Cannabis helps a lot of people get through cancer treatment. That is not the same thing as treating cancer. Almost all the confusion lives in the gap between those two sentences.

Cancer patients are using cannabis faster than physicians can tell them whether it works.

In 2024, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the main professional body for cancer doctors in the United States, published its first full guideline on cannabis and cannabinoids in adults with cancer. The panel worked through thirteen systematic reviews and dozens of trials. It opened by conceding the obvious: patient use has run well ahead of the evidence.

Its central recommendation is that cannabis should not be used as cancer-directed treatment, meaning treatment aimed at the tumor itself, outside a clinical trial. On the one hand, there’s a real and growing body of evidence that cannabis helps people endure cancer and its treatment. On the other, a claim that has circulated for two decades with almost nothing behind it.

What the Evidence Supports

Solid ground is symptom management.

Nausea ranks highest. For patients still vomiting through chemotherapy despite standard anti-nausea drugs, ASCO says cannabinoids can be added to the regimen. This is the oldest formal recognition cannabinoids have in medicine. In 1985 the FDA approved synthetic THC, sold as dronabinol under the brand name Marinol, for chemotherapy-induced nausea. It cleared a second synthetic THC compound the same year, nabilone, sold as Cesamet. Eli Lilly pulled Cesamet from the American market in 1989 for commercial reasons. Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought the drug in 2004 and returned it to US pharmacies in 2006.

So cannabinoids have four decades in the oncology toolkit. The catch is that newer anti-nausea drugs work better and do not get patients high, which leaves cannabinoids as a second option brought in when the first ones fail.

After that, the ground softens.

Appetite is the one everybody assumes is settled, because everybody knows what the munchies are. In 2002, a trial in patients with advanced cancer tested dronabinol head-to-head against megestrol, an older appetite drug. Dronabinol lost. Patients reported wanting to eat more without putting on meaningful weight. Stimulating appetite and reversing the metabolic freefall of cancer cachexia, the wasting syndrome that comes with advanced disease, turn out to be different problems. That is one trial, now more than two decades old, in the hardest population there is. It tells you cannabinoids did not reverse late-stage wasting. It does not tell you they do nothing for appetite in someone earlier in treatment who cannot face a meal, which is the situation most patients are actually in.

Pain is where the record gets uncomfortable. Nabiximols, sold as Sativex, is a mouth spray with roughly equal parts THC and CBD, and it is the most rigorously studied cannabis medicine on the planet. It went through three Phase 3 trials in cancer pain, the stage of testing designed to prove a drug works. Marie Fallon and colleagues reported two of them in the British Journal of Pain in 2017. The third, led by Aron Lichtman, put 199 patients on nabiximols against 198 on placebo and appeared in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 2018.

It missed the primary endpoint in all three.

That is a real result and it should be said plainly. It is also worth knowing what those trials were asking: whether a spray could produce a measurable additional drop in pain scores in patients with advanced cancer already on optimized opioid therapy, a setting where placebo responses run high and the room to improve is narrow. There were flickers in the secondary data. In the Lichtman trial, nabiximols beat placebo on two of three quality-of-life instruments at week three and on all three at week five, and analyses run after the fact found benefits among American patients that did not appear in patients elsewhere.

Patient experience runs ahead of that record. Plenty of people report cutting their opioid use and taking fewer painkillers, and the real-world data point the same direction. A prospective registry study of 358 cancer patients enrolled in the Quebec Cannabis Registry, published in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care in 2023, recorded significant drops in pain severity, pain interference and total medication burden across the first nine months. It also had no control group, its authors said the findings need confirmation in randomized placebo-controlled trials, and the registry itself was supported in part by unrestricted grants from licensed cannabis producers. That is what real-world evidence looks like. Suggestive, not decisive.

Outside oncology, in chronic pain, a recent systematic review in Annals of Internal Medicine pooled 25 short-term randomized trials covering 2,303 patients, nearly two-thirds of them with neuropathic pain. Oral THC-only products moved pain about 0.78 points on a ten-point scale. Balanced THC-to-CBD oromucosal sprays, the class Sativex belongs to, moved it about half a point. Both came with moderate to large increases in dizziness, sedation and nausea. And the THC-only category split against itself: nabilone cut pain by 1.59 points, dronabinol by 0.23, which is to say not at all.

Real relief for some people. Modest on a population scale. Both things are true.

What the Lab Shows, and Why That Is Not a Cure

The question underneath all of this is whether cannabis can kill cancer.

In the laboratory, there is genuinely interesting evidence. For twenty-five years, a lab at the Complutense University of Madrid run by Manuel Guzmán has documented how cannabinoids attack tumor cells. THC can trigger a stress response inside a cancer cell that pushes it to digest and destroy itself. Cannabinoids can choke off the blood supply a tumor needs and blunt its ability to invade neighboring tissue. Glioblastoma, breast, pancreatic, melanoma. In cell cultures and in mice, the compounds do impressive work. And the work has not stopped. In June 2026, a team at Rostock University Medical Center reported that cannabigerol and cannabichromene, two non-intoxicating cannabinoids that get a fraction of the attention paid to THC and CBD, killed lung cancer cells in culture and pushed them into apoptosis, with CBG appearing to act through a receptor called PPARα rather than the cannabinoid receptors everyone assumes are doing the work. That is a cell-culture finding, with everything that implies. It is also a reminder that this field is active, not closed.

Then come the qualifiers, and they are not small ones.

Cell lines and mice are not people. Oncology’s graveyard is full of compounds that cleared tumors in a dish and did nothing in a human body. One common reason is dosage: the concentrations that kill tumor cells in vitro, meaning in glassware rather than in a patient, are often far higher than anything that can safely be put into a human bloodstream.

Cannabinoids also do not only inhibit tumors. In some studies, under some conditions, THC has stimulated cancer cell growth by suppressing the immune response that keeps tumors in check. Cancer Research UK, reviewing the same body of laboratory work, notes that different cannabinoids appear to do different things to different cancers, and that under certain conditions they can encourage cancer cells rather than kill them.

The National Cancer Institute makes the same distinction in its own summary for clinicians: antitumor activity in preclinical models, no approval and no established role in treating cancer in patients.

And when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed the entire published literature in 2017, it landed on a phrase worth memorizing. There is insufficient evidence, the report concluded, either “to support or refute” the idea that cannabinoids are an effective treatment for cancers.

The Only Human Trials

In humans, the entire body of direct anti-tumor evidence fits in a few paragraphs.

Guzmán’s team ran the first one in 2006. Nine patients with terminal recurrent glioblastoma, THC delivered through a catheter directly into the tumor. It was a safety study, and it cleared that bar. The treatment did not appear to accelerate the disease. Two patients were alive a year later, though both have since died. Guzmán’s own verdict was measured: the significance, he has said, is little in clinical terms, but the trial offered “some hints towards possible anti-tumoral action of THC in certain patients.”

Guzmán has been more careful about that study than most people who cite it. In a 2013 opinion piece, he wrote that “cannabinoids are efficacious drugs to treat at least some types of cancers in laboratory animals,” but that the anecdotal evidence “remains far from supporting that cannabinoids are efficacious anticancer drugs for large patient populations.” Part of the problem is that “cancer” is not one disease. It is at least 150 histological types and thousands more by molecular profile. Nothing treats all of that, which makes the question of which therapy helps which patient enormously specific.

In 2021, a team led by Chris Twelves at the University of Leeds published the results of GWCA1208, which gave nabiximols alongside chemotherapy to patients with recurrent glioblastoma. One-year survival was 83 percent in the nabiximols group against 44 percent on placebo. Those numbers traveled fast.

What traveled less is the shape of the study. It was a Phase 1b trial built to test safety and tolerability, run in two parts. Part 1 was open-label, with six patients. Part 2 randomized 21 more, twelve to nabiximols and nine to placebo, and the survival figures come from those 21. Two of the placebo patients died within the first 40 days of enrollment. At six months, progression-free survival was identical in both arms, 33 percent. The trial was sponsored by GW Research, which made the drug, and the authors wrote that the survival difference would need testing in a randomized controlled trial.

Which is why the trial that matters is the one still running.

ARISTOCRAT is a Phase 2, triple-blind, placebo-controlled trial testing nabiximols plus temozolomide, the standard chemotherapy for the disease, against placebo plus temozolomide in patients with recurrent glioblastoma of a specific molecular subtype. It is coordinated by the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Birmingham and funded by The Brain Tumour Charity, with the drug supplied free by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, which now owns the Sativex line. Its primary endpoint is overall survival, which is to say the only measure that answers the question people actually ask. Patients are randomized two to one, with a target enrollment of 120 across 22 UK sites, revised down from an original 234. Per the trial registry it is still recruiting, with primary completion expected in September 2026.

Where the Cure Story Came From

In 2003, a doctor removed a basal cell carcinoma from a Canadian man named Rick Simpson. It is the most common and most treatable skin cancer there is. Simpson then made a concentrated cannabis oil at home, put it on his bandages and concluded the oil had healed him. That account is his own, and it is essentially the only one there is.

