Yale Center for the Science of Cannabis and Cannabinoids

Transcript

• 00:04- THC is delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol,
• 00:09which is the principal active constituent of cannabis.
• 00:12Without THC, there wouldn't be any psychoactive effects of cannabis,
• 00:17and the effects are dose related, as in the more THC in the product,
• 00:22the greater the effects, both good and bad.
• 00:26The content of THC in cannabis from the 1960s was about 4%,
• 00:34and then in 2016, it got up to about 16%,
• 00:38and now it's 35% THC content.
• 00:41Beyond cannabis itself, there are a staggering array of products,
• 00:46including concentrates that have a THC content of 95%.
• 00:51So when people think about cannabis
• 00:54and studies done on cannabis from the ‘60s and ’70s,
• 00:59where cannabis was 20 times weaker
• 01:01than some of the products that are currently available,
• 01:04they may not understand the risks of the currently available products.
• 01:13The mission of the Yale Center for the Science of Cannabis and Cannabinoids
• 01:17is to provide support for the highest quality research
• 01:22so that we can disseminate that to the public,
• 01:25to clinicians, to parents, to health policy experts.
• 01:30The other is to support the development
• 01:33of a new breed of young investigators who’d spend the next
• 01:3820 years of their careers studying the science of cannabis to
• 01:43to move the field forward.
• 01:47The methods and the approaches that are being used are very diverse.
• 01:51They go from molecular neuroscience
• 01:53all the way to asking someone with schizophrenia,
• 01:57“why do you use cannabis and what effect is cannabis having?”
• 02:00and everything in between.
• 02:03We find that heavy cannabis users have about
• 02:07a 15% reduction in the number of synapses in the hippocampus,
• 02:12which is that part of the brain that's really critical for learning and memory,
• 02:16and now we are looking at whether
• 02:19abstinence from cannabis in those people who are heavy cannabis users
• 02:23results in some recovery of the number of synapses.
• 02:26We also supporting a study that will use a technique called
• 02:30ecological momentary assessment, where we will have
• 02:34people with schizophrenia who will be asked to report in a diary
• 02:39how they are feeling at that moment and whether they've recently used cannabis.
• 02:43And that would allow us in a naturalistic setting,
• 02:48understand the effects of cannabis
• 02:51on the everyday lives of someone with a serious mental illness.
• 02:56So these are really important approaches that are useful on their own,
• 03:01but when they are combined, they are synergistic,
• 03:04and one of the great things about Yale is that we have such a breadth and depth
• 03:11of research expertise,
• 03:13technologies and methodologies
• 03:16that is really remarkable.
• 03:21The goal is to provide
• 03:23the highest quality evidence in either direction.
• 03:26If it if there is good evidence that cannabis, for example, is beneficial
• 03:31for certain medical conditions,
• 03:35and that's definitive, irrefutable evidence, great.
• 03:39If there is evidence that exposure to cannabis
• 03:42is associated with detrimental effects down the line,
• 03:45that would be important for people to know.
• 03:47At the end of the day, our purpose is in generating the highest quality information,
• 03:53and then what people would do with that information, it's really up to them.