THC: The Hidden Hook — Understanding the Addictive Dangers of Modern Marijuana

THC is popular and more dangerous than ever. 

Transcript

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I'm again for Dr. Addiction Life Guard Placement. I'm Dr. Doctor psychology. License Professional Help for an Addiction Special. You are suffering from addiction, injury, trauma, whatever it is. I'm here to help. You're in search of help. Try to get your life back together. Join me here at Dr. Addiction Life Guard, the Addiction Recovery Podcast. I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes, but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. You know, THC today isn't the same as what your parents or more likely your grandparents used to call pot. We, you know, it's weed. Uh, but what used to be at about a two to four percent THC level plant has turned into a chemical concentrate reaching 90% potency. Um that's way different than it used to be. That's not a mild buzz, that's a neurochemical storm coming at you. And that's what I wanted to talk about today was the much debated uh topic of like, what are you what are we calling THC uh stuff today and why it is so so dangerous and deadly and uh causing so many problems. So let's let's kind of set this up with an understanding of kind of what we're talking about. So THC is the chemical compound, it's the primary psychoactive compound in in cannabis plants. It binds to the CB1 receptors in the brain and the CB2 receptors in the immune system. Both. And so both parts of that endocinoidal, um, endocannaboidal system, excuse me, the C E C S, it regulates pain, mood, appetite, memory, um, and that's that's the effect that it has when you're getting high. It's affecting those things, right? So you're feeling different about things. You get, you know, the effects of it. Um I'm I got the munchies, I feel kind of mellowed out, I'm not feeling pain, my memory is kind of disappearing on me. So the ECS naturally uses that, so this cannabid system that we have internally, which regulates mood, pain, appetite memory, the e that's the ECS, it it naturally uses internal cannabides. So it uses these internal cannabides, cannab cannibinoids, cannabinoids, to maintain that balance of of the th mood, pain, appetite, memory. When you introduce THC externally, you're smoking it, you're ingesting it, it overactivates the ECS. So it disrupts normal regulation. And so you become more of, you know, whatever. So you're that's when the the mood and the appetite and the memory and the pain and all of that gets all kind of thrown out of whack because you're throwing off the internal receptors, neuroreceptors that we have, because you're introducing more of that THC than we have in our bodies, and we have THC in our bodies naturally. So but the bigger problem is not that, it's the the change in the THC levels. That's the thing that is becoming so problematic. So in the 1960s and 70s, the average uh cannabis um it was two to four percent THC, and so very low potency. In the 1990s, they had figured out how to get the potency up in that THC level of the plants, so the strains were averaging about six percent. In the 2020s, vape oils, dabs, shatter, they these these potency levels are reaching sixty and ninety percent. And that's where the problem lies, is in the increase in the levels because we're getting a whole different thing happening. So cannabis use disorder, um, it's defined in our diagnostic statistical manual, the DSM, 5 TR. Um, it's a pattern of cannabis use causing clinically significant impairment or distress, and it meets there's 11 criteria, you've got to meet uh two or more within 12 months. Tolerance, withdrawal, unsuccessful attempts to cut down, cravings, and neglect of obligations and uh different things like that. It's a it's the typical um uh addiction kind of diagnostic criteria we use, but it's got it's two out of the eleven, which is not many compared to some of the other drugs. So the and that's what we use to to diagnose. So we're defining it by addiction or abuse, right? So the impact on you as a person. So the addiction mechanism that's going on there, THC triggers dopamine, it releases in the mesolimbic reward pathway, so it's triggering this dopamine release, and the repeated use desensitizes those dopamine receptors. So it produces a tolerance and a need for higher amounts of the THC. Um when you're getting high levels to begin with, your tolerance is going to be competing against, so to speak, the amount of the levels of the THC in the products that you're using. Um withdrawal. The withdrawal symptoms, huge problem there. Irritability, sleep disturbance, decreased appetite, anxiety, vivid dreams when you're withdrawing. Um two to three days after you stopped. Might go as long as seven. I've heard as long as ten. Some of my clients are complaining about these things uh going on and on, and sleep disturbance actually can go on for a year after you stopped. Um, and I'm gonna go into reasons why in a little bit. Um but so the the the brain and the body on THC, what what happens to that? Now, again, understand, I mean, I'm competing against another uh voice that people hear, which is it's natural, it's a plant-based thing, and so hey, what's the big deal? You know, well, so is heroin, so is hash, so is cocaine. Uh other drugs are out there that are are horribly bad. And it's funny because the defense of it's a natural product, you would never apply that to cocaine. You