Purple Haze, Northern Lights…..do different strains of cannabis have different psychological effects?

Synopsis

Two thousand years ago, cannabis was an important medicine in both China and India. Today in the United States the approved medical use of marijuana is spreading and Uraguay has just become the first country in the world to make it legal to grow, sell and consume marijuana. Mos research, however, has focussed on the negative efffects of cannabis rather than its hedonic or medicinal properties. We now know that there are around a 100 different ingredients - 'cannabinoids' -in cannabis. THC is what makes people stoned but other ingredients moderate THC's effects.

This talk will briefly review the desired effects of cannabis and four major areas of mental health harm: addiction, cognitive impairment, anxiety/depression and pyschosis. We will ask what determines the marked indvidual variation in the experience of the pyschological effect of cannabis and how relative levels of cannabinoids in different strains influence this. Finally, we will ask how scientific knowledge of cannabis could inform drug policy.

Speaker

Prof Valerie Curran, UCL Phycology

Programme

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