A Minnesota emergency room physician talks cannabis
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Since Aug. 1, 2023, Minnesotans 21 and older have been legally able to smoke, vape, drink and eat forms of cannabis. And even though recreational dispensaries aren’t widely available for Minnesotans to buy cannabis, people are allowed to possess, use and grow marijuana.
The drug is known for its mind altering compounds that can affect your brain and body. But how do you which bodily reactions are normal? How do you know what reactions aren’t normal? And when should you seek help if you're having a strange reaction?
Medical director of the Minnesota Poison Control System and emergency physician with Hennepin Healthcare Dr. Jon Cole joined Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer to help answer those questions.
If you or someone you know has ingested too much THC or has a bad reaction to a marijuana product, you can call the poison control center Hotline at 1-800-222-1222
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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview.
How fast does the THC and cannabis get into one’s bloodstream?
It depends completely on the way in which you consume the cannabis.
Smoking cannabis is one of the quickest ways to get it into your bloodstream, and for it to go to your brain where it has its effects. So when you smoke cannabis, you feel the effects pretty immediately, and you can sort of titrate the effect that you’re looking for.
When you consume cannabis edibles — you know when you eat it — and this goes for when you drink cannabis drinks as well, the effect is delayed. So you don’t really start to feel the true peak effect anywhere between one and three hours after you eat it. It’s really easy to make mistakes and start stacking up doses.
Can you explain what happens to the body when using cannabis? Can the cardiovascular system be affected?
One of the things that’s really interesting about cannabis is that the active ingredient in cannabis affects lots and lots of neurotransmitters in your brain — the chemicals that signal from one nerve to another. And so there's all kinds of effects that it can have.
At the recreational doses that people use where they intend to have a pleasurable experience, you feel a little disinhibited. It’s pleasurable. A colleague of mine once referred to it as the same sensation when kids are playfully spinning around on the ground until they get dizzy and fall down for the pure enjoyment of it.
When you take too much of it, though, the effects become much less pleasurable. You can have vertigo, hallucinations and really terrible unrelenting nausea and vomiting.
But what’s really important from a safety standpoint is the effects are much different in small children when they accidentally get cannabis.
What are you seeing in your ER related to cannabis use over the last year?
I think the most important thing that we see and where the greatest harm comes from is what small children get into cannabis products.
And so I mentioned that the effects are much different. So the things we’ve talked about with adult nausea, the vomiting, the hallucinations, those are certainly unpleasant. But small children, their brains react much differently. And so they can have really profound drowsiness, sometimes seizures, and even get so impaired that they end up comatose.
And what often happens is, you know, kids explore the world, a lot of them explore the world by taking small things that look good to eat and putting them in their mouth. And a lot of cannabis edibles are designed to either taste good or look like other things that are just food.
And kids find them, get into them, And then all of a sudden, parents have a really impaired small child that they bring into the hospital. And it takes a little while to sort that out. And sometimes kids end up in intensive care and have lots of medical testing that later on we learn is all due to a cannabis edible that they ate when no one was looking.
It’s really critical to treat cannabis products in your home the same way that you treat medications and dangerous chemicals. So we really encourage folks to keep them up high where kids can’t get them, ideally locked. And we really encourage folks not to use cannabis products in front of children because children are so apt to model and mimic behavior.