Cannabidiol—the ingredient of cannabis that doesn’t make you high, commonly called CBD—might be the angel to THC’s devil, a new study of people’s brains suggests. The research found that 17 people who smoked cannabis with mostly THC had worse brain function in certain regions than those who smoked cannabis with roughly equal levels of THC and CBD.
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THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the part of cannabis that’s responsible for its well-known, mind-altering high. Fun as using THC can be, though, some researchers have also worried about the harms of taking it in high doses.
There’s some (conflicting) evidence, for instance, suggesting that chronic cannabis users, especially if they start at a young age, are more likely to become psychologically addicted to the drug or develop psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia.
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Relative to placebo, they found that after people used high-THC weed, neural connections were impaired in two brain networks, the default mode and salience network. …
But these same impairments were much less apparent in volunteers after they took the high-CBD strains.
“We have now found that CBD appears to buffer the user against some of the acute effects of THC on the brain,” [researcher Matt] Wall said.
Read full, original post: Scientists Had Volunteers Get High to See How CBD and THC Affect the Brain Differently
