SlowToke
New Member
I'm listening to Russo's presentation to the Society Of Cannabis Clinicians and at 20:47 he says
"It's unclear if 11-OH-THC is any different with respect to its psychoactivity as compared to THC itself."
I was unaware of this fact. Up until this moment I'd accepted the widely promoted fact that 11-OH-THC was massively more psychoactive than THC.
We may need a little more information on this before we completely toss out the conventional wisdom on the psychoactive effect of 11-HO-THC, only because I have run across a couple of references in my studies that seem to support the idea that this metabolite has increased potency. Maybe not a massive increase, but one source had indicated an 4x increase over THC (sorry, can put my hands on that reference right now, but I'll keep looking). And this article had this to say:
Further evidence that the 11-OH Delta 9 THC is responsible for marihuana's effect was seen in oral and inhalation studies. By the oral route, blood levels of unchanged THC were relatively low compared to the radioactivity levels of the metabolic products at the time of peak subjective effect. While the blood level of unchanged THC at the peak oral effect was identical to that after intravenous injection of the 0.5 mg. dose, the psychologic, effect was much more pronounced after oral administration of the larger 20 mg. dose of THC. Again after inhalation, the plasma levels of metabolites correlate temporarily with the subjective effects, but the plasma levels of unchanged Delta 9 THC do not. (Lemberger, 1971, 1972, 1973; Galanter, 1972)
I know these studies are not recent, but let's find some current data to support the info in Russo's talk before throwing out this older data completely.