allows
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for medical cannabis and for medical cannabis patients.
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There are some really tight restrictions. It's actually known as one of the
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most restricted cannabis laws in the country currently.
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But so we do. We do currently have that. It's a strange space because all of
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the polling pretty consistently suggests that a majority of Kentucky in the
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support for legalization of cannabis.
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There's not been the political will to get that done. So in the meantime, that's what we have.
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We have medical cannabis, and then we're looking to enshrine it with legislation
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for that to be long-term.
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And then the question of recreational cannabis is up in the air.
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We've had some neighboring states legalize recreational cannabis,
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but Kentucky... And there have been a few proposals put forth in the Kentucky
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State Legislature, but none that have ever carried.
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So that'll be a wait and see. See what happens.
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All right. Well, thank you, Alex, for this fascinating discussion.
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And I don't think that I completely bombed, but I didn't do really well either.
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I think you got it. I appreciate the time that you have taken to share with me today.
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And I hope that you'll come back and share with us again. Absolutely. Thanks, Mindy.
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