WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY WHEN SMOKING WEED?

It takes a couple of attempts, but you manage to spark a lighter and hold it up steadily in front of your face to light up a joint. A familiar woody smell fills the room and drifts out of your window on the afternoon breeze.

You blink, steady yourself, inhale deeply, and feel your lungs fill up with warmth. But what happens next? Chemically speaking, biologically speaking, what is it about this little green plant that gets millions of people around the world to flock to it? How long has humanity been consuming it? And what exactly is it doing inside your body? Inside your mind?

To start, let's have a look at the chemical composition of the cannabis plant itself rolled up in a joint in your hand. The cannabis plant is indigenous to Central and South Asia. From small-scale drug superlabs to rural farming operations, incorporating a variety of illicit weed farms somewhere in the middle, experts believe that there are well over 700 different strains of cannabis currently on the market, and this number seems only set to increase.

Being able to identify which strain of weed you have in your hand can be very easy when buying from a legal dispensary, but if you live in a country or a state where marijuana is still criminalized, being able to verify exactly what it is you're smoking becomes much more difficult. Looking down at the green mossy balls in your hand, do you know where in the world it comes from and what's inside it?

Let's break it down a bit, or rather, grind it down. You have likely heard of the two most well-known active ingredients in cannabis.

These are cannabidiol and tetrahydrocannabinol, or as you probably know them, CBD and THC. Over the last ten years, in the West in particular, CBD has been championed as a potential medical breakthrough. It has been shown to have a calming effect on those with anxious dispositions and is currently being tested as a treatment for psychosis, sleep disorders, muscle spasticity, and more.

You may have seen ads for CBD oil products popping up in your feed, claiming that it can solve several ailments. Research is ongoing; however, results do vary. In the case of curing cancer, for example, so far, there is no evidence to support that CBD has any kind of effect on the disease, despite what people on the internet may be saying.

So you smoke CBD and get high, right? No. CBD is usually extracted as an oil and, on its own, will not get you high. However, it remains psychotropic. The feeling of being high comes from the main active component in marijuana: THC.

Typically found in much greater quantities than CBD, THC can have a powerful psychoactive effect. To see what that means in practice, let's follow it as it enters the human body. Take in a deep breath of that joint and let the smoke fill your lungs.

In this example, you’re going to be our test subject, and you will be smoking weed. Smoking is one of the most direct and quickest ways to get high. This is because the smoke from the burning marijuana contains high levels of THC. The smoke is then inhaled, filling your lungs.

At this point, you may experience some irritation - manifesting in the iconic Smoker’s Cough - from introducing an alien substance into your lungs. This, however, is not unique to smoking weed, as you’re likely to see the same from people smoking or vaping conventional tobacco. When we breathe, oxygen is swiftly and effectively transferred into the bloodstream by the lungs. As a result, they may quickly absorb vast amounts of gas in a single breath and quickly transfer any number of its constituent atoms or molecules into our circulation. The lungs aren't just empty chambers; they are full of tiny little air pockets called alveoli. The average human adult has roughly 480 million alveoli in their lungs, constituting about 1500 miles of airways.

That would be the same as traveling from Miami by car to New Hampshire for our American viewers or Madrid to Copenhagen for our European viewers. For everyone else, it’s roughly 13,636,363.6 bananas lying end to end. Anyway, back to your lungs. The amount of THC in each alveolus is immediately absorbed by your bloodstream, which distributes it throughout your body. As a result, the user frequently experiences the psychoactive effects of the substance they are smoking in a matter of seconds.

So, let’s crack your head open and see what’s going on inside. Sorry, this might hurt a little. The THC and CBD bind themselves to receptors throughout your brain. The amygdala, for example, is responsible for anxiety, emotional responses, and fear. CBD dulls the activity in this part of THC, however, it can excite the brain. Although smoking marijuana makes many people feel more at ease, others can feel a heightened sense of paranoia and worry, especially during the "comedown," when the CBD's calming effects subside.

Looking at other parts of the brain impacted by the CBD we have the basal ganglia, which is involved with motor control and planning, the neocortex which processes sensory information, and the cerebellum which is the center of motor control. These three places are all affected by smoking weed, resulting in you feeling ‘slower’ in general. Reflexes are delayed, information takes more time to be processed, and motor functions and speech slow down. Driving under the influence of marijuana can be very dangerous as a result.