What he did next is the part his critics skip. He gave the recipe away. RSO is not a branded product, and Simpson’s own site explains how to make the oil rather than selling it. He does not profit from the syringes now sitting in dispensary cases across legal markets, in rice-grain doses. Whatever else is true here, nobody was running a business.

The claim is still wrong.

There is no scientific evidence that RSO cures cancer. Not weak evidence. None. The founding observation is a lesion a surgeon had already removed, read afterward as proof that the oil had worked. That is a reasoning error, and it is one that costs other people.

The sharpest critics of the cure claim are not prohibitionists. Adam Friedman, professor of dermatology at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, has co-authored papers on the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids and uses CBD in his own practice. He has called the phenomenon terrifying.

The cost lands on patients, not on Simpson. Some delay or refuse treatment that works. Many more use cannabis alongside treatment without telling anyone, which means nobody is watching for drug interactions, product contamination, or the possibility, suggested by early research, that cannabis may blunt the effectiveness of immunotherapy. Those findings have been disputed and need further study, but the risk is not a footnote: ASCO leaned on early evidence of poorer outcomes in patients using cannabis during immunotherapy as part of the reasoning behind its one firm recommendation, that cannabis not be used as cancer-directed treatment outside a trial.

And the silence is widespread. A cross-sectional survey of patients and survivors at the Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, in a state where cannabis is still illegal, shows a weighted prevalence of 26 percent.

Ethan Zohn, the Survivor: Africa winner and co-producer of the High Times docuseries Kicking Back, who beat CD20-positive Hodgkin’s lymphoma twice, described exactly that gap in a recent interview for this magazine. When he used cannabis to manage the side effects of chemotherapy, no doctor could tell him how to do it safely. The only guidance he got was not to smoke it.

What the Government Now Admits

For more than fifty years, the United States kept cannabis in Schedule I, the category defined in statute as having no currently accepted medical use. Heroin’s shelf. That was a political artifact rather than a scientific finding, and the government’s own machinery has now said so in writing.

In August 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services, drawing on the FDA and NIDA, formally recommended moving cannabis to Schedule III. The FDA review behind that recommendation counted more than 30,000 licensed practitioners recommending cannabis across 43 jurisdictions to more than six million patients for at least fifteen conditions, and found credible scientific support in three specific areas: pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, and appetite loss.

The same three symptom domains the trials keep pointing at. Not the tumor.

In April 2024, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the DEA is bound by the scientific and medical determinations HHS reached. The agency that spent five decades insisting cannabis had no medical value was told by its own department’s lawyers otherwise.

Then, on April 23, 2026, the DOJ issued a final order moving two categories into Schedule III: cannabis contained in an FDA-approved drug product, and cannabis subject to a state medical marijuana license. It took effect five days later, the first time cannabis has moved out of Schedule I since the Controlled Substances Act became law in 1970.

It is also narrower than the headlines suggested. Everything outside those two categories, including all adult-use cannabis, remains in Schedule I. An expedited DEA hearing on broader rescheduling opened on June 29, 2026, and has not concluded. Schedule III is a meaningful change for research access and for the tax treatment of medical operators. It is not the end of federal prohibition.

Where That Leaves Patients

Here is the honest accounting.

Cannabis helps people endure cancer treatment. Nausea is the firmest case, with sleep, anxiety and the general siege of being sick showing up powerfully in patient experience even where formal trials lag behind.

Cannabinoids might eventually earn a role against certain tumors. That possibility rests on twenty-five years of laboratory work that keeps producing results and one carefully caveated survival signal in a study too small to prove anything. Unproven is not the same as disproven, and the distance between them is exactly what a trial is for. ARISTOCRAT will tell us more than everything that came before it combined.

What nobody can responsibly claim today is that cannabis treats cancer in a human body. The scientist who ran the only human trial says so himself, and says it more cautiously than most of the people who quote him. He also has not stopped working on the question, and neither has anyone else in this piece.

What is beyond dispute is that a plant with documented medical value is being used by millions of sick people who cannot get a straight answer about how to use it safely. That is not a scientific problem. It is a regulatory one.

The trial that could finally answer the question is funded in substantial part by the patients and families who wanted it answered. Neither the state nor the pharmaceutical industry would fully bankroll it. They passed the hat.

This article is for information only and is not medical advice. Cannabis can interact with cancer treatments. Patients should talk to their oncologist before starting, stopping or changing anything about their care.

<p>The post Cannabis and Cancer: What We Know, What We Suspect, and What Nobody Can Prove Yet first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Cone or straight joint? You’ve got a side. Everybody’s got a side. Nobody’s ever had proof. So a research team packed a dozen of them with the exact same weed, smoked every one on a machine programmed to puff more like a cannabis consumer than a cigarette smoker, and weighed what came out the other end. Here’s the kicker: you were both right.

You know how this goes. One guy loves a pre-rolled cone. The next guy swears by a straight cylindrical joint and won’t hear otherwise. And it never gets settled, because the only thing anybody’s ever brought to the fight is how sure they sound. It’s a two-in-the-morning debate that’s dead by lunch.

Not anymore. There’s finally data. A research team led by Drs. Riley Kirk, Miyabe Shields and Allison Justice, with Twinkle Paryani, took one jar of flower and split it between seven pre-rolled cones and five cylinder joints. Then they burned every single one on a lab machine set to a cannabis-specific puffing profile instead of the old cigarette settings, caught the smoke on a filter, weighed it, counted the pulls, and clocked how hot each one ran. And the big result is almost too fair: the machine detected no significant difference in the total THC or terpenes captured from either format. The difference was in how that material got divided across each puff.

Similar totals. What changes is how they arrive. The cone loads more into every puff and finishes in fewer pulls. The straight joint takes that same weed and stretches it out, thinner, over more pulls. Neither one gave up a bigger total. They’re just two different speeds for smoking the same gram, and now somebody’s actually got the numbers.

The Cone Packs More Into Each Puff. Here’s the Why.

Quick translation: “more per puff” means more THC caught by the machine on each draw. Nobody wired up a person to measure the actual high. What they measured was the smoke coming off the joint, and on that score the cone came out ahead per pull.

The likely reason is the shape. Look at the burning end of each. A pre-rolled kingsize cone is fat at the tip, a touch over 10.5 millimeters across. A cylinder joint is skinnier, just under 8. Doesn’t sound like much until you turn it into burning surface: the cone’s lit end has roughly 78% more area. The authors point to that geometry as the main driver, more surface, potentially more material combusting on each draw.

The numbers: the cone delivered 2.40 milligrams of THC per machine puff against 2.02 for the cylinder, plus more of the big flavor-and-aroma terpenes per puff too. Both gaps cleared statistical significance. And because the cone works through its weed faster, it’s done in fewer pulls, about 20 on average versus 23 for the cylinder. Same gram, roughly 12% fewer pulls to finish it. Fewer, denser puffs versus more, lighter ones. That’s the trade.

The Real Surprise: Cones Were Way More Consistent

Here’s the finding that might actually sway how you pick. The cone results clustered tightly. The cylinders spread much wider by comparison.

On total smoke resin, the cones landed at a coefficient of variation of 2.9%, a measure of how tightly the samples clustered, against 16.5% for the cylinders. In plain terms, cone after cone came out close to the same, while the cylinders scattered a lot wider. Several of the cannabinoid and terpene measures followed the same general pattern, notably tighter among cones.

Here’s what the study can’t tell you, though: why. The cones were packed and tamped by the researchers; the cylinders were formed on a RAW rolling machine with the flower loaded by hand. So the difference could come from the geometry, the packing method, the machine rolling, or some mix of all three. The study wasn’t built to separate them. What it shows is that in this small batch, the cones came out more uniform. Why is the next question.

Finally, a Weed Study That Doesn’t Smoke Like a Cigarette

Here’s the part that sets the study apart from a lot of what came before it. For decades, the machines testing cannabis smoke ran on cigarette settings, small puffs on a rigid timer, built around how a lab decided a tobacco smoker puffed fifty years ago. Nobody smokes a joint like a cigarette.

This team programmed the machine with a cannabis-specific puff profile they say was built from real-world consumer data, bigger draws, a different rhythm, instead of leaning on the old cigarette protocol. Then they ran everything through a lab-grade smoking machine and caught the smoke on a filter for analysis. It’s a small study, twelve joints, one strain, and the researchers say plainly that the trends need a bigger batch before anyone treats them as settled. But the puffing setup is a real step toward measuring cannabis smoke on cannabis terms rather than tobacco’s.

The Science, for the Nerds

If you don’t care about p-values, you already got the answer up top. For everyone else, here’s the full teardown.