would never apply that to um heroin. Well, it's it comes from poppy seeds. Uh cocaine comes from the coca plant. You you would not associate that with, hey, it's natural. It's a plant. What's the big deal? I never have heard that as a defense for the usage of those drugs, but I do hear it with marijuana. And that's the old, I think it's the old hippie, you know, cheech and chong hippie thing of like, hey man, it's just a plant. What's the big deal? Well, so is alcohol, and so is heroin, and so is cocaine, and they're problems. They're huge problems. And nobody ever disagrees with me on that one. But how does what happens to the brain and the body when you're on THC products? Well, here's part of the issue. We we couldn't study THC legally in in our country, in the United States, because it was a banned substance. So you couldn't do laboratory experience experiments, you couldn't um do double blind experiments, you couldn't do any any t you know, actual clinical research. You could only ask, you know, if you asked somebody, hey, are you using this? Yes, no. But we had no idea how much they were using. We couldn't, you know, we couldn't go into that level of of research. But when they started legalizing it, we could. In Colorado, that was a gift to science community because now we can verify what we had thought all along. And it was actually worse than we thought. But so here, let me just go over some of the problems that that happened in the body and the brain with THC. Let's go through them point by point. Cognitive impact, short-term memory impairments, slow processing speed, difficulty with um uh executive functioning, making decisions, it's uh frontal cortex functioning, cognitive impact, neuroimaging. Um, when you take a when you take a an fMRI um and it shows reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex in the hippocampus, these are significant parts of our brain that really make us who we are as individuals. So when you when you've got somebody who's using THC products and uh you do an fMRI neural imaging, you can see that there is greatly reduced activity in that prefrontal cortex in the hippocampus area. And so then that's going to affect decision making and who you who you are. Like your personality is right there in the front of your brain. Motivational effects, um that that reduced uh reduced response leads to anti-motivational syndrome. That's what we call it. Loss of drive, goal-directed behavior. I have many clients that come in here who are um using THC regularly and and ongoing, and they just they don't they're not there's no drive. There's no drive there. The the psychiatric risk, um, it can induce acute psychosis and exacerbated latent schizophrenia. We know this, we've known this for a while. Um, but the problem, you know, when they were studying that, they started studying that back in 2002, 2003, but the level of psychosis is is frightening. Um, and it's with lower and lower age groups. I have clients who are teenagers who are I get parents that are calling me while they're taking their kid who's 15, 16, 17 years old, and they're having a psychotic break in the car on the way to the emergency room, and the parent has absolutely no idea what's going on. And the only thing that shows up on a talk screen at the hospital is THC because that's what they used. And they report this to me. They'll say, I all I did was just, you know, I I ate some edibles. Um and you know, or I I was using my dab pen. And I I I don't know what happened. It was like they just went into the psychotic break, and that's the only thing they were using. Um sleep disruption. Sleep disruption is a huge problem. Um well, uh, let me let me go back. I because I I really want to emphasize this schizophrenia, latent schizophrenia, later than uh normal. So schizophrenia normally starts showing up at between 18 and 25. And um there's a there's an there's a risk increase of uh, especially if you have a family history of psychosis, of uh let me see if I can remember the research. It was uh five times. Five times the amount of risk, especially with those with a family of psychosis, if you're using THC products. Five times. The sleep disruption thing, that's a huge problem. Um I I have reports of clients who you know they initially thought they were using uh THC products to help them go to sleep, only to find out that it's it's just making it worse and they're confused, you know. Um and the sleep disturbance um has a has another side to it. So you stop using THC products, maybe you go to a rehab and you've been using your edibles or dabs or doing shatter or whatever, and you get there and you can't sleep. And you know, you were doing other drugs, maybe you're drinking, maybe you're in there for like drugs and alcohol, or or maybe multiple drugs. You got cocaine or heroin, fentanyl, something, and you're using THC products on top of that, and you're using a lot of it. Withdrawal, you have this horrible rebound dream intensity thing that comes up. And um that's that's one of the problems with the sleep disruption is the the dreams, you know, you wake up, you're having a horrible dream, nightmare, it's too intense, and just waking up. Now you're you know, you go through a couple of days of that, and then you're afraid to go to sleep. So it's a huge problem. In addition to the up to a year of sleep disturbance, just either waking up in the middle of the night or having a hard time going to sleep that goes through withdrawal