Marijuana: Stress Relieving or Stress Giving?

Stress is something that everyone experiences on a daily basis. Whether it stresses you out to drive to work, your job is stressful, you college course work is piling up, or you are taining a new pet to only potty outside, stress is everywhere all the time. Cannabis has always said to be an anti-anxiety and stress reliever but a new study is saying that these attributes are only based on the amount: the lower amount.

In a new study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago, IL. is saying that when using cannabis as a stress reliever you should be using low doses. This team wanted to investigate the use of marijuana as a stress reliever and used 42 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 40. All ot the volunteers have used cannabis before but were not daily users. The volunteers were split up into three different groups: a low dose group who received 7.5 mg of THC in capsule form, a moderate dose group who received 12.5 mb of THC in capsule form, and the placebo group that received no THC.

Emma Childs, an associate professor of Psychiatry at UIC College of medicine says, “The dose used in the study produce the effects that are equivalent to only a few puffs of a cannabis cigarette.” Childs explains that the choice of dosage was to “…avoid potential adverse effects or cardiovascular effects that can result from higher doses of THC.”

During this study each participant took part in two 4 hour long sessions where they participated in a mock interview, challenging mathematical tasks, as well as having to explain their favorite movie/book and play five minutes of solitaire. Prior to the sessions taking place the participants relaxed for 2 hours so that the THC could enter the bloodstream.

The participants who received a low dose of THC reported less stress after the given tests. Those in the moderate dose group reported that the tasks were more challenging or even threatening. The participants that were given the higher doses also took longer pauses during their mock interview. Between all three groups blood pressure and heart rate were taken and there was no sign of any significant differences.
To read the full study made by the researchers from UIC and the University of Chicago the results were published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

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