31 December 2018
Concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - which causes the high - in herbal cannabis have risen from five per cent in 2006 to 10 per cent in 2016.
Experts have long warned of the dangers of high potency cannabis because of its established links to psychosis and mental health issues.
'What we are seeing in Europe is an increase in THC and either stable or decreasing levels of CBD, potentially making cannabis more harmful.
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link to www.dailymail.co.uk (secure)]
And while we're at it, please respond to this:
Doctors weigh in on British woman who supposedly overdosed on cannabis
[link to www.nydailynews.com (secure)] You're quick to come back with a lame and unoriginal insult. How about this time you comment on what other doctors are saying?
I can't read the link.
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries..... snip blah blah blah."
No worries, Francis. I'll post the article:
The coroner who said "cannabis poisoning" killed a British mother of three is likely blowing smoke.
Gemma Moss, 31, a devout Christian, reportedly collapsed and died after smoking half a joint at her home in Bournemouth, England.
Coroner Sheriff Payne found that she had moderate to high levels of pot in her system and attributed her death to cannabis toxicity, according to British news sites such as the Mirror Online and The Telegraph.
They say this would make her the first English woman to fatally overdose on marijuana.
"The postmortem could find no natural cause for her death, with the balance of probability that it is more likely than not that she died from the effects of cannabis," said Payne, according to The Telegraph.
The Daily News reached out to several New York doctors to see if someone could possibly die from pot.
A coroner thinks that Gemma Moss, from Bouremouth, Dorset, England, died from smoking pot. (BNPS/BNPS)
Dr. Bradley Flansbaum, a hospitalist at Lenox Hill Hospital, and Dr. Yasmin Hurd, professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, agreed that it is virtually impossible.
"From half a joint? That's ridiculous," Hurd said.
Both said that it is possible for someone to die after smoking pot if it had been laced with another drug. But that person would have died from the other, harder drug — not the cannabis.
"It would be very, very, very unlikely to get a lethal dose of the marijuana if wasn't adulterated with something," said Flansbaum.
They also agreed that the rush or anxiety from toking up could potentially exacerbate an underlying heart condition, or similar ailment, that could kill a person. Again, that condition, not the marijuana, would be responsible for taking the life.
Moss reportedly had moderate to high levels of cannabis in her system when she died, leading to the medical examiner to attribute her cause of death to 'cannabis toxicity.' (BNPS/BNPS)
Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, said a woman dying from pot is as likely as someone dying by walking off the edge of the Earth.
"It's been proven impossible. It flies in the face of decades and decades of medical research," said Tvert.
American Scientist, a prestigious science and technology magazine, published a report on the toxicity of recreational drugs. According to the study, a person would need to drink 10 times the average amount of alcohol it takes to get a buzz in order to overdose. But for marijuana, someone would need to consume more than 1,000 times the average amount it takes to get a little high in order to die.
"You would need to literally consume a third of your body weight in marijuana," Tvert said. "There are no acute marijuana deaths."