The team burned seven RAW Classic Kingsize Cones and five RAW Classic cylinder joints, each packed with one gram of the same ground flower, the strain Peaches and Cream, testing at a total potential THC content of 14.85%. Everything ran on a Cambustion SCS smoking machine under a cannabis-specific puff profile (a 41.7 mL/s peak flow rate and a 59.31 mL puff volume), with particulate captured on a Cambridge filter pad per the ISO 3308:2000 standard. Significance was tested with Welch’s two-sample t-test at p < 0.05. This was an exploratory study: seven cones, five cylinders and only one cultivar. The report also ran numerous comparisons without describing a correction for multiple testing, so the significant findings need replication.

On total yield, the two formats tied statistically. The machine captured 48.96 mg of THC per cone versus 46.83 mg per cylinder (p = 0.43), 1.67 mg versus 1.46 mg of major terpenes (p = 0.18), and near-identical minor terpenes (p = 0.93). Transfer efficiency from flower to filter, how much of the payload made it into the collected smoke, came in at 32.97% for cones and 31.54% for cylinders, both in line with prior published work. And a nonsignificant difference at this sample size means the totals looked similar, not that they’re proven identical; the study didn’t run an equivalence test. The one cannabinoid that separated the formats was CBN, modestly higher in cones (0.46 mg versus 0.40 mg, p = 0.028). The authors suggested combustion differences may explain it, though the temperature picture was mixed: cones ran hotter through the middle of the smoke and held a higher temperature before the first ash break (138 °F versus 121 °F, p = 0.002), while cylinders trended toward higher peak temperatures at the very end (p = 0.068, not significant).

The per-puff numbers are where significance showed up: THC per puff (p = 0.0015) and major terpenes per puff (p = 0.009) both cleared the bar, as did puff count to completion. The team also ran the pooled ash through elemental analysis (ICP-MS) and flagged differences in aluminum, sodium and selenium between formats, but they had to combine samples to get enough material to test, so those are a thread to pull later, not a finding. As the researchers put it, that data needs a bigger scale and repeat runs before anyone leans on it.

So, Cone or Straight?

Nobody wins, and that’s the honest answer. Under these machine conditions, the formats produced statistically similar total captured THC and terpenes from the same gram. The cone concentrated more into each puff and finished in fewer pulls. The cylinder spread similar totals across more.

The study can’t tell you which one feels better, burns better in your hand, or makes for a better night. Nobody measured that, and honestly that’s the part you’re deciding for yourself anyway. Want fewer pulls with more THC captured in each puff? The numbers lean cone. Prefer more pulls from the same gram? Go straight.

Same weed, similar totals, different pacing. The oldest argument at the session finally has somewhere real to start, and it turns out the format changes the pace of the ride more than the size of it. Which is just a long way of saying what we told you up top. You were both right.

Editor’s note: This article is based on a May 2026 data report, “HBI Innovations Smoke Study: Cones vs. Cylinders,” conducted by researchers Riley Kirk, Miyabe Shields, Allison Justice and Twinkle Paryani of Kirk and Shields LLC, with laboratory support from Gobi Labs and the Clemson University Agricultural Service Laboratory. The study tested RAW-brand cones and rolling papers. The report is preliminary and has not been peer reviewed.

<p>The post Cone or Straight Joint? Scientists Put Both to the Test. One Packed More THC Per Puff, the Other Took More Puffs to Finish. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Cannabis doesn’t give you talent you don’t already have. A psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens breaks down what THC actually does to the creative brain, and why the myth of the green muse is more complicated than it looks.

The myth of the green muse has coasted through history, dodging potholes between the weed Snoop Dogg smoked in sunny 90s Long Beach and today’s trap recording studios, dives overflowing with synthesizers, wisps of smoke, and dry coughs. Cough, cough. It’s a toxic romance, an urban legend that swears up and down that a couple of puffs will turn you into a writer on par with Mariana Enríquez, or somehow hack the Matrix so you can paint with the grace of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

But to understand what really happens in an artist’s mind when THC enters the picture, we need to lower the volume, turn off the autotune, and apply some, let’s say, “biological humility,” a concept that Dr. María Celeste Romero, a psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens, introduces to High Times and El Planteo. So, how’s your biological humility?

According to Romero, although science is beginning to unravel the plant’s basic mechanisms, the brain remains a map with too many unknown territories: “It’s such a vast, complex organ that we manage so little of… we know enough to recognize the effectiveness of certain treatments, but the exact, exact thing, there, sorry, but I’m a little humble.”

Nevertheless, this starting point, this partial knowledge, is enough to confirm that weed doesn’t give you a talent you don’t already have. No, my friend: it’s not like spinach for Popeye or the mushroom for Mario Bros. Not at all. It does, for instance, function as a modulator of processes that already exist within oneself. It acts as a kind of hack that helps you see what was already there, just in higher resolution.

What actually happens in your brain

At the heart of the creative “spark” is divergent thinking. Neurobiologically, this is explained by dopamine and CB1 receptors. When those are activated, cannabis produces the effect that the doctor defines as a filter-free zone: “Basically, what it does is, through dopaminergic modulation, lower inhibitory control.”

CB1 receptors are G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) located mainly in the central nervous system, brain, basal ganglia, hippocampus, and peripheral nervous system, being fundamental in the endocannabinoid system. They are activated by endocannabinoids (anandamide) and phytocannabinoids such as THC, modulating the release of neurotransmitters, memory, pain, appetite, and emotions, as confirmed by an academic paper from Temple University.

“Our brain tries to reduce uncertainty and control entropy… when we use cannabis, this inhibitory control decreases, which helps us enter a dynamic that allows us to associate concepts that are already inside us.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero, psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens

Sober, the brain acts like a bureaucrat, discarding ideas as far-fetched, disconnected, weak, lacking substance, or too risky to be considered. Cannabis sends the censor into early retirement. It facilitates cognitive flexibility where “trippy” becomes a viable possibility, allowing ideas to flow with less judgment from the internal logic police.

The dose problem, and the myth of smoking twenty joints

But beware: this door isn’t a blank check. There’s a biological limit dictated by the dose. There’s a myth that “more smoke means more genius,” but in reality it’s more like a booster that only pays off at moderate levels.

“If the dose was too high, there was no stimulus for creativity… it’s not about smoking twenty joints to get an idea; maybe it’s better to take a break from your phone.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero

This phenomenon is most critical for beginners. Without the habit behind them, on their shoulders and their lungs, the search for the muse can end in an Enter the Void kind of bad trip (great film, by the way). As Romero puts it: “A person who has never used doesn’t know how it’s going to hit them, and sometimes you see the paranoia.”

Set, setting and creative hygiene

Beyond the chemistry, there is the ritual. Creativity doesn’t depend solely on THC, but also on set and setting. “It’s not the same to smoke while watching a movie as it is to sit and smoke in front of the piano or with the guitar beside you,” the psychiatrist points out. Context is what turns the substance into a tool. For her, the plant intensifies visual and auditory perception, something she defines as “the cornerstone of art.” Cannabis can deepen your connection to your senses, allowing you to feel “touched by art” more directly.

But be careful, very careful, about relying entirely on external stimuli. Continuous use causes the endocannabinoid system to activate its defense protocol: “The receptors shut down. They put on a little jacket and stay inside, in a little bubble.” And she continues: “That makes the organ less receptive to the impact of cannabinoids.” To prevent the brain from “forgetting” how to be creative on its own, Romero recommends some mental hygiene: one full t-break day each week so the receptors come back to the field fresh as a daisy.

Creative health is an ecosystem: “The endocannabinoid system is activated by everything that’s good for us… if I want to overexploit myself to the max and don’t take care of the basics, hydration, food, exercise, relationships, everything ends up in the hands of the plant, and that’s a lot of responsibility for a single being.”

What cannabis actually does, and doesn’t do

Romero also challenges a common prejudice: she argues cannabis does not appear to produce the same kind of structural damage associated with alcohol or heavier substances, something we frequently highlight, debunk, and underline in these pages. In fact, on the contrary, its capacity to promote “forgetting” is pure medicine for post-traumatic stress, helping the brain modulate the discomfort of negative or problematic memories.

“If plants teach us anything with their entourage effect, it’s that life is collaborative.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero

So, plants don’t create geniuses, but they help the artist, or the aspiring enlightened one, enter that necessary state to break the mold. You need others, you’re needed too, and there, probably, in one of those moments, cannabis will do its part. A bit of gratitude to the plant for its share, and a truth murmured under one’s breath: you can’t buy with money, replace with AI, or fuel with a joint what God didn’t grant.

<p>The post Weed Doesn’t Make You Creative. It Just Gets You Out of the Way. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Weed Doesn’t Make You Creative. It Just Gets You Out of the Way. appeared first on Paradise Found.

Cannabis doesn’t give you talent you don’t already have. A psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens breaks down what THC actually does to the creative brain — and why the myth of the green muse is more complicated than it looks.

The myth of the green muse has coasted through history, dodging potholes between the weed Snoop Dogg smoked in sunny 90s Long Beach and today’s trap recording studios, dives overflowing with synthesizers, wisps of smoke, and dry coughs. Cough, cough. It’s a toxic romance, an urban legend that swears up and down that a couple of puffs will turn you into a writer on par with Mariana Enríquez, or somehow hack the Matrix so you can paint with the grace of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

But to understand what really happens in an artist’s mind when THC enters the picture, we need to lower the volume, turn off the autotune, and apply some, let’s say, “biological humility,” a concept that Dr. María Celeste Romero, a psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens, introduces to High Times. So—how’s your biological humility?

