Summary
Right. So there we have it. The main findings seemed to be that skunk users heard more voices where they weren’t present, that cannabis of any kind was associated with an increased desire to listen to music, and that performance on a memory task was impaired while intoxicated.
Also, I’d really like to see more information on the brain imaging aspect of the study, to understand what the differences between the groups mean.
Thanks everyone for your comments and your tweets. Don’t forget to check out the extra posts surrounding the topic that I’ve shared this evening.
Final advice comes from Adam Winstock – don’t smoke cannabis with tobacco if you want to protect your health. Even better, avoid smoking it at all. Don’t smoke when you’re young and your brain is still developing, and if it’s affecting you negatively, take a break and see if you improve.
Right, I think they’re wrapping up. I think Jon Snow is slightly over-egging the ‘cannabis causes music to be more enjoyable’ but it’s interesting. David Nutt says “skunk” would stay where it was in the harm scale, and hash would move to the bottom. Quite a bold claim.
Jon Snow brings up education. Val Curran agrees that the message on the evidence in terms of drugs is lacking. I agree – it’s really important to be clear on what we know about cannabis use, but also what we don’t know.
Dr Christian brings up potential positive or medical uses for cannabis. Val Curran says the research is encouraging for epilepsy, and for multiple sclerosis.
Tweets seem to agree with David’s point about the gateway hypothesis.
#drugslive #cannabis is not a gateway drug. The market is the gateway. Time to separate the markets like #netherlands #Uruguay
— Ann Fordham (@AnnFordham) March 3, 2015
Branson now discussing the criminalisation of vast numbers of young people for smoking a joint. And now they are discussing the gateway hypothesis (I jumped the gun!). David Nutt says that this hypothesis is due to the availability of various illegal drugs from the same dealer. He says if you legalise cannabis you remove this possibility, as has happened in the Netherlands.
David Nutt is arguing that the criminalisation of cannabis users is directly responsible for skunk. Dal Babu, a former chief superintendent disagrees with him, and says legalisation would be opening a ‘Pandora’s box’ affecting the most vulnerable members of society. David looks sceptical. Babu is saying that legalisation wouldn’t remove dealers from the street. Richard Branson is now discussing prohibition in the USA, and that moonshine disappeared once alcohol was legal. He argues for regulation, and gets a round of applause.
So 89% of respondents have used cannabis. But this is almost certainly a somewhat self-selecting sample. Now Chris van Tulleken has been wheeled out to be stoned on TV. I think he’s doing remarkably well (though he will be embarrassed if this turns out to be placebo!)
One aspect of cannabis that I had expected to be touched on is the gateway hypothesis - namely that cannabis might lead to the use of other illicit drugs. Michelle Taylor, a cannabis researcher from University of Bristol, has written about the evidence for such a hypothesis.
Transform are offering an interesting and informed take on cannabis legality in the UK.
Due to prohibition, cannabis is the most lucrative cash crop on Earth – & all the money goes to criminals #DrugsLive pic.twitter.com/Py2N2SaOZA
— TransformDrugPolicy (@TransformDrugs) March 3, 2015
Apparently #DrugsLive is trending worldwide. Cue seamless link to Colorado, where cannabis is completely legal, and farms are a growing industry over there. Colorado’s legal cannabis is making money for the USA government via taxes too. After the break the discussion will move to cannabis regulation here in the UK.
Seems like not everyone’s a fan...
If #drugslive were a person, it'd be that guy at a party who sits next you, asks if you're "feeling your pill" yet, then throws up. In 1998.
— The Guyliner (@theguyliner) March 3, 2015
I’ve discovered it’s much harder to live-blog subtitled speech(!) But I’ll try and keep up. Dealer being interviewed says that “skunk weed” is the strain that people want on the street, as you get “more bang for your buck”.
Val is discussing anecdotal evidence that cannabis impacts poorly on motivation. These findings could be indicative of why this happens.
