CANNABIS Dangers

This is not intended as advice, medical, legal or otherwise, and is to be used solely for educational purposes. See Program Agreement for further disclaimers and release of liability.

 

Dear People,

Countless numbers of people have found enormous pain relief, safely, using cannabis. We hear about others who have successfully healed their cancers. To my and the entire industry’s knowledge, no one has ever died from using just cannabis. They might have had a terrible, not-soon-forgotten emergency room experience. But they haven’t died. Before the 1920’s-30’s, it was regularly prescribed in small amounts for pain and nervous disorders by family physicians. In the 30’s it became demonized by the Rockefellers and the nascent pharmaceutical industry, eventually making cannabis so illegal and propagandized as evil, people were jailed for the rest of their lifetimes just for having the tiniest amount in their possession. However, it must be used responsibly and with mindful purpose. Some cancers it might aggravate instead of heal. Some people have allergic reactions of various types using cannabis.

So, you see all the disclaimers scattered around my cannabis topics. I hear you. Many are in so much pain, are desperate for relief, and have been around the medical establishments’ merry-go-round so many times that the disclaimers no longer matter. But here on this site, please know that in any of my cannabis topics as you review them and might start doubting again, hold your despair at bay a bit. I want to let you know that even if cannabis also ends up being not for you, this site is loaded with tons of alternatives that so many others have successfully used to reduce their pains WITHOUT any cannabis at all, or with just the slightest amount one time a day. I so encourage you to continue to explore the rest. Perhaps you too will be one of those truly free from all the drugs! Please give yourself a chance.

 

I decided to make a list of Cannabis Dangers like I did with “Dangerous Items” of other things.

Here is the list of dangers with additional discussion below them:

• Recreational use of any kind
• Cannabis edibles for medicine or recreation
• Consuming cannabis edibles gives no way to accurately figure a dose
• Consuming cannabis edibles gives such a long delay of effect, and tasty food that people tend to over-dose by overeating and end up often in the ER
• Consuming cannabis edibles trains the mind incorrectly to equate medicine with nutritional or entertainment foods
• Cannabis edibles create the body converting the normal cannabinoids that might be consumed when inhaling into different chemicals that affect the body and mind differently
• Consuming cannabis plant or edibles from unreliable or unknown black market sources
• Using homemade or black market cannabis based sexual aids, vaginal or rectal suppositories and lubes can change vital PH causing infection, or even tear sensitive skin from the sharp tiny plant pieces left after not filtering the product correctly. As well, according to Dr. Allan Frankel, MD, cannabis suppositories used rectally cannot absorb into the colon that way and need extra chemicals in order for the cannabinoids to make it into the body.
• No cannabis edible or plant certificate of quality can be trusted for dosage amount or ingredients
• Cannabis is a bioaccumulation plant and the plant you are consuming by inhaling or ingesting an edible could be filled with poisons
• Cannabis extracts and concentrates can be mixed with street drugs
• Cannabis and alcohol beverages consumed together are a highly dangerous and unpredictable combo and could cause death from a variety of physiological and psychological effects when combined
• Consuming and being under euphoric cannabis use while meditating can negate any mindset work.
• Cannabis in all forms is estrogenic and if consumed while battling hormonally caused cancers could make your cancer worse
• CBD Delta 8 and CBD Delta 9 products are created by extracting the naturally occurring tiny amounts of them from the hemp cannabis plant and then concentrating them under no formal regulation
• Ingesting using modern day high dose concentrates and extracts
• Home-making (think explosions) and/or ingesting original versions of cannabis concentrates RSO (Rick Simpson Oil) or BHO (Butane Hash Oil) with insanely high, but usually unknown how high, amounts of THC (see more about what is RSO in the Hemp Oil Dangers discussion). And also see more of the RSO discussion below.
• High dose recreational use spoils its use as a medicine
• High dose use can harm the innate endocannabinoid system
• High dose use can trigger body estrogen dominance
• Recreational and continual use can affect mental health negatively
• Recreational and continual high dose use can reduce or eliminate feelings of belonging and intimacy with friends, family and intimates as it makes people forget things shared
• High dose euphoric cannabis use can trigger, not relieve PTSD
• Recreational and high dose use can trigger irreversible allergies to cannabis
• Recreational and high dose use can cause cannabis addiction, mentally and physically
• Transporting cannabis openly in one’s vehicle while driving across state lines, even driving from one legal state to another legal state could end up with the driver and/or occupants spending jail time. Same if air traveling or any other way of traveling (or even shipping cannabis THC-rich flower or products) from a legal state to an illegal OR LEGAL state is against the law.
• When stopping the use of high dose THC-rich marijuana cannabis, and even full spectrum CBD products in order to travel and not take anything with them, many go through severe withdrawal symptoms of headache, nausea, diarrhea, sleeplessness, return of pains. Vacations are often spoiled this way when users have not planned to relieve the symptoms before traveling.
• And home or apartment damage caused by people trying to grow a little, or more, of cannabis on their own. Because of the unique humidity needs of these plants, people have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of inside-the-wall, and on the walls– drywall, concrete, baseboards, you have it, mold damage to their abodes (along with the explosions trying to make up concentrates on their own).