that lasts seems to be the thing that lasts the longest. So there's a huge impact that use of THC has on people, and they would like to ignore it, and many of them do, but that's just the reality: psychosis, latent schizophrenia, um, memory problems, impairment. Now remember, I'm not talking about 1960s, 1970s, stereotypical hippie who's just smoking a joint and having a good time, and it's not a big problem. We didn't see any of this before. Now, with with the new forms of THC, we're seeing it, and we're seeing it in the worst forms possible. So that's because there's a change. So what do we have? We've got we got new things in in THC: vapes, edibles, dabs. It's a huge change in how you're ingesting it and the amount that you're getting, the uptake of it, how fast it occurs, uh, in some instances the delay of and then a quick uptake. So let me explain this. Uh, especially if you're listening to this and you don't really understand uh much about THC. Perhaps you're not using it. Maybe your family member who's listening to this and trying to figure this out. So you got oils, vape oils. Um they contain all kinds of solvents, residues, synthetic cutting agents that are in it. So the vape oils are what you're getting in um when you're vaping the vape pen. They had to make it liquid, right? So they had to have this uh solvent to get it there, and then they have to cut it. So they're doing different things like vitamin T vitamin E, acetate, which is linked to um E V A L I, lung injury, evali lung injury. Sometimes we don't even know what is in that. Uh there's no requirement to list every single thing in that vape pen. And and even if they do, I mean, we're finding that it's just, you know, it's out there. One of my clients went to a convenience store, um, and he is a THC addict who's in recovery, and he walked into a convenience store, and there was uh dab pens that had 50,000 units of THC in the dab pen, in a single dab pen. And he was shocked when he saw that. He was like, Man, if I pick that up, I'd I could just get as high as a kite just so quick, and it's 50,000 units um of THC. Wow. Um, vape oils are, you know, you seriously, it could be just a vape pen that has nothing in it, or it has a vape oil uh or a uh THC oil in it, and if you're uh seen using it, you're not they're not nobody's gonna know. They can't smell it. They don't know it's any other vape, it could be anything other any other kind of vape oil. Grape vape oil, you know, with THC in it. Edibles. Edibles, here's another thing. Okay, so the the clients that I have that use THC products, they run into trouble with edibles. Edibles have a delayed onset, one to two hours. Uh once you've once you've consumed it. It takes one to two hours before it hits you. And so uh a lot of times what I see is people using edibles, they don't feel like they're getting high, so they eat more, they eat more. Well, now you've way overconsumed, or you have no real idea about how much you're consuming, so you take too much, but it's going to be a couple of hours perhaps before you'd even know. It can cause panic attacks, vomiting, hallucinations because the THC, it's a delayed onset, and if you're overconsuming, you end up with THC toxicity, which really results in the things I'm talking about, the panic and the um the vomiting, the hallucinations, the psychosis type things. Dab pens. Um little pen, little, it's like a little heated metal tip end pen, and you're uh you're inhaling the smoke that the the dab pen is melting the uh the wax. So this these concentrations, 60-90%, deliver massive amounts of THC instantly. So rapid tolerance and dopamine blunting happen really quickly with this. So if you if you you're using a dab pen and you want to really kind of fry your brain quick, man, that's the way to do it. Then we have the uh the other things that are so much fun. The synthetic THC. Um space, uh space, spice, K2, stuff like that. Full CB1 agonists, a hundred times stronger than natural THC, but it doesn't necessarily show up on a test, and then you're gonna have other things that are like way worse because it's so much stronger than natural THC, seizures, stroke, psychosis. I have a client who's had uh multiple strokes caused by synthetic THC, they ingested unknowingly, and um they have permanent brain damage from that, they have no short-term, no long-term memory, and it's very, very difficult for them to live. And as a 20, 24-year-old, um, that's a sad thing because you're not getting it back. So they went from fully functioning normal person to kind of vegged out because of that. Um, I think that person had four strokes and was in a coma for about a month, came out and could remember very little of anything and can't retain information either, just can't retain it. How to get home from down the street from their house, kind of thing. It's very sad. So there's there's a lot of things that can happen on the usage, but I wanted to talk also about like what what are the mental health link here with THC usage? Because a lot of people are using it because hey, it's better than using heroin, or hey, it's just it's relaxing me, or hey, hey, I you know, it's helping me sleep. Okay, but chronic THC use correlates with incredibly higher rates of major depressive disorder and panic disorder, which is interesting because they're using THC because they're trying to relieve these things, right? But it causes them, and we know that. We know that from the research. Um, so depression and anxiety, psychosis. The meta-analysis um shows daily high potency THC use increases psychosis risk by five times. So daily usage of high potency THC. Now, that's not the person who's using it once a month or once a week, but somebody who's a wake and bake person, yeah, they have five time risk, five times the risk of psychosis. That's frightening. Um not sure when you're using it because you're treating depression and anxiety that you're feeling, or panic disorder, how that's gonna help you. The trauma interaction, um, it dampens the amygdala activity. The that's the part of the brain where there's uh emotional um uh response to threat, right? Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. That's the amygdala. Um short-term arousal, but long term it reinforces avoidance and dissociation. Um you you're not having a true trauma response process with that. So things that are happening to you, you're not ha it's it's preventing the true trauma response. You're having an artificial experience in the amygdala because it dampens it, it tamps it down, it makes it so that your amygdala doesn't activate. And so the the emotional uh emotional arousal um is very short-term. In other words, if somebody is doing something and it's very traumatic, they're not responding to it like a normal person who's not getting high all the time of THC. But trust me, there, you know, once you stop using that, you're going to have that response. And now you're gonna have a really weird process of of trying to experience past trauma without having had the initial response to it. It makes it very difficult to treat people that have uh traumatic lives, and now they're coming off of THC and and they got to deal with it in today's world versus yesterday when you were experiencing it. With adolescence, you have another problem. Prefundal and limbic systems, uh, the regions are still developing in 25. So when we talk about, oh, you know, the frontal cortex is not fully online, well, it's online, it's just not really filtering information the same because it's not really done developing. This is why we get personality disorders to pop up later in life relative to teenagers. So uh schizophrenia, psychosis, um, that kind of thing kicks in later on, right? But these areas that are developing, when you to when you expose them to THC, it alters the white matter connectivity and the reward sensitivity. And so you're altering brain function um permanently, it's not temporary, and we know it's permanent because we've had enough time to be able to look at it for 20 years. We've been looking at this. So we could look at teenagers that were using a lot of THC products and we'd be able to determine the level of uh alteration and where they should probably should be. So I guess all of that to say, I'm not an advocate of use of THC products, period. Um, and today's THC products are way different than the ones from when I was a teenager back in the 70s. Um and certainly in the 60s and 70s, a different time, I understand. But there's a different consideration because we keep pushing up the potency levels. They keep like the better high, the better high. So I'm not in favor of that. And I certainly don't like that when my clients are coming to me and they're in with um recovery for some other drug, uh, heroin or alcohol, and they come in and they say, Well, I'm I'm clean, you know, I'm I'm clean, I'm not using heroin, and I'm I'm in recovery, and I'm like, Yeah, but you're using all the time. And and one of the issues is, and I I'm not it's not just me saying it, because I have clients. Uh, for example, I have a client, um fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, uh THC products, alcohol, did it all at a young age, teenage years, into 20-something, then started getting into recovery and went to college and had a really hard time because listening to all the nonsense that was coming out of people when they were talking about, hey, you know what, uh, smoking pots not that big of a deal. Um, I'm I'm in recovery from, you know, I was doing heroin or I was doing cocaine, and all, you know, it's just it's fine that I'm I'm doing weed. And this client that I had who experienced that was just outraged because they said that they understood the connection between the use of a drug and a chemical and the impact on your recovery. And that person was just horrified listening to these people talk about how innocuous and and non-impactful THC products were. And this is a person who had one of the worst addictions I've encountered in my career, and one of the more successful recoveries. And they just couldn't tolerate it, like listening to these people. So they start they couldn't go to meetings because every meeting was like THC is fine as long as you're not drinking, you're okay. That's AA, right? The NA was the same thing, but it was always the primary drug of choice they weren't using, but it was fine that they were using THC products. Somehow that was fine. And they and they couldn't stand that idea, and they stopped going to meetings because of it until they were out of college. Um, and now goes back out of the college environment, the kids who think they know everything, but they just don't look at facts and science and they don't listen to experts. So what a what do you do? Well, you know what? You you you can't be mastered by anything. And I think that THC is mastering you if you're using it, um, and you're using it daily or multiple times a week. I