“The potential for increases in adolescent marijuana use is an important concern given recent changes in marijuana policy.
The purpose of this study was to estimate trends in marijuana use from 1999 to 2013 among a national sample of US high school students…
Despite considerable changes in state marijuana policies over the past 15 years, marijuana use among high school students has largely declined. ”
“Cannabis has been used throughout history for different purposes but was outlawed in the United States in 1937; many countries followed suit. Although recently reintroduced as a medical treatment in several countries, the use of cannabis in Israel is permitted for some medical purposes but is still controversial, eliciting heated public and professional debate. The few published studies on physicians’ attitudes to medical cannabis found them to be generally unsupportive.
To examine, for the first time, the experience, knowledge and attitudes of Israeli physicians towards medical cannabis (MC)…
Physicians generally agreed that MC treatment could be helpful for chronic and for terminally ill patients. Oncologists and pain specialists did not agree unanimously that MC can undermine mental health, whereas other physicians did. Physicians who recommended MC in the past (once or more) agreed, more than physicians who did not, with the statement “MC treatment in Israel is accessible to patients who need it”.
In contrast to other studies we found partial acceptance of MC as a therapeutic agent. Further in-depth studies are needed to address regulatory and educational needs.”
“The force of the recent explosion of largely unproven and unregulated cannabis-based preparations on medical therapeutics may have its greatest impact in the field of neurology.
Paradoxically, for 10 millennia this plant has been an integral part of human cultivation, where it was used for its fibers long before its pharmacological properties.
With regard to the latter, cannabis was well known to healers from China and India thousands of years ago; Greek and Roman doctors during classic times; Arab doctors during the Middle Ages; Victorian and Continental physicians in the nineteenth century; American doctors during the early twentieth century; and English doctors until 1971 when a variety of nonevidence-based remedies were removed from the British Pharmaceutical Codex.
The clinical data on cannabis therapeutics are meager and the vast majority are formed by surveys or small studies that are underpowered and/or suffer from multiple methodological flaws, often by virtue of limited research funding for nonaddiction-focused studies. Thus, we know relatively little about the clinical efficacy of cannabinoids for the various neurological disorders for which historical nonscientific and medical literature have advocated its use.
The relative scarcity of proven cannabis-based therapies is not due to data that show that cannabinoids are ineffective or unsafe, but rather reflects a poverty of medical interest and a failure by pharmaceutical companies arising from regulatory restrictions compounded by limits for patent rights on plant cannabinoid-containing preparations that have been used medicinally for millennia, as is the case for most natural products.
We are pleased to have gathered many of the world’s experts together on the basic biology of cannabinoids, as well as their potential role in treating neurologic and psychiatric disorders…
We hope that this issue of Neurotherapeutics will serve to mark the bounds of verifiable scientific knowledge of cannabinoids in the treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders. At the same time, our contributors have also helped identify areas for future research, as well as the strategies needed to move our base of knowledge forward.
We hope that this volume will help to accelerate the pace of the appropriately focused and productive research and double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trials to the point at which the care of patients is informed by valid data and not just anecdote.”
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13311-015-0388-0/fulltext.html
“Cannabis and Humulus are sister genera comprising the entirety of the Cannabaceae sensu stricto, including C. sativa L. (marijuana, hemp), and H. lupulus L. (hops) as two economically important crops.
These two plants have been used by humans for many purposes including as a fiber, food, medicine, or inebriant in the case of C. sativa, and as a flavoring component in beer brewing in the case of H. lupulus.
In this study, we report the complete chloroplast genomes for two distinct hemp varieties of C. sativa, Italian “Carmagnola” and Russian “Dagestani”, and one Czech variety of H. lupulus “Saazer”.
Both C. sativa genomes are 153 871 bp in length, while the H. lupulus genome is 153 751 bp. The genomes from the two C. sativa varieties differ in 16 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), while the H. lupulus genome differs in 1722 SNPs from both C. sativa cultivars.”
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this study, differences in amygdala volume in cannabis users were attributable to common predispositional factors, genetic or environmental in origin, with little support for causal influences.”
“Despite its cultivation as a source of food, fibre and medicine, and its global status as the most used illicit drug, the genus Cannabis has an inconclusive taxonomic organization and evolutionary history.
Drug types of Cannabis (marijuana), which contain high amounts of the psychoactivecannabinoid Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), are used for medical purposes and as a recreational drug.
Hemp types are grown for the production of seed and fibre, and contain low amounts of THC.
Two species or gene pools (C. sativa and C. indica) are widely used in describing the pedigree or appearance of cultivated Cannabis plants.
