Can Your Endocannabinoid System Shutdown? Yes but not how you might think…

Can Your Endocannabinoid System Shutdown? Yes but not how you might think…

Cannabis, derived from a plant and one of the oldest known drugs, has remained a source of controversy throughout our recent history. Its medicinal value has been debated on for less than six centuries. Its legalization and the concerns of dependency and schizophrenia from Cannabis has always been a hot button for politicians and pundits alike ever since “Reefer Madness”, But the truth is the real fundamentals to these discussions should be about how cannabis affects the mind and body, as well as the body’s cells and systems. The question really is “How can something that stimulates appetite also be great for relieving pain, nausea, seizures, and anxiety?” Whether it’s smoked, baked into pastries, processed into pills, or brewed as tea and sipped, cannabis affects us in ways that are sometimes hard to define. Not only are its many facets an intrinsically fascinating topic, but because they touch on so many parts of the brain and the body, their medical, ethical, and legal ramifications are vast.

The brain immediately responds to any disturbance by trying to undo an impact imposed from the outside, which in a nutshell is homeostasis. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, “Newton’s Law.” For instance, soon after THC binds on receptor sites, whether in the hippocampus, the amygdala, or other parts of the brain, the number of sites begins to dwindle. At first the overstimulation causes nerves to start sucking receptor sites into the cell, where they are no longer available to be stimulated. If the THC's unnatural storm continues, this down-regulation gradually leads to the actual dismantling of sites, which takes longer to reverse once the THC stimulation stops. As a result of the down-regulation of receptor density, when the high wears off and THC levels fall, the entire cannabinoid system enters into a state of endocannabinoid deficiency. Until the brain can rebuild receptors, anandamide and other endocannabinoids no longer have as many locks to key into. When you use marijuana, not only are the receptors down-regulated but the G-proteins (cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 are G-protein coupled receptors) become uncoupled from the receptor. As researchers continued to study CB1, they learned that it was one of the most abundant G-protein coupled receptors in the brain. This simply means you can only reach a certain level of euphoria. (you can only get but so high.) The development of pharmacological tolerance was accompanied by down-regulation of cannabinoid receptors in selected brain areas, as measured by radiolabeled ligand binding. It is interesting to note that in one study, the decrease in receptor number was not paralleled by changes in adenylyl cyclase functionality. On the other hand, others have shown that cannabinoid-induced G-protein activation is diminished in brains from cannabinoid-tolerant rats. While the cellular mechanisms responsible for these adaptive processes remain to be established, an increase in mRNA for the CB1 receptor has been detected in cerebellum of rats. The detection of concomitant pharmacological tolerance and adaptation in the biochemical events associated with the CB1 receptor provides a framework for elucidating the neurochemical actions of the endogenous cannabinoid system.

This is a plant that obviously has show that it has beneficial use in many, many ways.

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