According to Romero, although science is beginning to unravel the plant’s basic mechanisms, the brain remains a map with too many unknown territories: “It’s such a vast, complex organ that we understand so little… we know enough to recognize the effectiveness of certain treatments, but as for accuracy… well, I’m a little humble.”

Nevertheless, this starting point—this partial knowledge—is enough to confirm that weed doesn’t give you a talent you don’t already have. No, my friend: it’s not like spinach for Popeye or mushroom for Mario Bros. Not at all. It does, for instance, function as a modulator of processes that already exist within oneself. It acts as a kind of hack that helps you see what was already there—just in higher resolution.

What actually happens in your brain

At the heart of the creative “spark” is divergent thinking. Neurobiologically, this is explained by dopamine and CB1 receptors. When those are activated, cannabis produces the effect that the doctor defines as a filter-free zone: “Basically, what it does is, through dopaminergic modulation, lower inhibitory control.”

CB1 receptors are G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) located mainly in the central nervous system — brain, basal ganglia, hippocampus — and peripheral nervous system, being fundamental in the endocannabinoid system. They are activated by endocannabinoids (anandamide) and phytocannabinoids such as THC, modulating the release of neurotransmitters, memory, pain, appetite, and emotions, as confirmed by an academic paper from Temple University.

“Our brain tries to reduce uncertainty and control entropy… when we use cannabis, this inhibitory control decreases, which helps us enter a dynamic that allows us to associate concepts that are already inside us.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero, psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens

Sober, the brain acts like a bureaucrat, discarding ideas as far-fetched, disconnected, weak, lacking substance, or too risky to be considered. Cannabis replaces the censor. It facilitates cognitive flexibility where “trippy” becomes a viable possibility, allowing ideas to flow with less judgment from the internal logic police.

The dose problem — and the myth of smoking twenty joints

But beware: this isn’t a blank check. There’s a biological limit dictated by the dose. There’s a myth that “more smoke means more genius,” but in reality, it’s more like a booster that only works at moderate levels.

“If the dose was too high, there was no stimulus for creativity… it’s not about smoking twenty joints to get an idea; maybe it’s better to take a break from your phone.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero

Set, setting and creative hygiene

Beyond the chemistry, there is the ritual. Creativity doesn’t depend solely on THC, but also on the set and setting. “It’s not the same to smoke while watching a movie as it is to sit and smoke in front of a piano or with a guitar nearby,” the psychiatrist points out. Context is what turns the substance into a tool. For her, the plant intensifies visual and auditory perception, something she defines as “the cornerstone of art.” Weed can deepen your connection to your senses, allowing you to feel more directly “touched by art.”

But be careful, very careful, about relying entirely on external stimuli. Continuous use causes the endocannabinoid system to activate its defense protocol: “The receptors shut down. They form a protective layer and stay inside, encased in a bubble.” This makes the organ less receptive to the impact of cannabinoids. To prevent the brain from “forgetting” how to be creative on its own, Romero recommends some mental hygiene: one full t-break day each week so that the receptors can return to the field fresh as a daisy.

Creative health is an ecosystem: “The endocannabinoid system is activated by everything that’s good for us… if I want to overexert myself and don’t take care of the basics—hydration, food, exercise, relationships—everything gets placed in the hands of the plant, and that’s a lot of responsibility for one being.”

What cannabis actually does — and doesn’t — do

Romero also challenges the prevailing prejudices: cannabis doesn’t cause structural damage like alcohol or harder substances — something we frequently highlight, debunk, and underline in these pages. In fact, on the contrary, its ability to promote “forgetting” is pure medicine for post-traumatic stress, helping the brain modulate the discomfort of negative or problematic memories.

“If plants teach us anything with their entourage effect, it’s that life is collaborative.”

Dr. María Celeste Romero

So, plants don’t create geniuses, but they help the artist—or the aspiring enlightened one—enter that necessary state to break the mold. You need others, you’re needed, and there, probably, weed will do its part. A bit of gratitude to the plant for its contribution and a truth murmured under one’s breath: you can’t buy, replace with AI, or fuel with a joint what God didn’t grant.

<p>The post Weed Doesn’t Make You Creative. It Just Gets Out of the Way first appeared on High Times.</p>

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From robot canopy scanners to algorithmic breeders to AI-powered dispensary counters, artificial intelligence is remaking cannabis at every level. The question nobody has fully answered: does this help the people who built the culture, or does it replace them?

Somewhere in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a robot is watching the weed grow.

It moves along cables strung above the canopy. Slowly, methodically scanning every leaf and bud site in an 86,000-square-foot cannabis facility owned by PURPLEFARM, one of Canada’s premier genetics enterprises. The machine is called the Spyder. It was built by Neatleaf, a Santa Cruz startup founded by Elmar Mair, a former head of perception at Google X. It never sleeps. Twenty-four hours a day, it generates millions of data points on plant height, chlorosis patterns, early signs of mildew, temperature differentials between air and leaf surface. Then it feeds everything into an artificial intelligence system that suggests actions to growers.

PURPLEFARM says yields have jumped 20 percent since the Spyder arrived.

To understand the scale of what that machine is doing, consider what it replaces. On the weekend this piece came together, the author visited some agronomic field trials for hemp varieties. A team of three or four technicians and agronomists collected fewer parameters than Spyder captures in a single square meter. That manual process took at least 30 minutes. You get the picture.

Across the American cannabis industry, from genetics labs to dispensary checkout counters, AI has moved from pitch decks into actual operations. The technology is monitoring grow rooms, predicting potency before harvest, automating compliance paperwork, and deciding when to text a customer about a sale. The question that hangs over all of it — the one that matters to growers, trimmers, budtenders and small-shop owners — is straightforward: does this help me, or does this replace me?

The answer turns out to be complicated. And far more interesting than the hype suggests.

Robots in the canopy

Cannabis cultivation has always been a data problem. Indoor grows require constant calibration of humidity, temperature, CO₂, light spectrum, irrigation and nutrients — variables that interact in nonlinear ways and shift with every strain and every room. A great grower holds all of this in their head. But even the best grower cannot be in every room, watching every plant, around the clock.

Neatleaf has deployed its Spyder in more than 30 facilities, with a waiting list that now includes berry producers. iAnthus brought the system into its New Jersey grow and reported reduced crop loss through early anomaly detection. At 22Red in Arizona, head of cultivation Stephen Hess described it as a way to escape the tyranny of manually cross-referencing dozens of environmental readings. Other players occupy different pieces of the same territory: AgEye Technologies develops spectral imaging for crop monitoring; Jushi Holdings has embedded machine learning into its entire building-management system; companies like iUNU and AEssenseGrows specialize in computer vision that detects pest infestations at stages invisible to the human eye.

Some cultivators have pushed further still, using AI-powered spectral imaging to measure cannabinoid potency directly on the plant and screen for diseases like Hop Latent Viroid. In November 2025, researchers at the University of Adelaide published a method combining hyperspectral leaf scanning with machine learning that predicted cannabinoid concentrations weeks before harvest with 94.74 percent accuracy.

Breeding by algorithm

Below the grow room, AI is beginning to reshape the genetic identity of cannabis itself. Breeding has always been slow work — pick parents, cross them, grow out thousands of seeds, phenotype the best, repeat over years. Machine learning compresses this by simulating potential crosses computationally before a single seed hits soil.

Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan and Renaissance Bioscience demonstrated that by feeding genetic markers, growth data and chemical assays into AI models, breeders can predict how combinations will influence cannabinoid content, terpene profiles and plant morphology. Companies like Phylos Bioscience and Front Range Biosciences have built their businesses around this approach.

The promise is extraordinary. The peril is equally real. Legal markets already incentivize a narrow band of traits — high THC, fast flowering, extraction-friendly architecture. AI could accelerate that genetic bottleneck, eroding the diversity that makes the plant adaptable and culturally rich. The monoculture problem that hollowed out corn and wheat genetics could arrive in cannabis on a compressed timeline, turbocharged by algorithms optimizing for quarterly earnings. California has recognized the stakes: the Department of Cannabis Control funded a study to catalog and preserve legacy cultivars. Whether the industry moves fast enough to protect those archives before the algorithms narrow the field remains an open question.

From the lab to the license

Between the harvest and the shelf, AI is making quieter but consequential inroads. On the processing floor, sensor-laden extraction equipment now monitors temperature, pressure and solvent ratios in real time. Machine learning models adjust parameters mid-run, maintaining consistent potency and terpene profiles across batches — turning what used to be one technician’s personal recipe into a continuously improving digital playbook. Robotic trimmers are getting smarter. Automated packaging lines sync with inventory systems. In the testing lab, algorithms trained on vast chemical databases help HPLC and gas chromatography systems identify cannabinoids faster and detect contaminants at levels below human perception.

