Science Market Update

Did you know you can be considered a "pot-head" without ever touching, let alone smoking, marijuana? When early neuroscientists went looking for the mental hardware that allowed the body to respond to the active ingredient in the cannabis sativa plant (called THC), they found much more than they were bargaining for. They did in fact identify a perfectly-shaped receptor in the brain. Puzzled at why it would exist (surely the human body was not designed with cannabis-intake in mind?), they went on to discover that the body itself makes a cannabis-like substance, called an endocannabinoid, and that it is part of a complex system regulating appetite, pain, pleasure, and immunity. So, technically, your brain is already wired for pot, and your body produces it all by itself.

Debates over the legitimacy of medical marijuana as a pain medication or appetite enhancer have tended to point to a lack of scientific studies proving the key substance is safe and effective. Patients and doctors have not always waited for that hard evidence, instead working from an empirical position that saw positive results from the ingestion of cannabinoids, the active ingredients, that lead them to make their own treatment decisions. But serious bioscience research, especially in the fields of pharmacology, infectious disease, and neuroscience, is showing surprising results in laboratory studies on cannabinoids, and those findings go far beyond the pain and appetite benefits to actually short-circuiting disease in late-stage AIDS patients.