‘Diet weed’: More than 10% of high school seniors take ‘loophole’ legal drug delta-8 THC. What are the consequences?

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Credit: Midjourney/ Heenan

More than 11% of high school seniors report using delta-8 THC — a compound closely related to the psychoactive chemical in marijuana that’s legal in many states thanks to a loophole in the 2018 farm bill — according to a study published [March 12] in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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“We know high school students naturally want to explore and try new ‘exciting’ things, like e-cigarettes, alcohol or marijuana,” said senior study author Adam Leventhal, director of the University of Southern California Institute for Addiction Science. “It’s not surprising that we’re seeing that they’re using delta-8. We just didn’t expect it to be so high.”

Delta-8 tetrahydrocannabinol is only slightly chemically different from delta-9 THC, which is the type of THC that is typically found in marijuana and what people most likely think of as responsible for the drug’s high.

Delta-8 is sometimes referred to as “diet weed” or “weed-lite,” because it’s believed to have weaker psychoactive effects than delta-9. The problem, Leventhal said, is that there isn’t enough research to say that definitively.

Delta-8 isn’t the only cannabinoid that has entered the market that has experts concerned, [Director of the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids Ziva] Cooper said.

“We don’t know very much about them, but people are using them, and they’re proliferating,” she said, referring to other synthetic cannabinoids.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here

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