You know, I have colleagues in this business who will fawn all over clients who show up to the course-work with a cannabis high by letting them know “hey, it’s just fine if you want to recreate with cannabis, I don’t judge, it’s ok”…

I have heard cannabis coaches who freely tell others they have used it daily for years with no tolerance break because otherwise their anxiety would get away from them (while suggesting they have stopped working on the underlying cause of the anxiety to help relieve it), etc. Such a role model.

Well.  I do judge. I do see, assess and interpret and discern about it. I definitely have an opinion about it. I think it’s a very bad idea and would strongly encourage you to avoid using cannabis for recreation—ever.

I want to talk you out of it.

Not only is it bad form (sober others KNOW when you are high no matter what you think…), but it’s dangerous.

As far as bad form, what would be your inward thoughts if you showed up all excited to learn from and to watch a master sommelier, an esteemed wine expert, show up to sell you something, to discuss a topic of importance to you completely drunk? He would be demonstrating the equipment and showing you how to set up your own home wine-making kit that you could purchase from him. But he would be drunk during the entire presentation.

Can it be different if someone shows up to participate anywhere drunk on cannabis? Are they participating with you or merely showing up?

And it’s especially dangerous in these modern times because of the insanely high levels of intoxicating cannabinoids in the hybrid plants, in the sophisticated and intensely concentrated concentrates and extracts and the innovative and enterprising inventions of how to recreate with it, like dabbing tools, like massive-hit inhalation gadgets, like the new designer “legal” CBD Delta’s anything.

The level of intoxicating material that can be put in the body in one session is astonishing. And it never was available in these kinds of intense levels in earlier times.

So I think it’s a way to escape life when other choices are available.

Yes, there are those in so much physical pain, or riddled with so much unsolvable cancer with no other way for relief except high dose cannabis that must use it so, but we’re not talking about those medical users. Some or all of these issues will apply but are no longer the main focus when you’re needing to make it from one moment to the next.

And even then, Dr. Allan Frankel, MD (1951-2021), world renown cannabis cancer dosing expert, in several of his video interviews discusses using not more than 75 mg THC max per DAY and not as concentrates but that the medicine needed the other cannabinoids and compounds in the dose too.

But he suggests the doses themselves are meant to be taken as smaller doses spread out throughout the day. And he suggested NEVER to try using RSO (Rick Simpson Oil). 

RSO and BHO were among the original concentrates attempts of 20 years ago. They were made by briefly soaking a huge amount of harvested cannabis flower in alcohol or butane and then slow cooking off, at low temps, the alcohol or butane leaving behind an enormously high concentrate of the cannabis trichome resins, with particularly THC concentrated out (something like 900 mg of THC per gram of the sticky goo) along with chlorophyll (making the thick goo dark green) and other cannabinoids that were dissolved in the solvents– and leaving behind an unknown amount of solvent in the mix.

The mixture turned into a dense, thick, sticky semi-gooey sap-like dark liquid that was dispensed through a needle-less catheter syringe often into capsules. This mixture was/is termed “oil”, probably because of the properties of the mix not dissolving readily in water but dissolving better into other “real” oils.  There is no oil in this mix, as most would consider oil, no unsaturated or saturated oil in it– perhaps there might be a bit of essential oils of the terpenes in the resin left but often those are so fragile they quickly evaporate off the harvested plant and/or get destroyed in the cooking of the mix. 

But making these concentrates the old way often caused enormous damage as those desperate for cures caused massive explosions in its preparation or in its use. Besides the health consequences of the side effects of enormous-dose THC dosing, without correctly purging all the flammable chemicals out of the final product some people would then light it up (think explode) and try to smoke it. 

