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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

> The increased legal availability of cannabis has led to a common misconception that it is a safe natural remedy for, among others, pregnancy-related ailments such as morning sickness.

Cannabis has been widely recognized among stoners as a natural miracle cure for everything from hangovers to stage IV cancer, and because it is produced by "nature" it is thought to be superior to "chemicals" found in ordinary pharmaceuticals.

If anything, legalizing cannabis will increase the visibility of studies like this and give us a clearer picture of its benefits and drawbacks.

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Part of me suspects this is an over-correction against decades of prohibition and negative misinformation coming from D.A.R.E and other such programs. The legalization movement has been touting myriad medicinal benefits for a while, but that has bled over into the popular consciousness as the idea that weed is a miracle drug.

Cannabis attenuates inflammation and inflammation is an underlying or contributing cause to just about every disease so the stoners are right, in a way.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Inflammati...

Inflammation is part of the immune response. It's not a cause, it's a symptom. And much like other symptoms like vomiting or fever, the symptom is actually an effective way for the body to fix root causes.

Being in a perpetual state of fever, vomit, or inflammation is clearly an unhealthy state, but that doesn't mean suppressing these symptoms is useful.

Dysregulation of the inflammatory system is, to a growing extent, being considered as a cause of disease per se. So it's somewhat more complicated than that; it's plausible that the broad anti-inflammatory effects of cannabis could treat a variety of common diseases.

>Being in a perpetual state of fever, vomit, or inflammation is clearly an unhealthy state, but that doesn't mean suppressing these symptoms is useful.

A growing body of research disagrees. For example, this public-oriented article from Johns Hopkins entitled Fight Inflammation to Help Prevent Heart Disease

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

What you're talking about are things like, when you break a bone it isn't necessarily appropriate to "treat" the inflammation because that inflammation is useful to the healing process. It helps bring blood supply, differences in temperature, etc.

It can also have the opposite of the "intended" evolutionary effect, inflammation pressure closing off blood access to the injured location because evolution is often stupid.

Yes and no.

I had inflammation issues due to a back injury that contributed to other health issues. Think of inflammation as a enhancement for other things.

> inflammation is an underlying or contributing cause to just about every disease

Inflammation is correlated with many disease symptoms but the causal chain is unclear. In fact there is good research going back decades suggesting that MMPs are part of disease fighting and that suppressing them might make things worse.

This is sort of the inverse of people taking antioxidants in the belief that it would be cancer fighting -- oops.

That article is from 2006. Is this still just a theory?

As far as I can tell from a brief search [0] cannabis is definitely considered anti-inflammatory.

So obviously there's a huge lack of "decent" research in marijuana in general, so which specific chemicals and mechanisms cause this effect isn't widely understood.

Also research suggesting many diseases and ailments are somehow caused by or affected by inflammation (allergies are an obvious example - not that I'm claiming cannabis is a treatment for allergies) is fairly recent. So there may be _some_ merit there.

That said, cannabis is definitely not "a cure for everything" like many stoners like to claim. And I never understood why it being "from a plant" makes it better than other drugs - poison ivy and poison hemlock are both "perfectly natural" but I think you'll certainly find some negative effects from those.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308289/

Cannabis is from dynastic Egyptian at a minimum.. If its anti inflammatory properties havent changed much since then... I think research from 13 years ago is still okay. We have a problem as a species of assuming anything older than 4 years is garbage..

It's not that it being 4 years old makes it garbage - it's that in domains where there is rapid research and new understanding, something being 4 years old may be inaccurate as that's 4 years new research may have been released.

"miracle cure for everything" That's my main argument to why it can't be good for them, it's evidence how much the use makes them want to believe.

But on a more cynical note, I get the impression that it might even help fight global warming: just consider how small the ecological footprint of a stereotype stoner failure lifestyle would be compared to a median middle class career. Find a solution to the packaging of spontaneous midnight snacks (sorry for reveling in stereotypes) and it would be about as green as it gets, except suicide. Could we capitalize (well, "ecologize") on that?

