Highly potent THC concentrates are just as safe as regular weed, more data shows

Legislators across the US are scrambling to pass laws that would limit the strength of highly potent cannabis concentrates, arguing that high levels of THC pose a serious health risk. But like most of the anti-weed fears raised by prohibitionists and the media, clinical researchers find that these concerns are not really backed by science.

Politicians seem particularly concerned about the potential risk of high-THC cannabis products, but federal regulations make it nearly impossible for researchers to study these risks in a clinical setting. The federal government makes legal weed available to researchers, but this notoriously inferior weed has a maximum THC content of 8 percent, making it unsuitable for serious research.

A team of researchers at Washington State University (WSU) came up with a unique idea to work around these excessive restrictions. Instead of buying weed themselves and allowing subjects to light it in their laboratories, the researchers conducted a study using Zoom. Subjects were asked to buy their own weed from a government-licensed pharmacy and use it in the comfort of their homes. The researchers then ran a series of cognitive tests using the online video app.

“Because of federal restrictions on researchers, it simply wasn’t possible to study the acute effects of these highly potent products,” said Carrie Cuttler, psychologist and senior researcher at WSU, in a statement. “The general population in states where cannabis is legal have very easy access to a wide range of highly potent cannabis products, including extremely potent cannabis concentrates that can exceed 90% THC, and we have limited ourselves to studying the entire plant with less than 10% THC. “

The WSU team recruited 80 adult participants and divided them into four groups. One group used cannabis flowers with at least 20 percent THC and over 0.7 percent CBD, and another group smoked weed with over 20 percent THC but no CBD. A third group vaped cannabis concentrates with over 60 percent THC and about 2 percent CBD content, and a fourth group stayed ice-cold sober.

The study, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, reports that cannabis did not affect subjects’ ability to make decisions or perceive risks. Cannabis users did as well as sober users on several memory tests, including the ability to remember, complete appointments, or other tasks. The researchers also found that pot did not affect the subjects’ ability to remember the sequence of previous events.

In the short-term memory tests, however, the cannabis users showed deficits compared to the control group. In free memory tests, in which subjects were asked to remember words or pictures they were shown, the three groups of cannabis users performed worse than the sober subjects. The stoned subjects also did poorly on a false memory test, where they were given new words and asked to remember if researchers had shown them those words before.

The researchers believed that the subjects who used high potency concentrates would be far more affected than the other subjects, but they actually did as well as those who smoked regular THC flowers. To the researchers’ surprise, the group that smoked THC mixed with CBD performed worst on memory tests.

“Comparisons of the effects of highly potent cannabis flowers with and without CBD showed that the THC + CBD flower group freely remembered significantly fewer images in the source memory test compared to the sober, THC flower and concentrate groups,” the authors stated. “This contradicted our hypothesis and previous research showing that CBD had a protective effect on memory.”

“Despite the use of highly potent products, we did not find any significant effects on these results,” the researchers concluded. “It is possible that this reflects a real lack of the effects of cannabis on these aspects of cognition.”

While further research is clearly needed on the subject, the present study shows that fears about highly potent THC concentrates are likely unfounded. Another recent study also reported that subjects who smoked THC-rich concentrates had higher levels of THC in their blood than normal cannabis smokers, but they did no worse on cognitive tests and also said they subjectively felt more stoned than they did normal cannabis users.