Then there is compliance. Cannabis is among the most regulated industries in almost every state. Seed-to-sale tracking, testing mandates, labeling rules and sales reporting all vary by jurisdiction, change frequently and punish errors with fines or license revocation. CannabisRegulations.ai has trained a language model specifically on state cannabis statutes and enforcement actions, allowing operators to ask jurisdiction-specific questions and receive cited answers in seconds. Flowhub uses the tool when entering new markets. Prelude offers an AI-powered ERP that automates reporting and syncs with Metrc, the tracking system now running in 30 regulated markets. Solink provides AI video analytics that cross-reference POS data with camera footage to catch mis-weighing, unauthorized discounts and internal theft.

All of this — the autonomous robots, the algorithmic breeders, the compliance bots — paints a picture of an industry being remade by technology at every level. Depending on your disposition, it sounds either thrilling or terrifying. What it rarely sounds like is human.

What actually happened at the register

To get a more grounded view, the author called Rocco Del Priore. He is a computer scientist who dropped out of college with eight credits left, worked as an engineer at Apple and co-founded Sweed — a point-of-sale and retail platform that today powers hundreds of dispensaries for some of the largest cannabis companies in the United States, including Verano and Curaleaf. He has spent nearly nine years building technology for cannabis retail and is, by his own description, a pot guy. His company has an entire team dedicated to AI. He is exactly the kind of person who should be bullish on the technology’s transformative power. He kept undercutting the hype.

Sweed was among the first cannabis tech companies to pilot an AI recommendation engine at the point of sale, running a test in Arizona about two years ago. The early results caught Del Priore off guard.

“In the beginning, it wasn’t suggesting a whole lot of products that the customer wasn’t going to purchase anyway. But it was creating this really magical experience at the cash register.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

He described a returning customer walking up to the counter. The budtender pulls up their profile. Instantly, the system surfaces their usual order. The budtender says, “Welcome back. Blueberry or pear today?” Before anyone talks about upselling, something more fundamental happens: a better human interaction.

“I didn’t expect that. I thought the story was going to be about sexy sales numbers. But the budtenders were excited to have a better relationship with the customer.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

Meanwhile, the feature many in the industry had predicted would be the breakout — a guided AI tool that asks consumers how they want to feel and recommends products accordingly — fizzled. “Our lived experience did not match up with the case studies we were reading,” Del Priore said. “A small group of users engaged heavily. The vast majority didn’t interact with it at all.”

What moved the needle was something far less glamorous. Sweed built a feature called “smart sending” that uses AI to determine the optimal moment to deliver a marketing message to each individual customer, rather than blasting everyone at 2 p.m. The result: a 10 percent bump in ROI across every campaign that used it.

Del Priore had expected the opposite — the guided experience to be the headline, smart sending to be a footnote. The data reversed his assumptions.

The future is not ours to see

The tempting narrative about AI in cannabis is about consolidation — big companies deploying big technology to crush small operators. Del Priore thinks it could go the other way.

He asked for a picture of two businesses. A 150-store MSO with a four-person regional marketing team designing campaigns and building customer segmentation strategies. Then a three-store independent where one person — often the owner — handles purchasing, discounting, staffing and marketing alone. There is no way that solo operator matches the output of a dedicated enterprise team.

Unless AI does the work for them.

“If you give these people tools that will do a lot of this work, suddenly you could see a smaller chain marketing in a similar way to a larger enterprise-based chain. I think that could create a really interesting change in the ecosystem.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

He also described a near-future he called “proactive AI”: the system analyzes inventory, identifies a slow-moving SKU, cross-references it with the right customer cohort, drafts a promotional message and picks the optimal send time. The operator approves. “Instead of me going to the computer and saying, I would like you to do something,” he said, “imagine the computer coming at me and being like, ‘I think I should do something. Will you let me’?”

According to this optimistic view, AI in cannabis retail could function as a leveling mechanism — handing the analytical firepower of a Fortune 500 marketing department to a family-run dispensary in St. Paul.

425,000 workers and counting

The U.S. legal cannabis industry supports 425,002 full-time equivalent jobs, according to the 2025 Vangst Jobs Report. That figure dipped 3.4 percent from the prior year — even as retail sales grew to $30.1 billion. About 30 percent of those jobs sit in cultivation, 23 percent in retail, 17 percent in processing and packaging, and 30 percent in ancillary services. Cultivation and processing — roughly 200,000 positions — are the segments most directly in the path of automation, with entry-level roles like trimmers, harvesters and packaging-line workers first in line. By one estimate, between 60,000 and 90,000 positions face meaningful disruption over the next three to five years.

But Del Priore says the industry is already desperately short-staffed. “You go to any organization, small or large, and you ask them if they need more or less people,” he said, “and all of them are going to say more.” He attributes the shortage partly to the lack of mainstream software support caused by federal prohibition and partly to the industry’s expansion outpacing the supply of experienced talent. AI, in his view, fills gaps rather than eliminates positions.

“There’s a world in which those jobs are at risk. But the demand is so high right now that cannabis is unlikely to be impacted the way you might see software engineering.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

It is a plausible argument with a built-in expiration date. Whether it holds depends on two variables nobody can predict: the pace of legalization and the pace of AI development. If both accelerate simultaneously, his optimism stands. If the technology matures faster than the market expands, jobs will be lost. That dynamic is already visible in the year-over-year numbers.

The menu and the waiter

Near the end of the conversation, Del Priore offered an analogy worth sitting with. Imagine walking into a restaurant. You sit down, pick up the menu, read through all the dishes, narrow it to two choices. Then the waiter comes over and you ask: what do you think — the branzino or the chicken parm?

The technology is already good enough to monitor canopies, predict potency, automate compliance and sharpen marketing. It will get better. Jobs will shift. Genetic diversity will need defending. Consumers should be aware of the ever-increasing impact of algorithmic marketing on what they buy and why. And the question of what happens when algorithms start deciding which brands win deserves a serious answer.

Still, there might be a version of this future that serves the culture, the plant and the people who have built their lives around both.

We will be watching.

<p>The post AI Is Growing Your Weed Now first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post AI Is Growing Your Weed Now appeared first on Paradise Found.

Neuralink can simulate euphoria and stimulate the reward system on demand. But can a chip replace the ritual of rolling, lighting and getting lost in the smoke?

In Arco, an animated film nominated for an Academy Award and presented worldwide at the Cannes Film Festival, the young protagonist dons a multicolored hood with a diamond on his forehead that allows him to travel through time. Without it, he can’t or doesn’t know how. That diamond is what gives him that “power.” Recently, a video went viral on social media showing several people playing a video game without joysticks — supposedly using only their brains.

Inside their heads, like Arco’s protagonist with his diamond on his forehead, is the Neuralink chip: the device that allows them to control the character without using their fingers. Using nothing but their thoughts. Sometimes science fiction knocks on the door of the future. Other times, like now, science fiction and the future are one and the same. At this moment, science fiction is knocking on the door of reality.

After years of development, the Neuralink brain implant — a kind of mind computer developed by Elon Musk’s team — is starting to show results. Musk has even promised industrial production by 2026. Currently, Neuralink, which reportedly already has more than a dozen people living with a functioning implant, focuses on decoding neural signals and restoring senses.

However, the long-term potential points toward enhanced perception: from ultraviolet vision to mind expansion. Will humankind’s natural abilities be replaced by information supplied by a chip? Will the next Lionel Messi, LeBron James, or Shohei Ohtani be born, or made? One piece of pop-culture trivia: Noland Arbaugh, the first patient, uses the implant to play Civilization VI and Mario Kart. He has already broken world speed records using nothing but his thoughts.

Will the Chip Replace the Plant?

So far, so good. But some questions remain — questions everyday life will have to confront: Will cannabis still be necessary as a source of heightened sensitivities, perceptual experiences, comfort, health, and distortion? Is the plant’s sensory hegemony coming to an end? Will the chip compensate for what the soil provides?

What we know so far: Neuralink acts through electrical impulses in specific areas. And while it could simulate states of euphoria or relaxation by stimulating the reward system, the cannabis experience will still act as a systemic chemical bath across the entire brain. So, if technology seeks precision, cannabis offers organic alteration and, consequently, an unpredictable logic.

If technology seeks precision, cannabis offers organic alteration and an unpredictable logic.

For now, what we’re seeing from Neuralink is just a tiny glimpse into the future. And it’s likely that, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after, it could offer on-demand states of consciousness. What will obviously be missing is the ritual itself — the part tied to the plant: rolling, lighting, smoking, getting lost in the swirling wisps of smoke. Something a chip probably won’t replace completely.

What will obviously be missing is the ritual itself — rolling, lighting, smoking, getting lost in the swirling wisps of smoke. Something a chip probably won’t replace completely.

To Whom Do Our Thoughts Belong?