  (even more off topic ramblings from here on)

You could set up "fun monasteries", were people could self-admit to dedicate their lives to nonproductive but low-impact activities such as stonerism, abdicating from consumerism, career and procreation in exchange for minima food, shelter and the means to follow their low-impact hobby. Those "fun monasteries" could be set up not just for doing drugs but for all kinds of low-impact but sufficiently addictive activities. Video games, certain sports, artisanship, coding, even for nonreproductive sex, science, or, if you want to go full retro, for religion. I'm sure that they could all be cheaper and lower impact per head than excusing models of welfare that just treat everybody in need as temporarily embarrassed middle class. "fun monasteries" would not replace welfare, they would be an individual alternative to it. Just like the prison system already kind of is. Would there be a mass rush? I doubt it. Butt supporting people who might be willing to severely lessen their footprint in exchange for a nonmonetary stipend sounds like a no-brainer low hanging fruit.

(for those who read till the end and who were wondering if that isn't just a green spin on the "concents" in Stephenson's Anathem, sure, the idea grew when someone mentioned the concents in a different thread on the site. Before that it was just general disappointment in how much we still resent low-impact lifestyle choices, even in circles who outwardly agree on strong measures to fight climate change)

That’s a problem when Federal rules are held hostage. There’s no science because it’s difficult or impossible to get funding.

>Cannabis has been widely recognized among stoners

Well lets also not forget the medical and scientific community has also widely recognized the Endocannabinoid system/Cannabinoid Receptors in the human body.

And although they have generally been prohibited from conducting research and clinical trials with cannabis the potential functions of cannabis receptors in the body include: cognitive, memory, appetite, energy balance/metabolism, stress response, immune system, female reproduction, nervous system, thermoregulation, sleep, and the physiological/cognitive effects of physical exercises.

> because it is produced by “nature”

Like cyanide and mercury

To make that a more accurate comparison than single compounds, one could say hemlock, datura and galerina mushrooms. But you'd also need to specify, more healthy compared to what? Almost all medicines have a poisonous dosage level. Cannabinoids are some of the least toxic therapeutically active groups of substances in existence.

I think it was Tim Minchin's Storm that brought the quip "You know what they call Alternative Medicine that works? _MEDICINE!_". This is an entirely true statement, but also seems to miss the R&D period. And I'm not specifically saying its a modern R&D period.

It was well known for centuries that willow and aspen tree bark had anti-inflammation properties, so R&D could simply be to test if chewing on branches or bark was what helped with inflammation, or does it need to be from a fresh tree or can a dead tree also provide benefit. Once it's been determine that it's the bark, then can one grind it up and drink it in tea? For centuries, drinking a tea made from some plant material was the cutting edge of drug delivery mechanisms. Then for modern times, what substance within that plant can be isolated that provides the specific function we've observed. Can it be synthesized? Can it be pressed into a pill, or placed in a capsule? Now it's what you and I may observe as modern medicine, but there is a fact that chewing on the bark, the so-called "alternative medicine" is just unrefined medicine, where the level of refinement is determined by your society's manufacturing and science communities. Some day, some culture will probably look back and think that it was uncivilized that we had to go find someone who we needed to convince to dispense physical chemicals that we had to consume in order to feel better, just as we might look at someone chewing on a stick to relieve a headache as wacky. That's what "Asprin" is for.

That said, I'm entirely in the camp that thinks that modern alternative medicine is a sham. Cannabis' biggest problem is obviously political, but it probably also has the biggest potential for being a candidate for research to isolate and properly identify the interactions with the human body today. It clearly has some effect on the body (and mind), but as far as I'm concerned it's flower is still a caveman era drug while CBD oils are essentially Victorian drugs. We might see some kind of modern medicine originate from it, but I'm skeptical for now.

The thing about aspirin tablets vs. herbal tea, is not so much the delivery method itself. It's that the active compound in the tree bark has been discovered, isolated, and dosage-controlled so that you get a fixed amount in each tablet. Note that we still use drinks as a means of dispensing medicines -- consider cough syrup or Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold.

a level of accuracy useful in no context ever

I would have to say your original comparison is fairly useless. You're welcome for the improvement I offered.

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