The study is now over apparently, and there’s another video starting, on cannabis growers. Lots of men in ski masks, and doctored voice-overs.
Professor Nutt is describing the MRI findings. A specific area of the brain, the ‘salience network’ is affected by skunk only. He describes this as a key network for your desire to get up and go. On placebo and on hash, there was plenty of brain activity in this area, but not when participants had smoked skunk. I’m not entirely clear what this has been compared to though.
Dr Chris is describing feeling ‘like being very very drunk’. He’s filling out a questionnaire on his experiences. Val Curran is describing why such questions are useful. She says it’s important to monitor intoxication experiences to compare hash and skunk.
Dr Amir Englund is now describing the cannabis psychosis paper I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Amir wrote me the blog I posted earlier about different strains of cannabis.
There’s now a case-study of cannabis-induced psychosis. A young man talking candidly about his cannabis abuse and subsequent sectioning. He has now stopped using cannabis and describes himself as feeling more ‘confident about himself as a human’. He’s being interviewed in the studio too.
Val has presented the results of cannabis-induced paranoia. Both skunk and hash induced paranoia greatly elevated from placebo. What’s not really mentioned is the paranoia of being intoxicated in a lab-based setting is much more unpleasant and unusual than in a more usual recreational situation, which could have elevated this even further.
Someone’s got the giggles. Cannabis is causing Neil to become insensible. I have done some alcohol studies in the research group where I work, and that happened to me once. Couldn’t stop giggling.
Since they’re talking about twitter, here’s another excellent tweet.
Smoking skunk makes you terrible at hiding. #DrugsLive pic.twitter.com/LcMfmYECdq
— Andy (@alreadytaken74) March 3, 2015
While there’s a break, here’s that excellent moment where Dr Christian took a closer look at Jennie Bond’s brain on pleasure...
Doctor Christan getting a little exited #drugslive pic.twitter.com/KHcVT5muTM
— ⠀ (@AyyKane) March 3, 2015
And now what we’ve all been waiting for: the film of Jon Snow’s experience. I can imagine that if you’re not used to smoking cannabis, being constantly asked how you’re feeling can’t be very nice. The people running the study deal really well with Jon wanting to leave the scanner, no pressure on him to get back in there after he wanted to leave.
The next test Dr Chris is being subjected to is a white-noise test. And we get to have a go at this. Was there a voice in that final clip or not?! It didn’t sound like it to me...Oh good, Val says there wasn’t a voice. This test is trying to tap in to the mechanisms that cannabis might cause paranoia. Twice the number of people on cannabis heard a voice where there wasn’t one, compared to placebo (though a voice was heard half the time even in placebo).
Val Curran now discussing how this memory effect might be taking place. Cannabis receptors are found in the hippocampus area of the brain, which could be a mechanism by which memory is affected:.Val states that this could mean memories cannot be laid down in the first place, which is why they can’t then be retrieved.
Jennie Bond couldn’t believe how bad she was at the task while high on cannabis. Matthew Parris said he was ‘mortified’. This is a particularly mean task to give journalists I suppose, since this is their job! Val Curran says the findings of the study showed that skunk and hash both impaired memory by around 30% (but again no error bars).
Poor Dr Chris van Tulleken is still going with a battery of tests. He’s doing a recall test at the moment – hearing a story and being asked to remember it. Participants were all played a news story and then immediately had to write down as much of the story as they could remember. This is testing the memory effects of cannabis intoxication. This isn’t the same as long-term memory problems that the drug may or may not cause. I think I’d be pretty bad at this task while drunk too.
Cannabis’ effects on memory loss are going to be discussed after the break. Claire Mokrysz is a PhD student at UCL who works with Professor Val Curran on the subject. Here’s what she had to say:
My work at University College London focuses on the impact of adolescent cannabis use on cognition and the brain. Some research suggests that using cannabis from a young age can be particularly damaging to brain development, and can impact on your cognition and performance at school. However the evidence is often inconsistent and it’s hard to know whether these links are causal, or whether they merely reflect pre-existing differences between cannabis users and non-users. One such potential confound is that teenagers who use a lot of cannabis are often also heavy alcohol drinkers and cigarette smokers.