The original RSO mixture, from 2003, was used EXTERNALLY to heal the skin cancers of the inventor, Rick Simpson. It wasn’t meant for ingesting at the time.

But people have tried ingesting these huge amounts of THC. Dr. Frankel suggested this was a really wrong way of using the medicine. The side effects were outrageous.

This RSO is now being sold made out of cannabis hemp plants and sold nationally for concentrated CBD, often in capsule forms. Except for a marketing name, this is just CBD concentrate, isolate or full spectrum, but CBD concentrate.

By the way, I bought some of this CBD RSO in a syringe and smeared it all over one of my leg varicose veins, covered with a bandage (like Rick Simpson had done with his mix), put some on my face for a skin flap, and ended up with severe burns and eczema on my leg and face from it!

However, today, there  have been equipment inventions, and creative ways of using equipment meant for other things to create these extremely concentrated versions of THC without having to risk blowing up the house.

But even so.

We’re talking about consuming high doses just because you can. We’re often talking about recreation. We’re talking about using cannabis as entertainment.

And  “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”  JUST DON’T DO IT.

And it’s dangerous too because it’s been illegal in so many areas for so long, quality and credible research is completely lacking in the modern effects of these extremely high dose and designer uses.

But witnessing the epidemic of cannabis over-dose just in all our everyday lives sure gives one an idea that there’s a problem here…oh, not people dying in hospitals or on the streets and back places like with the opioid crisis, but over-dosing alone, in front of friends, family by just being completely “couch locked” by their over consumption of cannabis. That’s an overdose.

Consider this online marketing clip for example. It advertises a high-end online cannabis cooking course so you can learn “how to dose guests”.

“…the knowledge you have on cannabis and the responsibility to ensure your guests are correctly dosed is what matters most…” (That statement in general is a responsible statement to make for disclosures…but…really? Dosing guests? And I’m NOT meaning I think the company should re-word this!)

So just think about that for a moment “how guests are dosed”. What medicine are we talking about?

Would you “like to be dosed”? According to whose definition of how much dose? Really?

We’re talking about creating enticing, professionally chef created dinner parties, dishes, desserts—all made with cannabis intoxicating cannabinoids materials. So the chef can dose you (or “guests”).

How does that make you feel? What thoughts go through your mind now?

Cooking everyday foods with cannabis trains you to think this kind of medicine dosing is ok. No. This is entertainment, and dangerous entertainment in my opinion.

And peoples’ and entrepreneurs ingenuity in how to get around the laws knows no bounds. And boundaries would be a good thing.

Even in the “legal in all 50 States” insanely profitable CBD industry there is massive fraud and corruption now, and very, very dangerous ways to ingest new CBD excipient products.

Which by the way, CBD is NOT legal in all 50 States—some States ban some or all its use.  But the businesses find creative ways to get people high in all kinds of poison products masquerading as food and as supplements.  

 

So here’s when it all goes wrong.

• Using cannabis as recreation can blow out your real, internal endocannabinoid system. And the endocannabinoid system is a natural-to-the-body-even-without-cannabis-supplements system that is used to create homeostasis and balance between all the other body systems for well being in the body. When one is supplementing cannabinoids over what the body naturally needs to be well balanced, the rest of the body system can begin to break down instead of being balanced.
• The high doses used need to be ever higher as the body becomes intolerant to its intoxicating effects. So if cannabis is used for recreation, it often starts to become useless as medicine.
• The health of the body can begin to suffer from component damage. For example, the flavonals and flavonoids in the cannabis are estrogenic and can begin to throw off the endocrine system, possibly trigger estrogenic cancers, breast cancers and other maladies.
• Those recreational high dose users begin to be and feel isolated even when in groups of people. One of the medicinal effects of cannabis, and why it’s so effective (when used in small and correct cannabinoid ratio doses) for anxiety is its ability to make people forget. So users start to forget not just their anxious moments, but they forget what their friends and families have shared that cause intimate bonds to form. The bonds don’t form because the users can’t remember what they were told in the sharing.
• Using cannabis for recreation could ruin your chances of using it to find pain relief as a medicine because of the intolerant build up of it in your system.
• If using high doses for recreation you can become allergic to it and not be able to use it at all, see hyperemesis. 
• Using it for recreation can cause you to become addicted to cannabis. Not like you would become addicted to opioids, but similar. The addiction usually is first mental/emotional need. You have to have it to relax for example. But then when you try to stop cold turkey, you could get nausea, insomnia, IBS symptoms, headaches or other for a couple weeks or more. A CBD-rich supplement can help with those symptoms by the way, unless you’re now allergic.
• Using cannabis for recreation can put you off to using it for medicine because you used it incorrectly and had a bad experience. PTSD users especially can get into trouble when the wrong high amount of the intoxicating part of the plant spins their PTSD into a full blown episode instead of helping to calm it.

