Science for Potheads
K.M. Cholewa
There's so much misunderstanding around marijuana. Here's
what's really happening to people when they smoke weed
Drug warriors have long tried to smear marijuana as a
dangerous scourge, seeking to criminalize possession of a leaf they clearly do
not understand. The key to comprehending its effects is by better grasping our
physiology.
Marijuana is not magic. Marijuana (botanical name, cannabis)
affects the human body because the plant-based cannabinoids in marijuana, once
ingested, can “plug into” the cannabinoid receptors that are used by the
cannabinoids made by our own bodies.
It’s not just people that have cannabinoid systems. All
mammals have them. All creatures do, except bugs. Although
cannabinoid systems
can utilize the plant-based cannabinoids in marijuana, the cultivation and
preservation of cannabinoid systems by the evolutionary process has nothing to
do with pot. The cannabinoid receptor appeared on the planet at least 550
million years before marijuana.
Evolution has selected for cannabinoid
The cannabinoid receptor seems to have first appeared
approximately 600 million years ago in sea squirts. Sea squirts also happen to
be our closet relatives among the invertebrates. We share 80 percent of our
genes with them.
A sea squirt is a tunicate, and tunicates contain a host of
potentially useful chemical compounds that are effective against various types
of cancer. In the May 2007 issue of The Federation of American Societies for
Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal, researchers from Stanford University
showed that “tunicates can correct [biological] abnormalities over a series of
generations… the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon may lead to insights
about the potential of cells and tissues to be reprogrammed.”
Could that underlying mechanism allowing for “reprogramming”
involve the cannabinoid system?
Tunicates evolved in the early Cambrian period, a period
that featured the Cambrian explosion that was characterized by increased
diversity and diversification of organisms by an order of magnitude. The
Cambrian explosion marked the sudden (in geological terms) emergence of almost
every biological type known.
Prior to 580 million years ago, life forms were simple. Over
the following 75 million years the rate of evolution accelerated. Charles
Darwin considered the Cambrian explosion one of the best arguments against his
theory of natural selection. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles
Eldridge’s theory of punctuated equalibria challenged the idea that evolution
took place exclusively gradually over the generations and asserted that instead
there were eras where rapid change ensued. Gould pointed to stasis in most of
the fossil record for evidence.
Could there be a connection between an accelerated rate of
evolution 580 million years ago and the emergence of the cannabinoid system 600
million years ago? Is it possible that it is a system involved with evolution
itself?
The capacity to change is essential to survival. Grow a fin.
Resist bacteria. Accept a new idea. The ability to change can mean the
difference between life and death, at the individual level or for a species. We
know we can change biochemically. There has to be a biochemical reason for
that. Such a biochemical system would be mandatory for most species when it
comes to survival in a changing world.
The cannabinoid system seems at least in part to be
associated with the capacity to “shift,” i.e., change, dislodge stagnancies and
interrupt patterns (“forget”). Memory is not just an act of the mind. The body
has memory, too. Marijuana affects
“memory by way of the receptors in the limbic system’s hippocampus, which
“gates” information during memory consolidation.”
According to Judith Horstman in “The Scientific American
Brave New Brain,” learning is a product of memory formation. Memories are
created “when messages are sent across the tiny gaps between neurons called
synapses… A memory is held in the connections made by this network and firmly
established when a network of synapses is strengthened… Over time, this net of
memories can be strengthened further, weakened, or broken, depending on your
brain chemistry, your genes, and your actions.”
So, these networks can be viewed as grooves that get dug and
create underlying structure. Information gets trained to the tracks. So what if
the well-dug groove becomes maladaptive, or even detrimental to survival? What
if the dug groove was grounded in misinformation? What if the underlying
structure distorts the
information running through it? How do you realize it?
(How does the body realize it?) How do you know to jump the tracks? And if you
do jump them, jump them into what?
Unlearning, or pattern breaking, under certain circumstances
is critical to the ability of life itself to persist. It may be equally
important in organisms, organizations and even software to have a mechanism for
pattern interruption when changes in the environment make a formerly useful
pattern destructive. The interruption serves as a reset button and causes the
system to reassess and aim for optimizing in current reality as opposed to
maintaining historical patterns.
The researchers who work with cannabis, the cannabinoid
system and cannabis science often refer to cannabinoids as working like
“grease” and facilitating transitions from one state to another, and as
allowing change. Certainly, more study in these areas is desirable, and
necessary. But the federal government systematically blocks such studies.
Whereas clinical researchers can get permission from the
Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to grow or create restricted compounds like LSD,
MDMA or psilocybin in the lab, they are unable to do so when it comes to
marijuana.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) currently is
funding a nearly $2 million study in an attempt to find a link between
marijuana use and domestic violence, even though a recent study published by
the journal Neuropharmacology has found that cannabinoids may reduce aggression
and improve social interactions.
Despite such obstacles to research, there are more than
20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to
the cannabis plant and cannabinoids. Other countries, such as Israel, are
moving ahead to study cannabis’ therapeutic applications.
The paradigm is changing for marijuana in America. According
to Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark book, “The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions”:
The decision to
reject one paradigm is
always the simultaneous decision to accept another, and
the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms
with nature and with each other… [T]he transition of a paradigm in crisis to a
new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a
cumulative process, one achieved by the articulation or extension of the old
paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a
reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical
generalizations.
We may be in for exciting times.The cannabinoid system is an
ancient one. Life organized around it. The illegal status of marijuana is less
than 100 years old. Political institutions and economic interests organized
around it.
How the cannabinoid system functions may be a door to more
secrets about the workings of our physiology. And, as when we figured out that
the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, it might shake
up some faulty premises and challenge the work of authorities.
Marijuana medicine and science will change things. New
information that conflicts with the prevailing paradigm always does.
Marijuana economics may change things, too. Whether it does
depends largely on how the regulatory models shake out and whether the
resources – the money – generated under legal status flow to new players,
provide broad opportunities for entrepreneurship, build the middle class, or
find their way to the more deeply dug grooves of those who already command the
resources of the economy.
Marijuana politics is the tool that is used to reinforce
current patterns, networks and flows — or to dig new grooves and enable change.
K.M Cholewa has worked as a political writer, policy
consultant and lobbyist in Montana for 22 years, including on issues related to
medical marijuana. Her novel, Shaking Out the Dead, is due out Spring 2014.