In light of this, a study published last month in the scientific journal Neurobiology of Disease looked at the structure of subcortical regions in the brains of adolescent and adult cannabis-users, and compared these to non-users. The adolescent users had all been daily users for at least 3 months- so these really were persistent regular users. Importantly, unlike previous studies that have found cannabis-related differences in brain structure, the researchers matched their groups for alcohol use. Results showed no evidence of structural differences between the brains of cannabis users and non-users, not even for the adolescent cannabis users. For me these results demonstrate that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the effects of teenage cannabis use. But potentially of more importance, the results also highlight how alcohol- a much more socially acceptable drug- may in fact be linked to the previously reported structural brain differences.
Val Curran is describing the results of this - skunk and hash both increased the desire to listen to music (compared to placebo I assume). But I’d like some error bars please! The sample size is quite small so hard to tell how much of a difference there was.
And we’re back to the science, WITH a music task. Participants were asked to rate their desire to listen to music (and what music), then played music while in the MRI scanner. Someone is waggling their feet – I hope that was during a break in scanning or there’ll be some nasty artefacts from that movement!
There’s now a video of musicians talking about using cannabis to help the artistic muse. Artists are saying that the cannabis can help them get the ‘looseness’ that helps them work, or to emotionally connect to the music. This isn’t scientific in the least, but it’s a really interesting juxtaposition to the study. Members of the audience discussing that certain genres wouldn’t exist without cannabis. Were Black Sabbath always high?
Jon Snow is now interviewing Professor David Nutt about his views on cannabis harms. Nutt devised his harm index in a famous Lancet paper, which rated cannabis as about 1/3 as harmful as alcohol. This paper splits harm in to ‘to self’ and ‘to others’. Snow asks Nutt whether splitting cannabis in to ‘skunk’ and ‘hash’ would alter this, and Nutt says he thinks so.
And we’re back after the first break. Dr Christian is talking to Dr Adam Winstock, an addiction scientist interested in the effects of cannabis on the brain. But they’re surrounded by cannabis plants. They’re discussing the thorny skunk-versus-cannabis issue. A neat video is being shown now on the effects of THC. It’s also claiming that CBD can protect you from some of the more unpleasant effects of THC, though the evidence for this is weaker at the moment, as research is relatively new in this field.
Earlier, I asked some of the researchers involved in the programme what they hoped the show would achieve. Here’s what Matt Wall, neuroscientist and self-confessed ‘fMRI-nerd’ said:
For me, what I hope the show will achieve is to get across some of the genuinely exciting results we’ve found about the effects of different type of cannabis on the brain. The data I’ve been working on is resting-state fMRI scans, and we’ve found some interesting results not just on how cannabis affects brain networks, but on how the effects differ between the two types we’ve tested: ‘skunk’ (high THC, low CBD) and ‘hash’ (roughly equal THC and CBD). These effects may be important clues to why high-THC strains might be more associated with negative effects like dependence or psychotic-like symptoms.
However, some of the results we’ve found are quite complex and subtle, so I’m expecting that perhaps we might not get across all of them. I’d be happy if we could explain what brain resting-state networks are, and mention that some of them may be differently affected by the two types of cannabis. I think this is an important aim; the general public seems to have some awareness of functional brain imaging now, but resting-state fMRI is still pretty much unknown, and a huge area of research.
Here’s a report on the history of cannabis. Lovely animations of “skunk number one” and “Skunk-man Sam”. The development of hydroponics as a technique to grow cannabis in colder climates meant cannabis didn’t need to be smuggled in to the country any more. The video estimates the UK cannabis ‘industry’ to be worth £6 billion!