Using 14,031 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped in 81 marijuana and 43 hemp samples, we show that marijuana and hemp are significantly differentiated at a genome-wide level, demonstrating that the distinction between these populations is not limited to genes underlying THC production.
We find a moderate correlation between the genetic structure of marijuana strains and their reported C. sativa and C. indica ancestry and show that marijuana strain names often do not reflect a meaningful genetic identity.
We also provide evidence that hemp is genetically more similar to C. indica type marijuana than to C. sativa strains.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26308334
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133292
“Leonotis leonurus, locally commonly known as “wilde dagga” (=wild cannabis), is traditionally used as a decoction, both topically and orally, in the treatment of a wide variety of conditions such as haemorrhoids, eczema, skin rashes, boils, itching, muscular cramps, headache, epilepsy, chest infections, constipation, spider and snake bites. The dried leaves and flowers are also smoked to relieve epilepsy. The leaves and flowers are reported to produce a mild euphoric effect when smoked and have been said to have a similar, although less potent, psychoactive effect to cannabis.
The phytochemistry of particularly the non-volatile constituents of Leonotis leonurus has been comprehensively investigated due to interest generated as a result of the wide variety of biological effects reported for this plant. More than 50 compounds have been isolated and characterised. Leonotis leonurus contains mainly terpenoids, particularly labdane diterpenes, the major diterpene reported is marrubiin. Various other compounds have been reported by some authors to have been isolated from the plant, including, in the popular literature only, the mildly psychoactive alkaloid, leonurine. Leonurine has however, never been reported by any scientific analysis of the extracts of L. leonurus.
Despite the publication of various papers on L. leonurus, there is still, however, the need for definitive research and clarification of other compounds, including alkaloids and essential oils from L. leonurus, as well as from other plant parts, such as the roots which are extensively used in traditional medicine. The traditional use by smoking also requires further investigation as to how the chemistry and activity are affected by this form of administration. Research has proven the psychoactive effects of the crude extract of L. leonurus, but confirmation of the presence of psychoactive compounds, as well as isolation and characterisation, is still required. Deliberate adulteration of L. leonurus with synthetic cannabinoids has been reported recently, in an attempt to facilitate the marketing of these illegal substances, highlighting the necessity for refinement of appropriate quality control processes to ensure safety and quality. Much work is therefore still required on the aspect of quality control to ensure safety, quality and efficacy of the product supplied to patients, as this plant is widely used in South Africa as a traditional medicine. Commercially available plant sources provide a viable option for phytochemical research, particularly with regard to the appropriate validation of the plant material (taxonomy) in order to identify and delimit closely related species such as L. leonurus and L. nepetifolia which are very similar in habit.”
“Given the paucity of data on metabolic significance of marijuana use, particularly among the black population, the objective of the study was to investigate the potential effects of marijuana on metabolic risk factors and body weight among black patients…
Current marijuana use is associated with significantly lower waist circumference, compared to former users and never users.
Except for diastolic BP that was significantly lower among current users, other metabolic parameters showed tendency towards favorable profile…
Our study on the cardio-metabolic effects on marijuana use among black population from an inner city institution showed consistent results on the association of marijuana use with lower waist circumference that has been demonstrated previously among populations that are largely white.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4523241/
“Acute stress results in release of glucocorticoids which are potent modulators of learning and plasticity. This process is presumably mediated by the basolateral amygdala (BLA) where cannabinoids CB1 receptors play a key role in regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
Growing attention has been focused on nucleus accumbens (NAc) plasticity which regulates mood and motivation. The NAc integrates affective and context dependent input from the BLA and ventral subiculum (vSub), respectively.
Since our previous data suggest that the CB1/2 receptor agonist WIN55,212-2 (WIN) and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) antagonist RU-38486 (RU) can prevent the effects of stress on emotional memory, we examined whether intra-BLA WIN and RU can reverse the effects of acute stress on NAc plasticity…
The results suggest that glucocorticoid and cannabinoid systems in the BLA can restore normal function of the NAc and hence may play a central role in the treatment of a variety of stress-related disorders.”
“Dronabinol (synthetic Δ9- tetrahydrocannabinol) is used in patients with nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy and in AIDS patients for appetite stimulation.
Recently, dronabinol was used to successfully treat visceral hypersensitivity causing noncardiac chest pain. With widening uses of this medication, we aim to explore its effects on metabolic parameters in long-term dosing and hypothesize that it will not affect major metabolic parameters.
A double-blind, placebo-controlled, 28-day trial was performed with patients 18 to 75 years old without cardiac disease…
Dronabinol administration does not significantly affect basic metabolic components after a period of 28 days.
The implications of these findings are important because dronabinol may be able to be used in patients with metabolic disorders. The favorable trends observed here warrant further exploration into its long-term effects.”