One study in the UK found that fatal accidents are 1.65 times more likely to occur when the subject is under the influence of marijuana, while another study in Canada found that accidents could be up to four times as likely. The majority of nations impose severe penalties for driving while intoxicated. If they’re testing your saliva, it can be up to 72 hours. The duration of urine might range from three to thirty days. And it can even be tested in your hair follicles for up to 90 days.

Fortunately, you won’t find many traffic cops that are plucking out your arm hairs for a routine traffic stop. However, it would be reductive to think that all that weed does is dull the brain. THC is a very active component that stimulates a lot of neural activity. Sounds are louder, colors appear brighter, and music sounds more rich and layered. Food often tastes better under the influence of THC, giving the subject the illusion that they’re hungry. Yes, this is the reason why many people using cannabis experience the famous “Munchies”, which is why having a stoner visit your home is potentially extremely dangerous to the state of your snack pantry and chip supply.

Many people report having heightened imagination, being able to think outside of the box, or coming up with fresh and exciting ideas. Artists throughout history have partaken in recreational drugs in an attempt to broaden their horizons. The dulling of a lot of negative sensations, such as feeling pain and anxiety, coupled with this stimulation from THC, results in feelings of euphoria. In short, you, our human test subject, have gotten high.

But what does this high look like? Here’s where it gets really interesting.

Let’s bandage your head up and take a look. So far, we have only focused on THC and CBD, but there are hundreds of active components within cannabis, which vary in quantity and intensity depending on which of the hundreds of strains the user is consuming. On top of that, there's the method of consumption.

While smoking or vaping gets the chemicals into the bloodstream quickly, the high only lasts around 3 hours or so. Many users instead take gummies or bake brownies and cookies. When weed is absorbed through the digestive system, it takes a significantly longer time to kick in, but when it does, the user can experience highs that go on for hours, even up to a day, as the digestive system slowly releases the chemicals into the bloodstream. All of this makes studying the effects of marijuana very difficult, as with almost any study, there are the caveats of which strain is being used, how the test subject is ingesting it, and who the test subject is.

The human brain is an incredibly complex thing indeed. If you took a sample of the human brain that was the size of just one grain of sand, that sample would contain 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses. Now, multiply that by 860,000, and you’ve got a human brain, just like the one that’s sitting in your head, watching this video and feeling very smug about itself. Being able to quantify and measure exactly what is happening in an organ far more advanced and complicated than the computers we are studying it on has been a challenge in medical science for decades and will likely continue to be one for a very long time.

While one individual might take one puff and spend the rest of the day feeling anxious; their elderly grandma might smoke a whole bowl and feel nothing but Zen.

So, for Nanna’s sake, is it dangerous? Well, on the whole, consuming marijuana is relatively harmless. As long as you aren't driving, controlling heavy machinery, or performing open heart surgery, the risks of smoking the occasional joint with the right amount of weed in it are low. So why hasn't it been legalized worldwide already? And why are there still skeptics out there, including in the scientific community?

As is frequently the case with contentious subjects, a lot of the conflict comes from political and cultural differences. To tell that whole story, we need to go back to China in 2800 BC, where we found the first recorded use of marijuana in history. Even that long ago, the cannabis plant was being used for medicinal purposes. Emperor Shen Nung, considered by many to be the grandfather of medicine, recorded the plant in his writings as being particularly useful. From that point, records of cannabis spread throughout India, Syria, Greece, and Rome.

Various healing properties have been ascribed to it over the years, including cures for inflammation, depression, arthritis, and even asthma. Of course, most early medicine is notoriously rather unreliable - we’re looking at you, leeches and milk transfusions - but there has always clearly been something about this little green plant that's captured the attention of doctors and pharmacologists throughout the centuries. Often, there is a grain of truth to the mythology that has sprung up around the drug.

In Hinduism, for example, the God Shiva is given the title ‘lord of bhang’ because cannabis is his favorite food. For centuries, many Hindus believed that if you were suffering from a fever, it was the god's hot breath of anger upon you. Rituals were conducted where you would be given a quantity of cannabis to consume so you would find favor with Shiva again, and your fever would pass. With modern Medical Science, we know that THC acts in the hypothalamus in the brain, reducing the body's temperature and therefore counteracting fevers.

