FDA, FTC warn company marketing unapproved cannabidiol products with unsubstantiated claims to treat teething and ear pain in infants, autism, ADHD, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease… Cannabis Chaos & Crack Pot Clinical Claims!

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Contribution of Marijuana Legalization to the U.S. Opioid Mortality Epidemic: Individual and Combined Experience of 27 States and District of Columbia

Conclusions The marijuana protection hypothesis is not supported by recent U.S. data on opioid mortality trends. Instead, legalizing marijuana appears to have contributed to the nation’s opioid mortality epidemic.

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Pennsylvania legalized medical marijuana in 2016, and since then its use has skyrocketed.¹ The doses of the active ingredients of marijuana — tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) — are not standardized, product concentrations are not regulated, and prescribing practices vary…

Neurotoxic effects, ranging from central nervous system (CNS) excitation (anxiety, paranoia, and delirium) to CNS depression, are a well-described consequence of exposure to excessive amounts of cannabinoids, with excitation more common in adults and depression more common in children.² For the formulation that our patient used, each 0.1 ml of fluid was reported to contain 50 mg of THC, 10 to 20 times as great as the doses recommended for therapeutic use.³ A typical recreational dose of THC for persons who have not previously used marijuana is 10 mg.

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JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(7):762-764. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0076

Mirroring increases in the general population, the prevalence of past-month marijuana use among pregnant mothers in the United States increased by 75% between 2002 (2.85%) and 2016 (4.98%).¹ Although cannabis use has been linked to psychosis, little is known about prenatal exposure.^2,3 Unprecedented increases in marijuana use during pregnancy, alongside evidence that cannabis use is correlated with psychosis and that endocannabinoids play an important role in neurodevelopment, highlight the importance of evaluating potential long-term consequences of prenatal exposure.⁴

Thus, prenatal cannabis exposure may be associated with later psychosis proneness in offspring. Only when there is sufficient fetal endocannabinoid type 1 receptor expression, which may not occur until after many mothers learn they are pregnant. In the context of increasing cannabis accessibility and potency, perceptions of safety, and the potential use of cannabis to combat pregnancy-related nausea, these data suggest that cannabis use by pregnant women should be discouraged until more is known.

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Those were the words of Minister of Health Ginette Taylor in November 2017, spoken as the government of Canada began to put together Bill 45, known as The Cannabis Act. Over a year has passed since the enactment of Bill 45 and questions still remain regarding the safety of legal cannabis to our pregnant population, both in the short- and long-term. Even preceding the legalization of cannabis in Canada, a 2017 survey by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) indicated that from 1996–2017, adults of reproductive age (i.e., 18–29 years) in Ontario reported the biggest increase in cannabis use, from 18.3% to 39.1%.3 Moreover, in 2017, the proportion of Ontarians reporting cannabis use in a span of just 1 year rose from 15.7% to 19.4%, representing a total of 2 million people.  These trends in usage are of great concern, especially when considering that over the last decade, cannabis use has progressively increased in pregnant women, along with the perception that it poses no risk in perinatal life. Aside from the brain, activation of cannabinoid receptors by Δ9-THC or CBD in peripheral tissues (e.g., pancreas, heart, adipose, and liver) during pregnancy could also directly influence the development of those organs, and consequentially, their function in postnatal life. In addition, Δ9-THC in pregnancy may have indirect effects on long-term non-communicable diseases given that it impedes fetal growth, which is a strong predictor of metabolic disease risk in human offspring.

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