I you know, part of me is like, hey man, you you wanna you want to smoke pot, you wanna um use weed, you wanna uh use THC products, have at it. But understand it's a drug and you're addicted, and it's gonna be a problem when you're trying to get off of it. Now, if it's legal, that's fine. But guess what? That doesn't mean you can drive and be high, and you can't be at work and be high, and employers are gonna test you, and if you test positive, you're gonna get fired. THC is a fat-soluble chemical, and so it stays in your fat cells. Well, it stays in your fat cells until you express it out. Well, so that could you could be testing positive for months. If you're a wake and bake guy, uh it could be months and you're gonna be testing positive. So guess what? You're gonna end up getting fired. Uh if you're driving a car and you're driving erratically and they do a blood test and they see that the metabolites are showing uh a high level of output of THC, even if you haven't used anything for, you know, I don't know, two or three days, you're gonna get popped for driving while intoxicated because you were driving erratically. Now, were you driving erratically because your steering uh linkage was loose in your car or because you were impaired? It doesn't matter because you tested positive. The thing I've talked to my friends who are psychiatrists, and I'm like, hey, what do you think about this as a uh a treatment for uh anxiety or panic disorder? Or THC edibles or dab pens or whatever, what do you think? And they're like, no, mm-mm, because we have no way of knowing how much they're using, and that's the problem. And so I can't I can't uh advise that. I've heard this from every single psychiatrist I've I've worked with. Can't really advise that. So I, you know, it's like there's no there's no good way to treat that. It's like treating um I'm treating anxiety by drinking alcohol. Well that that's not a treatment, first of all. Um it's not treating the condition, it's treating the symptom. So if you have anxiety, you have a panic attack, and you're using a chemical, you're treating the symptom. You're not treating the actual condition. Think about that when you're using. If you're using recreationally and and you are the person who has bought into the 420s and the idea of like it comes from a plant, understand that so does alcohol, so does cocaine, so does heroin. Uh, fentanyl is a chemical uh uh replication of of heroin just in a more intense uh intense form put together in a laboratory that doesn't make it okay so these are problems and you're just kidding yourself if you think that it's not a problem. That's like the d the alcoholic who drinks every day because he has anxiety Yeah but you're drinking every day. What are you doing for the anxiety? You're just you're treating the symptom of the anxiety. What's causing it? So if you're not out there actually working on those things then you're really just pro you know you're kicking the can down the road. And unfortunately with you know if you're just kicking a bad decision can down the road that's one thing. When you're kicking a uh a chemical you're using a chemical to kick it down the road that chemical is going to get you eventually and it's gonna cause problems. And um it pains me because I've seen many of my clients over the last I don't know I want to say five years report that they've had psychotic episodes um the one that had the you know multiple strokes and was in a coma for months a month um and came out with severe brain damage. It's just these are not good things. And so yeah it's legal because politicians want to make money and they see tax revenue that comes coming from the usage and the sales of THC products. I'm sorry. Politicians don't make good decisions for everybody. They're making decisions based on I can figure out a way to make more money to grow the government or perhaps I'm being uh contributed to in my campaigns to give me a very high paying political job by some lobbyists. And that's a problem. Just my two cents on THC. So the good and the bad it is possible to heal from this but you know you gotta get support. If you have these issues of anxiety and depression and those are the two that people come to me with and they say oh yeah I'm using because of that fine. How about you get real treatment for it and stop screwing around with like addressing the symptoms. You you wouldn't oddly enough the biggest advocates for the use of marijuana because it's quote unquote natural are the people who refuse to take mood stabilizers and antidepressants. But yet they don't have a problem with using a chemical in the form of THC for the rest of their life apparently this none of that makes sense to me. So there are better ways. Those better ways are to get help so if you need help please go to rehab get the help reach out to a counselor go to your nearest emergency room if you need to but whatever it is man get into treatment because being high and strung out and losing the life is is not the way to go. If you're protecting your addiction by losing the life what are you gaining? Nonsense but get the help you know it's it's frustrating when you're there but you know if you're listening to these podcasts you're already sort of getting the help that you're looking for a little bit but let's go all the way. Get clean and sober and stay and stable it's a better live it's a better life now lift life. Until then this is Doc Jack your Dixon lifeguard saying see ya