So, where did it all go wrong for Weed’s PR team? Why are there so many individuals in

the West now including cannabis in the same conversation as crack cocaine and heroin,

as opposed to paracetamol and penicillin? Well, medical marijuana was first introduced in the West in 1841 by William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, an Irish physician who had spent years studying all kinds of different medicines in India.

However, the actual beginnings of the marijuana issue in the United States date back to 1605, 200 years earlier, in the Jamestown colony. Dissatisfied with the return on investment they were seeing, the English, and King James I in particular, demanded that the colony change up the crop they produced to hemp, a plant within the cannabis family.

The crop was a massive success and became key to the early expansion of the American colonial settlements. Famously, George Washington cultivated marijuana as one of his three primary crops on Mount Vernon. The plant was used to manufacture ropes and fabrics, but following William Brooke O'Shaughnessy's findings from India, Americans began to experiment with the plant's medicinal properties.

The USA was still in relative infancy, with many laws and prohibitions being established. Drug laws at the time involved labeling products as being poisons, which restricted them to being legal only if prescribed by a pharmacist. Even then, the debate about cannabis varied from state to state, with some issuing it with the poison status and others believing it was exempt from these rules. At the time, opium dens were rife across America, and alongside them, several hashish parlors popped up in which people would smoke various forms of hemp and cannabis.

By 1880, these establishments were seen as quite fashionable, with many of the upper classes frequenting them. It’s estimated that there were roughly 500 such parlors in New York City alone. The laws needed to be strengthened further still. Fraud and corruption were rife in the drug industry, with many falsely labeling their products for the sake of profit. The tighter that these restrictions got, the more people looked for loopholes. The government and the newly established Food and Drug Administration were pulling in a different direction than a lot of the American public, who were looking to skirt prescriptions and drug laws to continue to get their highs.

In the move to close these loopholes, cannabis was often grouped in with many of the much more addictive, much more harmful drugs that were plaguing the American population. The solution that the American government came to was a zero-tolerance policy on recreational drug use, including the Prohibition of alcohol and the criminalization of marijuana, which at the time were spelled with an ‘H’. In 1971, President Nixon coined the term ‘war on drugs,’ where he declared drug abuse to be ‘Public Enemy number one’ of the American people. Iron fist incarceration was the strategy.

Possession, distribution, and consumption of banned substances would result in jail time.

It’s estimated that throughout its war on drugs, the USA spends roughly $51 billion annually on its endeavor to “clean up its streets.” To illustrate, with that money, the USA could give each Canadian citizen $1,416.67 per year just as a little thank you for being such lovely neighbors. Alternatively, they could give one lucky Canadian a dollar a minute for 97,032 years. A large amount of this campaign against drugs has involved a level of fear-mongering.

There is a lot of false information swirling around the world about the negative effects that these drugs have. “It rots the brain and causes psychosis, it is a gateway drug to stronger and more dangerous highs, and it is highly addictive.” But are any of these assertions true? Let's examine them one by one. Firstly, marijuana does not rot the brain. Rotting is the decay of dead organic material as bacteria and fungi consume it. That simply doesn't happen. However, the link to psychosis is a much more contested field with evidence for both sides of the argument. Firstly, what is psychosis?

It's a term that is thrown around a lot, especially in the world of drug usage, but very rarely defined, meaning a lot of people attach their fears, worries, and prejudices to the word. Psychosis is when someone loses contact with reality.

However, the link to psychosis is a much more contested field with evidence for both sides of the argument. Firstly, what is psychosis? It's a term that is thrown around a lot, especially in the world of drug usage, but very rarely defined, meaning a lot of people attach their fears, worries, and prejudices to the word. Psychosis is when someone loses contact with reality. The image of the world around them that their mental images do not correspond with the actual world.

Delusions and hallucinations are the two primary signs of psychosis, and it's critical to understand the distinction between the two.

The Takeaway

Cannabis affects individuals differently, with its impact varying based on the strain, method of consumption, and individual biology. While it offers therapeutic potential and recreational enjoyment for many, it is not without risks, particularly for developing brains or individuals predisposed to certain mental health conditions.

As research continues, the hope is for a balanced understanding of cannabis - acknowledging its benefits while addressing its drawbacks responsibly. The conversation around cannabis is as much about science as it is about culture, history, and politics, reflecting humanity's complex relationship with this ancient plant.