Hungry Pot… Ever wonder why you get the munchies from smoking pot? Michelle Janikian, writing at the excellent Herb website (herb.co), reports on two studies that dug into the question… Back in 2015, Yale University School of Medicine neuroscientists looked at how neurons called “pro-opiomelanocortins” in the brain’s appetite center responded to marijuana. One of the main jobs of these neurons is to tell you to quit eating when you’re full, but it turns out pot “tricks” them into doing the opposite… “It’s like pressing a car’s breaks and accelerating instead,” says Tamas Horyath, the study’s lead author. No other compounds are known to have this effect, he added… And in 2014 a team lead by Edgar Soria-Gomez at the University of Bordeaux found that stimulating cells’ CB1 receptors increased sensitivity to smells, which increases food intake… The usual caveats apply: First (altogether now) more research is needed, and second, the findings may not apply to you if you’re not a mouse…
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Skinny pot… Ever wonder why so many chronic marijuana users are thin, not fat? Ms. Janikian takes a bite out of that one too. She says marijuana varieties with the cannabinoids THCV and THCVA are being touted as “skinny weed” in California, with many people reporting “that this psychoactive compound decreases appetite instead of increasing it… However, she warns, be careful if you’re prone to anxiety.” While THCV can also be energizing, some people with anxiety disorders find THCV increases their anxiety rather than decreases it…
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Geezer pot… Speaking of studies, according to a study done by William Kerr, Camillia Lui and Yu Ye at the Alcohol Research Group, there’s been a big surge in marijuana use in two age groups, compared with the people in the same age groups 30 years ago — the geezer cohorts… The researchers found that the geezers of 2015 are 20 times more likely to smoke marijuana than the geezers of 1984… in 2015 more than 11 percent of Americans aged 50-59 smoked pot, compared with less than 1 percent of the same group in 1984… and in 2015 about 7 percent of Americans over 60 smoked marijuana, also compared with less than 1 percent in 1984… During the same period pot use among Americans aged 18-29 barely changed, actually falling slightly from 29.9 percent in 1984 to 29.2 percent in 2015… The surge in geezer inhalation isn’t that surprising really, because by 2015 the entire Baby Boomer generation (sometimes known as the rat moving through the python of life) was 54 years old or older…
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Crack pot… New Jersey State Senator Ronald Rice wants you to know that marijuana can kill you if you get too high… Rice, who is head of the New Jersey legislature’s Black Caucus says he wants to see marijuana decriminalized as a way of ending the mass incarceration of young blacks, but he still wants to keep marijuana illegal because he wants “to deter people from doing something that’s bad for them….” “If you get too high you die from it… It kills you directly if it’s too potent…” Strangely, he didn’t give the names of anyone who had expired from over-highness… According to Gothamist, Rice also believes that legalizing weed will lead to an employment crisis — because no one will be able to pass a drug test…
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Well, duh… A new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics into the relationship between e-cigarette and marijuana use among adolescents found that teens who had used e-cigarettes to smoke tobacco were, wait for it, more likely to smoke marijuana… previous studies had found that teens who smoked non-e-cigarettes were more likely to smoke marijuana…
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Bad news… You may have heard that the worms at Alden Global Capital, the out-of-state hedge fund that owns the Denver Post, have decided to save big bucks by reducing the size of the Post’s editorial staff, and last week they did — by getting rid of the entire dedicated staff of The Cannabist, the excellent and highly popular website owned by the Post… brilliant business decision there; the website had a larger following than High Times Magazine, which, unlike the Post, is doing pretty well these days… whether the Post will continue to operate the site from its depleted newsroom with wire service stories, press releases and fake news is unknown…
