#substanceuseprevention

This week’s blog is written by Dion McGill, SCY Communications and Community Outreach Manager.

Looking in both the local Chicago weekly’s, The Chicago Reader and The Red Eye, marijuana and it’s impending legalization is a hot topic.  Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a class sponsored by our friends at Safe Kids Chicago.  The topic of the class was vaping and cannabis, and the presenter was Dr. Michael Wahl. 

According to his biography page on the University of Chicago website,

Dr. Wahl is an attending emergency physician at University Northshore HealthSystems and also provides acute care medical toxicology consult services for the system. He is the Medical Director of the Illinois Poison Center and is responsible for the medical oversight of the statewide poison control center and its staff of approximately 26 individuals. The Illinois Poison Center receives over 78,000 calls annually and partners with healthcare, EMS and law enforcement agencies to help reduce the incidence and injury from harmful substances.

Dr. Wahl is primary faculty with the Toxikon Consortium (partnership between Cook County Health and Hospital System, UI Health, and the Illinois Poison Center).  Toxikon’s mission is to provide excellence in clinical care, training, education, and research related to the medical toxicology.  The consortium trains 100 – 150 medical and pharmacy residents and students each year in the care of the poisoned patient.

Interests include acute care toxicology, new and novel drugs of abuse, response to emerging public health threats and reducing the harm from the opioid epidemic.

I will cut to the chase and say it was by far one of the most interesting and informative classes on both vaping and cannabis that I have attended. I like to believe, due to my attendance to several other classes on the topic, my knowledge on marijuana is fairly good.  

After going over the basics of vaping and cannabis (varieties, how it is consumed, price, what we have to look forward to once the recreational legalization of marijuana begins in Illinois in January), there were a few points that Dr. Wahl began to make that caused my ears to perk up. 

Marijuana is much more potent than it used to be.  

In the words of Dr. Wahl, “This ain’t your father’s weed.” 

According to an article on the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s website, The Problem with the Current High Potency THC Marijuana from the Perspective of an Addiction Psychiatrist,

The primary problem with the current available cannabis in dispensaries in Colorado is that the THC content is not like it used to be. Prior to the 1990s it was less than 2%. In the 1990s it grew to 4%, and between 1995 and 2015 there has been a 212% increase in THC content in the marijuana flower. In 2017 the most popular strains found in dispensaries in Colorado had a range of THC content from 17–28% such as found in the popular strain named “Girl Scout Cookie.”2 Sadly these plants producing high levels of THC are incapable of producing much CBD, the protective component of the plant so these strains have minimal CBD. For example the Girl Scout Cookie strain has only 0.09–0.2% CBD.

The flower or leaves that are generally smoked or vaped are only one formulation. We now have concentrated THC products such as oil, shatter, dab, and edibles that have been able to get the THC concentration upwards of 95%. There is absolutely no research that indicates this level of THC is beneficial for any medical condition. The purpose of these products is to produce a high, and the increased potency makes them potentially more dangerous and more likely to result in addiction.

You can find the rest of the article here. 

In all honesty, the only reason I knew what “shatter marijuana” is is due to a Chance the Rapper song, Hot Shower, in which he proclaims 

“Smoking on some shatter, got me higher than a ladder.”

Indeed. 

While I don’t have the exact statistics that Dr. Wahl presented, there is a myriad of articles in the academic community about strains and potency, and many medical professionals are saying that potency will present an issue moving forward. 

However, towards the end of his presentation, Dr. Wahl mentioned something that I had never heard before, and made my ears immediately perk up:

“Cannabis-Induced Psychosis”

Now this was something I had never heard of, at least that I can recall.  He went on to explain what it is, and how it is being seen by more medical professionals, and that there is debate on whether the cannabis consumption is only exacerbating already existing conditions that may have gone unnoticed, or if this condition is something wholly different.  I truly enjoyed Dr. Wahl’s insight, and he did go on to say,  “And this isn’t in the same vein as “Reefer Madness,” which we know wasn’t real. This is something real.”  

As a parent, I found all of this information very interesting and enlightening, and yes, a little scary.  I have twin 14-year-old daughters, and I plan on discussing this information with them soon.  My daughters, to my knowledge, have not experimented with drugs, and I want to make sure they have the best possible knowledge when contending with things like peer pressure. 

As has been said, “Knowledge is power,”  and I feel much more knowledgeable about this topic, and will certainly be doing more research on the topic of both vaping, and how it relates to cannabis usage.  

If you’re a parent, do you feel exceptionally knowledgeable about vaping and cannabis use?  What things do you still feel that you need to learn or want to know?  Let us know down below in the comments, and we can use that information to guide future blogs.  

Resources: Lurie Children’s Hospital Evidence-Based Position Statement In Opposition to Legalization of Possession and Use of Marijuana for Non-Medical Reasons by Adults in Illinois

Kidshealth.org: Marijuana for Teens

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