I am a total layman, so could somebody explain the significance of this study? Obviously those substances alter the brain chemistry, that is not surprising, I think. How are those changes significant? Is there cause for concern?
There is really nothing surprising about the findings. Also note that the animals' brain tissues were analyzed 24 hours after last administration, so it says little to nothing about permanent effects (which have never been found in other studies, afaik). I really don't get why trivial/unsurprising findings like this raise so high on HN.
My background is in biology (PhD, Biophysics) but I do software engineering. Few SWEs who follow biology have any clue or understanding, and easily get fooled by bio papers.
> However, the combination of cannabis and caffeine mostly caused synergetic response in the level of the neurotransmitters; this implies that both substances produced their individual effects and did not cancel out the effects of one another. This is also expected since they bind primarily to various receptors. Thus, the resultant relative hyper increase is the cumulative effect of their individual influences.
Been smoking for a long time and a massive coffee drinker to the point work thinks something's wrong with me and Ive never felt the effects some of my googling describes regardless of my then Cannabis and Caffine intake.
I wonder if it is a more extreme version of drinking tea? Tea has a calming chemical (Theanine), and caffeine so you end up with more of a mellow energy instead of the hyper energy from coffee.
Theanine is also a fairly common substance in the smartdrugs community. People often stack it with caffeine to improve concentration and supress the jumpiness that caffeine often causes in higher doses.
No. After a quick look, 1) the main point seems to be toward juveniles 2) this isn't a particularly in-depth study. As you said, substances alter chemistry, no surprise.
To be clear, there's evidence elsewhere that caffeine and cannabis can have a negative impact on the developing brain, but the data here don't really go in depth on that.
Brewing your cannabis will lead to a disgusting liquid, but nothing else. You'll feel bad but it will have no effects of cannabis because there will be zero THC. THC binds to fat so you have to add butter or oil to the water.
Yeah, which is why I question their results for cannabis: "Cannabis aqueous extract was prepared by first blending the dried leaves, and then blending the dried leaves in fine powder using a dry blender. The fine powder was thereafter soaked in water for about 12 h and filtered; the substrate was evaporated to dryness, weighed, and then prepared into the mixture of suitable concentrations for the various animal groups".
They also don't appear to have tested this solution for levels of THC, CBD, or anything else. Seems like a pretty poorly designed study. I'm somewhat surprised it even got published.
Look up "green dragon", it takes ~1 month to make and ends up turning a very pretty florescent green. A single shot gloss of the stuff is very strong, and two shots would be intense even for someone with a high familiarity / tolerance to cannabis.