After all, if a chip can deliver sensory signals, it might be possible to “live” in universes with different physical laws. At the same time, the development of artificial intelligence is accelerating at a furious pace. There are already users with implants who can “design” 3D objects simply by thinking about them. That is, they “create” an “imagined reality.” What manifests in the mind could also appear. Or disappear.

From here, an ethical question arises: if Neuralink devices collect neural signals that can reveal emotions, intentions, and intimate cognitive processes, to whom do our thoughts belong? Imagine this: when (and if) “everyone” has one of these chips implanted, there will be a risk that this data will be used to sell advertising. Or worse, much worse, to orchestrate much-feared forms of extreme surveillance — and live, among neurons and transistors, with Big Brother.

If Neuralink devices collect neural signals that reveal emotions, intentions, and intimate cognitive processes — to whom do our thoughts belong?

Huxley, Gibson and the God Button

In 1957, evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, Aldous’s brother, coined the term “transhumanism,” stating that human beings should be improved through science and technology. In 1984, Canadian writer William Gibson wrote the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which triggered the definitive evolution of artificial intelligence, forever merging technology and human consciousness. And after his experiments with mescaline, Aldous Huxley managed to explore perception and reduce the activity of what he called the “brain’s reducing valve.” He shared this experience in his book The Doors of Perception, ultimately arguing something that Neuralink could undermine: the brain’s function of filtering reality so that, in essence, we don’t lose our minds among so much information.

So, if mescaline (or cannabis, or any other chemical trigger) can open that valve, allowing the “Being-in-Itself” of things to pass through, Neuralink could become the first technological tool capable of “hacking” that valve. Transhumanist thoughts, cyberpunk fears. The implant could allow for manually adjusting that valve of perception. A license to fantasize: imagine turning up the volume of colors, lowering the intensity of pain, or tuning into data frequencies we normally ignore.

So, if the perception of the sacred is linked to neural firings in the temporal lobe, will Neuralink be able to activate that “God button” at will? Will a mystical revelation have the same value if it was triggered by software code instead of a spiritual quest or an organic process?

Will a mystical revelation have the same value if it was triggered by software code instead of a spiritual quest or an organic process?

Of course, Huxley advocated for individual freedom to explore consciousness. And if a company like Neuralink controls that interface, will it also decide which doors open — and which remain closed? Will there be a terms and conditions button for the perceptual realm?

Cannabis, Unfazed

And here, some clues hint at a dilemma that may be looming: the danger of having our minds “hacked.” For this very reason, Chile became the first country in the world to constitutionally protect neurorights, expressly prohibiting the non-consensual manipulation of brain activity. The next? Spain, which has been preparing legislation on the matter since mid-2025.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is grappling with some technical challenges, such as brain tissue healing and battery life. Alongside this, cannabis remains unfazed, offering a “pure experience,” without sutures, chips, electrodes, or uncertainties: it requires no software updates or disclaimers. Thus, perhaps, in the future, amidst transistors and resin, cannabis will still be necessary to navigate the Matrix: an algorithm capable of replicating the plant’s imperfect poetry has yet to be invented.

<p>The post How to Hack the ‘God Button’: Could Neuralink Replace the Cannabis Ritual? first appeared on High Times.</p>

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In 1994, Melanie Dreher published a study showing that cannabis-exposed babies thrived. The medical establishment went silent. Thirty years later, she’s still trying to finish the work — and pregnant women are still being jailed.

More than 25 years ago, a landmark study quietly challenged one of modern medicine’s most deeply rooted assumptions: Cannabis use during pregnancy is inherently harmful. The findings were striking. The response was silence. And today, while cannabis laws liberalize across much of the world, pregnant women and mothers remain among the most vulnerable to punishment and stigma.

“It’s very disappointing,” says Melanie Dreher, the nurse-anthropologist and public health scholar who worked on the original study. “There are so many women in this country who could benefit from cannabis therapy during and post-pregnancy. Instead, they are reported to the authorities, often jailed and even separated from their newborns, depriving them of breast milk.”

She cited one such case of a woman whose hair tested positive for cannabis during labor and delivery in a Michigan hospital. “The infant was immediately placed into foster care and the parents left the hospital without their newborn,” she says. “Friends recommended me and I contacted the State Attorney’s office to better understand a policy that required the removal of children from their parents. I was told: ‘In Michigan, we believe that there is an inherent danger for children in homes where there is exposure to ‘harmful substances’ and who need to be protected by the state.’”

A Perfect Researcher for the Job

Melanie Dreher’s path into cannabis research was purely accidental. Initially trained as a registered nurse, she was encouraged early in her career to pursue a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Her professors, Dr. Lambros Comitas and Dr. Margaret Mead, invited her to participate in a federally funded comparative study of cannabis in Jamaica, where the plant was widely used by working class men. She demurred with a cordial “Thank you very much, but I don’t think so.” Her professors asked why. Her response: “I’ve never been to Jamaica. I’ve never done ethnographic fieldwork, and I’ve never smoked marijuana.”

Mead’s reply: “You’re perfect.”

Dreher landed in Jamaica, where she soon realized that cannabis is not criminalized or glamorized. It is medicine, nourishment and community. Sugarcane workers take ganja breaks — not coffee breaks — to sustain themselves through grueling labor. Mothers prepare cannabis tea for children to promote health, prevent illness, and improve learning.

One evening, while sitting in the yard of a sugar cane worker who participated in her study, Dreher noticed that he was smoking a spliff while holding his young daughter in his lap. Dreher watched him inhale deeply and exhale the smoke directly into the little girl’s face. Somewhat alarmed, she gently suggested that his daughter may be inhaling the smoke he was producing.

He responded (smiling) that she has asthma and he was curing her with ganja. Within minutes, the child’s breathing eased and regulated. As she dug a little deeper, she stopped studying the men and began her study of the women who use cannabis for health-related purposes and who grow, prepare and sell the plant as medicine.

The Jamaican Pregnancy Study

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, concerns about pregnancy and medication safety were widespread, particularly in the wake of pharmaceuticals prescribed for morning sickness that resulted in birth defects. Jamaican women, by contrast, were managing nausea with cannabis tea, not pills, and reported little to no morning sickness. So Dreher proposed a formal study.

Working with Harvard-affiliated pediatrician Kevin Nugent and drawing on the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale, the team conducted the first systematic study of cannabis use during pregnancy. Thirty women who already used cannabis were matched by age and parity with non-using mothers. All were rural, healthy, and from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

Babies were assessed at two days, five days, and one month after birth.

The results stunned the researchers. “The babies with the most cannabis exposure did the best,” says Dreher. “Across measures of alertness, motor development, and social engagement.” Still, the team hesitated to publish. At the time, the medical consensus — unsupported by data — was that cannabis exposure was dangerous. But the study was ultimately published, thanks largely to Nugent’s persistence.

Then they waited for backlash.

Nothing happened.

No outrage.

No replication.

No follow-up funding.

No public debate.

Still Fighting at 82

Now in her eighties and a grandmother of 10, Dreher remains undeterred. Today, she’s trying again to fund a small, modern study on cannabis and pregnancy. “It wouldn’t even cost that much,” she says. “With $100,000, we could do something meaningful.” She has already contributed $25,000 herself.

Nevertheless, funding remains elusive. Dreher claims previous NIH proposals scored well scientifically — until legislators intervened after seeing a photo of a healthy Jamaican cannabis mom and her baby girl. It was taken by Dreher and featured in an NIH publication sent to US legislators, accompanied by a caption noting cannabis use and healthy babies. “The lawmakers went nuts,” claims Dreher. “They said they would never fund the follow-up study. Ever. NIH had to comply.”

This is why she’s teaming up with physician Genester Wilson-King, MD FACOG, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, and longtime collaborator Rebekah Hudgins, an anthropologist and epidemiologist whose work focuses on women’s and children’s health and the community systems that shape well-being.

Hudgins explains that the study needs to be revisited since their combination of qualitative and quantitative data provides a rich portrait of the Jamaican households and children. “Surveys and testing alone simply cannot uncover the kind of data needed to understand any social issue,” says Hudgins, “and I think this is especially true with cannabis use.” During her two years in Jamaica, Hudgins conducted ethnographic observations of the 60 children in a case-control study.

Observations covered all waking hours for each child within one week of their 5th birthday. She was with families all day, following children during play, school, church. Wherever they went, “I was there with my notepad,” remembers Hudgins. “These 60 children had been in the study since birth, so they knew Melanie and had met other research assistants who were in the field before me. I believe I lived in Jamaica longer than any of the field researchers, so I got to know the families very well.”

Photo by Brooke Balentine on Unsplash

The team also completed the standardized McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities, as well as other standardized tests with each child around their 5th birthday, and collected information about weight and height. The observations around the children’s 5th birthday were the most intensively documented period, but Hudgins stayed in contact with the families throughout her time there. “In fact,” she says, “more than 30 years later, I still occasionally get a call from one of the children or a mother.”

