Natasha Mason explores how best to mitigate the negative effects of the world’s most widely used illicit drug.
and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.Natasha Mason describes her research into the neural effects of cannabis and other illicit drugs.Hello and welcome to Tales From The Synapse, a podcast brought to you by Nature’s careers section, in partnership with Nature Neuroscience.
And there is also a subdiscipline of this, which I would also connect with, which is neuro-psychopharmacology. So what changes behaviourally or biologically, and then you can say something about the role of that system in that outcome. So this is both acutely, when individuals are under the influence of the drug, and also in the long term.
Also the the underlying brain mechanisms which give rise to these behavioural effects. Here I have been focusing on tolerance. But I also think tolerance can be a good thing in regards to the clinical use of this drug. So this drug is now being prescribed or used for more clinical reasons. So pain, for example. And individuals who are using cannabis for pain, do not want the high. They do not, because this also comes with the impairment as well.
So for example, if you are prescribed cannabis daily, you have to consistently use a drug for your indication, but you also have to perform day to day operations, right, like driving to work or the store. So finding a way to measure behavioural tolerance. So you know, okay, who was actually impaired by the drug at that point and who was not. Because currently, blood or what we use with alcohol, like a breathalyzer, is not enough because it doesn’t consider these other factors.
And we give the patient the balloon in the straw, and we have them inhale the cannabis or placebo vapor in the scanner. And we found that in order for people to feel high, or for people to show an impairment and behaviour, or/and also to show this brain response, these concentrations in blood half to surpass a certain threshold.
And what we see is that individuals had developed tolerance. So they were not experiencing the subjective high of the drug, they were not experiencing the behavioural impairment of the drug. So a more clinical use, it can also be useful for recreational users actually, because when they start developing tolerance, it can get a bit risky. They start using more of the drug.
So here, there were particularly two drugs that stuck out. Drugs for depression and anxiety. People were reporting a lot of side effects that they just shouldn't have to live with. And reading that, you know, one administration of a psychedelic drug could induce long term reduction in symptoms. To me, that was fascinating. I had never heard about that in my pharmacy classes. And it was also, I felt getting to trying to like this was a substance, a potential substance that could start to fix the problem, versus the substances we had right now were just kind of like a band aid, just reducing the symptoms, but not actually addressing the underlying problem.
This is quite common in the US, I think, unpaid interns or research assistants or something. I was really desperate. I would have done that, not allowed in the Netherlands for good reasons.And so I did the Master’s so I can do the internship. did my internship actually on cannabis. So that was an ongoing project at the time, which turned into a PhD and some psychedelic work as well.
So what happens then, so the endocannabinoid system is involved in a lot of physiological processes. So appetite, pain, moods, memory, age, general activity of the nervous system, and THC acts on cannabinoid receptors located throughout the brain. So the system is involved in, in many processes. So appetite, pain, mood, memory, you know, activity of the nervous system, maybe some inflammatory processes, but from my understanding, yet, we’re just beginning to to understand how the system is working and interacting.
But there are so many other factors here that may be involved. So the differences in brain function we see may not be due to cannabis at all, but maybe due to you know, underlying lifestyle things. So administering cannabis to people with different indications such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, pain and PTSD, or anxiety related disorders, and seeing what's changing in the brain. And if this relates to symptom outcome would teach us a lot about how this drug can be used clinically.
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