It’s quite distracting trying to listen to Professor Curran discussing the increase in cannabis problems (including addiction) while Chris van Tulleken is still breathing in to that bag next to her. He says he’s taking the drug in a very different way to how most people take it. He’s been sent off to do a battery of psychological tests.
Now the discussion turns to legalisation. Although there are a number of high profile supporters of legalisation in the UK, this is very different to in USA. Cannabis users are being interviewed. Some are advocating ‘stoned sex’, or the joy of tangerines and ginger beer. Unsurprisingly, the comments are predominantly positive.
Ah. Dr Christian has used the HASHtag joke. But now we’re getting on to the ‘drugs’ element of Drugs Live. Dr Chris van Tulleken is breathing in (possibly) cannabis from a bag. Professor Val Curran is describing the size of the dose, not the ‘bottle of vodka’ equivalent it’s been suggested in comments on the video of Jon Snow. Dr van Tulleken is a medical doctor, and used to being on TV, so was chosen for ethical reasons: taking drugs on live television is likely to be pretty stressful.
Here’s the background to the trial. It’s double-blind, meaning that neither the participant nor the researcher knew which condition was being presented. While 20 people isn’t a huge study, it’s not uncommon for studies involving brain scanning to be on relatively small numbers given the expense of using the equipment.
And we’re off. Jon Snow is introducing the show, discussing the juxtaposition between calls for legalisation and worries about the health damages of cannabis. Also, the study will be the first to give participants two different potencies of cannabis and compare their effects. The study will be interspersed with stories from users, and discussions with experts in the audience. Including Richard Branson, it seems!
Here’s a sneaky peek of the Drugs Live rehearsals finishing, tweeted by the UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit. I think that’s a smaller brain than the one used in the Ecstasy programme.
Final rehearsals before they go live... #drugslive pic.twitter.com/fEpY03YIsg
— UCL_CPU (@UCL_CPU) March 3, 2015
Cannabis researcher Amir Englund has written a more in-depth explainer about the cannabis plant itself.
First things first, some terminology. The show’s presenter Dr Christian Jessen has already tweeted that the terms ‘skunk’ and ‘hash’ will be being used as short-hand for the relative levels of different compounds present in cannabis.
1) For purposes of brevity we will b using 2 terms tonight: hash (variable THC levels + CBD) and skunk (higher THC, minimal CBD) #drugslive
— Dr Christian Jessen (@DoctorChristian) March 3, 2015
THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is the most widely researched psychoactive compound in cannabis. It’s responsible for the typical ‘high’ people describe when on the drug. It can induce euphoria, but also paranoia and anxiety while a person is intoxicated.
CBD (cannabidiol) has had less research conducted upon it, but there’s intriguing evidence that’s beginning to emerge which suggests it could have an anti-psychotic effect.
Skunk, while being the name of a specific strain of cannabis, has also become used a short-hand to refer to herbal cannabis strains, often grown under hydroponics and artificial lighting, which are high in THC but contain only trace levels of CBD. Conversely hash or resin cannabis is often derived from cannabis strains that have equivalent levels of THC and CBD.
The Drugs Live team were criticised on twitter and by some cannabis activism organisations for using these terms, but given that’s what they’re going to refer to in the programme, I will do the same in this blog.
Preamble
Welcome to the Guardian live blog accompanying Channel 4’s Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial.
In 2012 the Guardian covered Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial – the highs and lows, but now the experiment turns to the most widely used illegal recreational drug: cannabis. It’s perfect timing for a show on cannabis; while recent UK evidence points to a link between potent strains of cannabis and psychosis, across the pond various states in USA are legalising recreational use of it.
Channel 4 have published the background to the trial, and Professor Val Curran who designed it has written about it here, but I’m sure most people will be watching to find out more about Jon Snow’s unpleasant experience which led to him requesting to be released from the brain scanner mid-way through the experiment.
The show starts at 10pm on Channel 4, so tune in and let me know your thoughts in the comments, or on twitter @soozaphone.