For her part, Dr. Wilson-King — a nationally recognized speaker on women’s health and cannabis — focuses on the plant’s use in gynecology and, where appropriate and responsible, in obstetrics. She serves on the Experts Board of Doctors for Drug Policy Reform and as President of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, where she leads its first female-majority executive board. She has also served as an expert witness in dozens of cases. “I have provided written testimony contributing to the complete dismissal of charges in several of them,” she says. Her approach is evidence-based, patient-centered and openly advocates for women’s rights across all spaces — including testifying before a medical board to support the inclusion of a specific diagnosis for women to qualify for cannabis use.

Observation Summary

In the Jamaican study, children of mothers who use cannabis did not differ from others regarding motor skills, attention, or general behavior. They were more likely to attend school and have multiple trusted adults who cared for them. Further, children exposed to cannabis in utero weighed slightly more and were slightly taller. Overall, the households of cannabis-using families had greater resources to support and care for their children.

“These findings are important,” says Hudgins. “The Jamaican study is the only study of its kind with a predominantly single drug-use population that collected extensive ethnographic data and standardized testing data and found no detrimental effects even within the highest consumption households.”

More research is clearly needed, and the team is interested in continuing to learn about cannabis use from women in this country to help inform social policy and practice and shift the public view of the plant.

Mothers Find the Study Anyway

Decades later, the study lives on. Underground. Pregnant women find it and share it. Cannabis-using mothers quietly pass it through private networks. Calls continue to pour in. Mothers write. Now, some judges listen when Dreher testifies on behalf of women facing incarceration. “I once got recognized by a tech support worker,” Dreher laughs. “She said, ‘We’re not supposed to comment on what’s on your screen, but…are you the one who did that study?’ She told me it was their moms’ group’s bible.”

Still, in medical institutions, skepticism remains entrenched. At a presentation to neurologists and psychiatrists at a major Chicago medical center, Dreher was told cannabis could never be endorsed without double-blind clinical trials. Her response was blunt: “It’s a good thing women don’t need you to prescribe it.”

The Hypocrisy of Modern Medicine

Physicians, argues Dreher, occupy a comfortable middle ground: unwilling to study or teach cannabis medicine, unwilling to treat patients directly with it and yet happy to charge hundreds of dollars for medical cannabis cards. “They make money without accountability,” she says. “And very few even teach the endocannabinoid system in medical school. That should tell you everything.”

Even in states with progressive cannabis laws, pregnancy remains a line that doctors and lawmakers refuse to cross. According to Dreher, in Illinois, hundreds of thousands of cannabis-related convictions have been expunged — yet pregnant women remain largely excluded from those reforms. “This is not about documentation,” she says. “It’s about convincing the public. And about misogyny. About control.”

Cannabis use by women, particularly mothers, provokes moral panic. In Dreher’s view, the plant threatens multiple power structures at once — pharmaceutical, medical, and cultural narratives about “good motherhood” — partly because it can’t be patented, packaged or controlled.

Parallel Paths Forward

Change won’t come from science alone. “We need parallel paths,” says Dreher. “Scientific validation and lived experience. Anecdotes matter, but the world demands data.” Until then, mothers remain silent, fearful and criminalized.

“There are so many women with secrets,” she says. “Underground, because they have to be. Because they’ll go to jail.” Still, Dreher is hopeful — especially in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, and storytellers who can reach hearts where academic journals have failed.

“More people will listen,” she says. “And we need that. We need all of it.”

After more than half a century of evidence, observation, and resistance, Dreher’s message remains unwavering: Cannabis is not harming mothers and babies. The system is.

This article reports on the research and views of Melanie Dreher, Ph.D., and her collaborators. It does not constitute medical advice. Readers with questions about cannabis use during pregnancy should consult a healthcare provider.

<p>The post The Study Nobody Wanted: Cannabis, Pregnancy, and the Women Still Paying the Price first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Terpenes are chemistry and neurobiology working together. Artificial flavors are something else entirely. Here’s what the difference actually means for your cannabis experience.

In cannabis culture, it’s often said that cannabinoids are the “engine,” while terpenes are the “steering wheel.” In fact, as a phrase attributed to scientist and neurologist Ethan Russo goes: “Terpenes are modulators of experience.” So terpenes are much more than simple aromatic molecules. But what is the difference between terpenes and artificial flavors? Why do some “flavors” hack the brain? Are we losing the true essence of the plant in the pursuit of a, shall we say, “manufactured” intensity?

“Terpenes are modulators of experience.”

Ethan Russo, neurologist and cannabis researcher

“In plants, they evolved as part of a defense and communication system—repelling pests, attracting pollinators, and responding to environmental stressors. In humans, those same molecules interact with receptors involved in mood, alertness, and perception. When consumed alongside cannabinoids, terpenes influence how those cannabinoids are experienced by shaping intensity, duration, and qualitative effects,” says Daniel Cook, CEO of True Terpenes, a leading company in terpene science and production. “It’s not mysticism: it’s chemistry and neurobiology working together.”

Here, too, the winds of change are blowing. Specifically, the industry has expanded (and is constantly being reconfigured) toward new flavor experiences: intense, sweet, and “dessert-like” profiles that make an immediate impression and resonate positively with many consumers. These profiles highlight creativity and innovation, and have helped attract new people to the 420 segment.

At the same time, there has always been a strong interest in more complex and earthy aromas, which have long defined cannabis. These aromas unfold gradually and faithfully reflect the plant, tending to prioritize depth, structure, and continuity throughout the experience.

“Both approaches have a place. What matters is clarity of intent and matching the sensory design to the consumer. Some people want excitement right away, others want a slower build, and many enjoy both depending on the moment. The opportunity for the industry is to recognize that not all flavor journeys are the same,” Cook adds.

How Artificial Flavors Hack the Brain

However, it’s worth mentioning that highly artificial flavors “hack” the brain’s reward system and deliver experiences that hit fast and hard. Why? Because “they trigger the brain’s reward circuitry — especially dopamine — by delivering intense sensory signals without the contextual cues the body expects,” Cook explains. A similar mechanism can be seen with sugar.

“Natural aromas and flavors tend to unfold gradually and are processed alongside texture, minor compounds, and other sensory variables. One invites the brain into an experience; the other demands attention instantly. That difference helps explain why some flavors feel satisfying while others feel exciting but fleeting.”

“One invites the brain into an experience; the other demands attention instantly.”

Daniel Cook, CEO, True Terpenes

This sensory urgency leads us to a deeper issue: the metabolic challenge. Specifically, when the body and brain receive “flavor” signals stripped of nutrients. “When the brain detects certain flavor cues — like ‘orange’ — it anticipates corresponding nutrients and metabolic feedback. When those nutrients don’t arrive, the body sometimes enters a seeking loop, essentially signaling that something is missing. This mismatch between sensory input and metabolic output helps explain why intensity without substance often leaves people wanting more,” Cook explains.

Chemical Cosmetics: When Flavor Masks Quality

For all these reasons, “artificial flavors” are considered a form of “chemical cosmetics,” since — in reality — these “artificial flavors” can mask quality rather than reflect it. “It’s a fair analogy… Just as cosmetics can obscure natural cues, synthetic flavors communicate through a different sensory channel than natural systems. When aroma is used to mask instead of signal quality, consumers lose an intuitive feedback mechanism that would otherwise guide good choices,” Cook observes.

Humans have been exposed to plant terpenes for thousands of years through food, herbs, and the environment. Our bodies recognize them. “Many modern flavor compounds are newer and can be useful tools, but they don’t always interact with the body in the same intuitive way,” adds Cook, who is currently working on Headstash, a product line that, he says, “changes how aroma is preserved and experienced in cannabis.”

Can You Retrain Your Palate?

But no matter what, that biological intuition isn’t lost, but sometimes buried beneath the roar of overstimulation. Then comes a hopeful question: can the palate be retrained after inhabiting a world of ultra-intense flavors? “Yes,” Cook reassures. “When people reduce their intake of ultra-flavored products, their senses tend to reset. Flavors and aromas that once felt muted start to become vivid again. Many consumers are surprised to rediscover how layered cannabis can be when nothing is overpowering it. Subtlety becomes enjoyable once the baseline shifts.”

“Many consumers are surprised to rediscover how layered cannabis can be when nothing is overpowering it. Subtlety becomes enjoyable once the baseline shifts.”

Daniel Cook, CEO, True Terpenes

Indeed, natural terpenes tend to feel fuller: they grow, plateau, and settle in a way the body recognizes. That arc can feel stabilizing and satisfying. In contrast, artificial flavors are usually designed for a quick hit: they deliver an immediate rush, but because they fade quickly, they can leave the user wanting more. One provides closure. The other encourages repetition.

Terpenes as the Steering Wheel

Ultimately, this ability to provide “closure” and fulfillment lies in the most celebrated technical function of terpenes: their capacity to direct the effect. “Different terpenes engage different neurological pathways. Some are associated with alertness and focus, while others promote calm or physical relaxation. They don’t replace cannabinoids — they shape how cannabinoids are interpreted by the brain,” Cook points out.