Also cannabis is dangerous:

• Using edibles for medicine or to recreate, edibles of any kind that look like “real” food, like gummies, brownies, complete dinner party or ordinary real food dishes combined with cannabis cannabinoids from plant OR from concentrates or extractions for medicine or recreation is highly dangerous. There are other ingredients in all the edibles of unknown type, things like extra flavorings, chemicals as preservatives and sweeteners, stabilizers, anti-mold chemicals, etc.
• With edibles, not only are you training your mind to equate your medicine as ordinary food and that makes it ok, the drug cannot be accurately dosed at all.
• More people end up in the emergency room thinking they are dying from cannabis overdose (they won’t die, but they’ll have a negative experience they won’t easily forget) with severe vomiting, diarrhea, PTSD anxiety, passing out…after eating a cannabis “edible” because of these dosing problems.
• Cannabis edibles cause over-dosing. Not only is the reaction slow to come on—often over an hour to many hours later the high kicks in and now there’s trouble. This is true especially if the cannabis food edible is enticing like a dessert. People don’t realize how much they’ve ingested when eating “just another piece” until it’s too late.
• These foods are drugged. And the eaten and digested cannabis drug changes in the liver into what type of drug it becomes, different than THC. Also, the drug’s strength and its effects on people depend not only on an individual body makeup, but on the heat given to the plant material to activate it before mixing it into recipes. The heat changes AGAIN upon baking or cooking the meal with it after activating it.
• Same if some concentrate or extract is used instead of raw plant. Besides maybe having 500-1000 mg intoxicating THC in a bit about as big as half your little finger nail (when 2.5 or 5 mg might be a regular dose) and no way to accurately know EXACLTY how many mg of that is ending up in your recipe and then into a serving, but it still needs heat to activate it. Add to that, no one knows exactly how much of the intoxicating cannabinoid ended up in the FINAL dish—and WHERE exactly in the final dish or which serving it resides (since even a supposedly homogenous gummie might have all the THC that’s supposed to be in the whole piece of candy…instead of spread around, it’s all in the head, or right foot… so you break apart the candy to dose yourself—with what? With how much really?
• Seeking out recreational or medicinal cannabis from unreliable sources can poison you. Never use unknown black market cannabis for medicine or recreation. Even medical dispensaries can be really unreliable businesses for good cannabis. They have owners, with someone keeping the store who might or might not know much about how cannabis affects different people. Medical dispensaries sell really old and sometimes moldy or contaminated plant material or edibles or packaged products. Black market cannabis might actually be a good place to acquire trustworthy medicine IF you know the source, know who’s providing it and know them to be trustworthy. That you know them to not spray other street drugs onto their plants for sale to create “bigger and grander highs” for clients. You get the picture. Some dispensaries are dives. Many black market dealers are “dealers”. So care in WHERE one acquires the medicine is highly important. And when you are new, the safest place to buy cannabis is from a well known, reputable dispensary.
• Dangers can also be found in cannabis  used for medicine and salves. Commercially these all are made by extracting the cannabinoids and terpenes and other constituents from the natural raw plant and then selectively adding some, (which concentrates of various ones do what in how much has not extensively been tested) back into the product’s base of oils, creams etc. Depending on  how and what was combined, many consumers have broken out in rashes from salves or potions applied NOT because of the cannabis, but because of the base used and the human selected amounts of terpenes (which can act like essential oils and trigger allergic reactions in people allergic to essential oils) and other parts and pieces that are added back into final commercial products– as well as preservatives, chemical sweeteners, stabilizers and such in the products. ALWAYS TEST a SMALL amount of product for 2-3 days inside the bend of the elbow or wrist before consuming quantities or applying a large amount of topical, CBD or otherwise.
• Cannabis is a bioaccumulation plant. This means it takes in any poisons and toxins in its soil or sprayed on it during growth or given as nutrients to the growing plant. All that poison is then concentrated in the parts of the plant that form the medicine that you get to ingest. Cannabis has been used to clean environmental nuclear spills for example because it’s so efficient at sucking the poisons from the ground into itself.