In the end, what the consumer seeks is a specific response from their own body. Therefore, understanding how terpenes alter the feeling of being “high” versus relaxation is the master key to conscious use. To start the engine, you also have to know how to steer.

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A viral survey claims 35% of Gen Z use substances before work. The number is everywhere on Instagram. It came from a rehab treatment marketing site, the math doesn’t match federal data, and the headlines buried what the survey actually measured. Here’s what the data really says.

You have probably seen the stat by now. “35% of Gen Z is getting high before work.” It’s been on Instagram, in Vice, in the New York Post, on every “9 to 5 but make it a side quest” meme that’s circulated for the past month.

The number comes from a single survey. It’s worth knowing where it came from, what it actually measured and why the math doesn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny.

Who’s behind the number

The survey was conducted by Drug Rehab USA, an addiction treatment marketing site. The methodology section discloses that the sample was 1,000 U.S. adults, recruited online, with a stratified design across age and gender. The author of the study is Andrew McKenna, deputy director of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence/Westchester.

Both organizations have a direct financial and institutional stake in the data showing that substance use is widespread and worsening. Drug Rehab USA exists to connect people to addiction treatment programs. NCADD is an addiction advocacy nonprofit. This doesn’t make their data wrong. It does mean any survey they produce should be read the way you’d read a tobacco-industry-funded study about cigarettes: with attention to who’s writing the questions and what story the funder is positioned to tell.

The math problem

The federal government runs the National Survey on Drug Use and Health every year. It interviews roughly 70,000 people and is the gold-standard data source on American substance use. The most recent NSDUH, published by SAMHSA in July 2025, found that 35% of young adults ages 18 to 25 used cannabis at all in the past year. About 21% reported past-month use.

Read those numbers next to each other for a second.

If the Drug Rehab USA survey were measuring cannabis specifically, it would be claiming that essentially every single Gen Z cannabis consumer in America gets high before work. Not before a concert. Not on weekends. Not after their shift. Specifically before work, every one of them. That’s not a statistic, it’s a math impossibility.

What rescues the survey from total absurdity is what got buried in the headlines.

What the headlines buried

The Drug Rehab USA survey didn’t ask Gen Z about cannabis specifically. It asked about “substances such as cannabis, alcohol, or prescription medications.” Three categories, lumped into one number, including legally prescribed anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids.

A graduate student taking their prescribed Adderall before clocking in at 8 a.m. is in the same statistical bucket as someone hitting a vape pen on the commute. The survey treats them as the same data point. The headlines treat the data point as “Gen Z is getting high.”

The other thing that got buried: Millennials actually scored higher than Gen Z in the same survey. 37% of Millennials reported substance use before work, compared to 35% of Gen Z. 62% of Millennials use alcohol to manage stress, compared to 61% of Gen Z. The data shows Millennials are slightly ahead of Gen Z on basically every metric the survey tracked. The “Gen Z is the most substance-dependent generation” framing is a headline grab, not a finding.

The Gen Z stress part is real

None of this means Gen Z isn’t stressed. The underlying conversation about generational anxiety is grounded in real data. The Deloitte 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which interviewed nearly 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, found that 40% of Gen Z report feeling stressed all or most of the time. That’s a serious finding from a serious methodology.

It’s also separate from the rehab marketing survey now circulating as fact.

Stress is real. The mental health crisis is real. Cannabis use among young adults has been documented for years by the federal government. None of those things require an addiction treatment company to manufacture data with a built-in panic angle.

How moral panics get made now

This is how the cycle works in 2026.

An organization with a financial stake in addiction treatment commissions a 1,000-person online survey. The survey lumps cannabis with alcohol and prescription medications and asks loaded questions about coping. The findings get a press release packaged for shareability. A few outlets pick it up without checking the methodology or comparing it against federal data. The numbers move from press release to news article to Instagram caption in about 72 hours. By the time anyone with a calculator notices the math doesn’t work, the panic has already done its job.

Gen Z is not getting high before work at the rates this survey claims. They might be more stressed than previous generations, more skeptical of pharmaceuticals, more open about cannabis. The federal data supports those broader trends. The “35% are pregaming the workday” framing is not data, it’s marketing.

Read the methodology. Check who funded it. Do the math.

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Dr. Dana Lambert left hospital pharmacy in 2013 to study cannabinoid pharmacology, learned plant medicine from indigenous elders, and bet her career on the whole plant. A new Oxford-published study shows two cannabinoids most dispensary customers have never asked for, CBC and CBG, can make silver work 64 times harder against MRSA, E. coli and Pseudomonas.

“I asked the cannabis plant (yes, I asked the plant itself, as recommended by the elders) to create better medicine.”

That is not a sentence you expect from a woman with a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences who runs a biotech company. Dr. Dana Lambert wrote it herself, in a personal essay published earlier this year. She meant it literally.

The contradiction is the point.

From the bedside to the lab

Lambert grew up on Vancouver Island, started a business degree at the University of British Columbia at 17, then transferred to pharmaceutical sciences when she realized she cared more about the chemistry of medicine than the business of it. She graduated as a licensed pharmacist in 2010 and went to work in hospitals. The job lasted two and a half years.

“I saw firsthand at patients’ bedsides the suffering, and too often, the mortality, caused by cancer, treatment-resistant infections, non-healing wounds, and chronic pain,” she wrote. “My job was to optimize drug therapy for patients, but all too often, the available treatments fell short.”

She left clinical pharmacy in 2013 and went back to UBC for a PhD in cannabinoid pharmacology. During her training she had also studied with indigenous elders on Vancouver Island and in Central America. One teaching stayed with her.

A woman with esophageal cancer who had failed chemotherapy with paclitaxel, a drug derived from Pacific yew bark, was reportedly cured after drinking tea prepared by an elder using the whole bark. The single isolated compound failed. The whole plant worked.

That observation became Lambert’s working thesis: pharmaceuticals routinely fail to capture the medicinal range of the plants they come from, because they isolate one active ingredient and discard everything else.

Cannabis is the plant for which this thesis was built.

“I asked the cannabis plant (yes, I asked the plant itself, as recommended by the elders) to create better medicine.”

Dr. Dana Lambert

What Oxford published

On April 21, the Journal of Applied Microbiology, an Oxford University Press journal, published a study from Lambert’s company, Andira Pharmaceuticals, and the University of British Columbia. The findings are not subtle.

The researchers tested silver, an antimicrobial used in wound care and medical devices for centuries, against three of the bacteria responsible for the worst hospital-acquired infections: MRSA, E. coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Silver alone is losing the fight, both to bacterial resistance and to its own toxicity at higher doses.

When the researchers added two cannabinoids most dispensary customers have never asked for, cannabichromene (CBC) and cannabigerol (CBG), the math changed. The combination cut the silver dose required by up to 64-fold. It converted weak bacterial growth inhibition into rapid killing. It cleared bacterial biofilms, which are present in over 60% of diabetic ulcers and which most antibiotics can’t touch.

“This work identifies a practical way to revitalize an existing antimicrobial that is already widely used in healthcare,” Lambert said in a statement.

The most consequential finding came from a 20-day resistance test. The researchers ran the silver-CBC-CBG combination side by side against fusidic acid, a standard antibiotic, exposing MRSA to both compounds at sub-lethal doses every day for three weeks. By day two, fusidic acid had already lost most of its punch. The combination held flat for the full passage.

A vacuum nobody else is filling

The framing of the paper is medical. The implication is bigger.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the World Health Organization’s top global health threats. Big Pharma has largely walked away from antibiotic development because the unit economics don’t work. Hospital-acquired infections cost the United States an estimated $28 to $45 billion a year, according to the Oxford paper.

Into that vacuum walked a Vancouver pharmacist with a PhD, a research team at UBC and a thesis she did not invent in a lab. She inherited it from a woman who beat esophageal cancer with tea.

Andira is now preparing two parallel Phase 1/2a clinical trials of the silver-CBC-CBG combination, branded as Silvanex Topical, for surgical wounds and chronic diabetic ulcers. Both are scheduled to begin in Q4 2026, with FDA Fast Track and QIDP applications to follow.

“I’m probably the furthest thing from an academic scientist you’ll ever meet.”

Dr. Dana Lambert

The plant was not a metaphor

Lambert is candid about how she got here. “I’m probably the furthest thing from an academic scientist you’ll ever meet,” she said in an earlier interview with this reporter. “I did it because I wanted to learn how to develop drugs and get involved in early-stage research and drug discovery.”

She has also been candid about the philosophical scaffolding. In her own essay, she wrote that her belief in the medicine she is developing rests on “the understanding that both human and plant intelligence came together to create them.”

Most pharma CEOs would never put that sentence in writing.

For thirty years the cannabis conversation in the United States has been a fight over THC. The medical horizon got handed to CBD, mostly through wellness products with thin clinical backing. Meanwhile CBC and CBG, the cannabinoids the industry treats as filler in full-spectrum products, are quietly the ones showing up in Oxford journals.

Lambert spent fifteen years preparing for this moment. The plant, in her telling, was not a metaphor.

The minor cannabinoids were never minor.

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