• In addition to that, again with the ingenious entrepreneurship of some sellers and manufacturers, concentrations of the intoxicating parts of the cannabis hemp plant are extracted, concentrated (because naturally they are present in very tiny amounts in the plant) and then sprayed on the flower buds, added to “supplements” or “edibles” for the sole purpose to GET YOU HIGH that might or not even be legal or healthy or dangerous. These are called CBD Delta 8 and CBD Delta 9 THC.  The Delta 8 cannabinoid completely has had zero research done on it and who knows its true effect when consumed. Who knows how much of it per dose might be needed to ingest for this or that person to get high or sick. This is done with the new “legal” Delta 8 CBD products. And even now this is done with the regular euphoric Delta 9 THC products, as concentrated in a product as regular marijuana THC might be (it’s all the same when extracted anyway) that supposedly are legal because the THC was extracted from the raw hemp cannabis plants into concentrated intoxicating amounts while still staying legal according to the writing of the law.  
• Cannabis concentrates and extractions can be mixed with street drugs for enhanced effects. Never consume cannabis products from ANY unknown source.
• Just a couple years ago, certificates of quality and testing of the cannabis products sold, plant, flower, edibles, CBD or marijuana plants were required by various regulations. Over the last couple years, with no one watching the barn, most certs today, if one is even presented, are out of date, some even several years old and definitely not the certification done on the crop or product sitting before you. As well, the certs don’t reflect the rest of the ingredients or testing of the entire product analyzed.  So those certs are worthless if they are even offered. There is no way to really know what’s in your cannabis unless you’ve chosen and tested your own soil, nutrients, grown your own plants and made your own medicines out of it. Many recreational users are buying from the dispensaries in legal states and most are buying from the black market in legal or illegal states.
• When consuming for recreation, marketing of products like alcohol flavored cannabis drinks are giving people the wrong idea that it’s ok to ingest alcohol with cannabis consumption. These drinks with cannabis are only FLAVORED without the actual alcohol…such confusion… SO THIS REAL MIXING of ALCOHOL with CANNAIS IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS.  NEVER MIX ALCOHOL with CANNABIS in recreational or other high doses. That said, THC is being mixed in FLAVORS of alcohol, with the actual alcohol removed and this fad-product is sold as a recreational drink. Cannabis medicine can be made using alcohol as the solvent and while the use of alcohol based cannabis meds will burn terribly when actually ingested, and not be utilized in the body as effectively as a fat-based carrier of the medicine, there is not enough alcohol in those doses to cause harm. But recreationally ingesting regular alcoholic drinks while smoking or dabbing or otherwise consuming any cannabis product is highly dangerous because of the way the chemicals between the two substances form. You could stop breathing for example doing this.
• When ingesting enough euphoric cannabis to be high, any mindset work you do will most likely be ineffective long term. Oh,  you might feel good while you’re performing it. It will only be an act. An act that will wear off with the cannabis high. People think using cannabis recreationally for better meditations are fooling themselves. The chemical reactions that happen in the brain when ingesting euphoric amounts of cannabis stop the positive brain activity and chemicals that are naturally produced from deep meditative and contemplative work that happens when meditations are done as true, unrestricted meditations and mindset work. Don’t combine cannabis with meditative work. Neither supports the other and what is happening is only recreational. Your mindset work becomes entertainment, and part of the “cannabis forgetting” phenomena, rather than creating lasting beneficial growth and change. You will be kidding yourself.
• Cannabis in all its forms, CBD-rich or marijuana-THC-rich could aggravate and cause any hormonally caused cancers, estrogen breast cancers you may be battling to grow. If you have Hashimoto’s disease or other endocrine problems, cannabis is ultimately estrogenic in its use and could make your malady worse. Using cannabis in high recreational amounts or high medicinal amounts is not advised with these type cancers and problems and could hasten your death. See Ray Peat’s discussions on estrogen out-of-balance problems (for women or men, and discussions found copiously in several of Peat’s articles, newsletters, interviews and books). Peat does NOT have any cannabis discussions in his materials, but that cannabis is estrogenic, I would say that ultimately makes cannabis definitely Un-Peaty.