On today’s episode of of the podcast, I will discuss marijuana use and how it affects mental health with Daniel Binus, the chief psychiatrist at Beautiful Minds, near Sacramento, California. Also joining us is a third-year medical student, Victoria Agee.

Why are we even talking about marijuana? There are a few reasons we believe this is important to talk about. First, as medical professionals, we often see patients who want help with their anxiety, depression, ADD and suicidality. They say they use cannabis, and that they need cannabis, to help calm those symptoms. When we explain the research to them, it still takes them awhile to let go of their habits and embrace other forms of therapy and medication that is a better long-term option. Also, we head into a time when marijuana is being legalized, there are tons of THC companies that will benefit from suppressing this information and even suppress these studies we will reference here. Hiding this information could be detrimental to society’s mental health. While there are some potential benefits to one component of marijuana (CBD), something I will review in the future (evidence is fairly young in that field), the THC component can be highly damaging to mental health. Whether or not people are willing to admit it, cannabis is actually highly addictive. One of the symptoms of addiction is intellectualizing reasons for use. Not only does it change the way the brain functions, it changes the way we see and perceive the world. It also changes our visual and spatial abilities. If you’re an architect or use math in your job, it deeply affects those abilities as well. THC stays in your brain a long time—it can be weeks (or even a month) before people get the full function of their brain back and the fog has cleared. What is the research on cannabis? Ganja is from the cut tops of leaves (5-8% THC content) and hashish is from the resin and is therefore more potent (10-20% THC content) Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the most commonly used substance worldwide. It causes long-term changes in the brainRecent research shows that consistent cannabis use will change the way your DNA is expressed in the brain. It will upregulate and downregulate proteins in the brain, and can change the morphology of the way it works. Marijuana, in fact, leads to changes in our genes over time, called epigenetic changes. So the initial effect may be pleasure or fun, but long term, it can create changes that take months to develop in a way that people don’t understand why they are having new issues that pop up. Basically, it’s not changing your gene structure, but it is changing the expression of those genes. Anytime you make positive food choices or develop a consistent exercise routine or make physical changes, epigenetic changes occur that are healthy for long term change (see my episode on diet and exercise)It’s not surprising that marijuana also causes similar changes in the brain, but not in a healthy way. When people use cannabis heavily, it causes our endogenous cannabinoids that naturally occur within the body to shift, which can create a disruption in our natural release of cannabinoids. This actually creates a direct correlation between heavy cannabis use and lower IQs. It lowers intelligenceStudies show that over 20 year cannabis use, people lose an average of 6-8 IQ points. That means you could go from intelligent to average, or even average to below average.It affects men’s sexual healthIn a survey of 8,650 people, women had no association with any of the sexual problems from marijuana use. Men, however, had significant associations between daily cannabis use and reporting an inability to reach orgasm (OR 3.94), reaching orgasm too quickly (OR 2.68), and reaching orgasm too slowly (OR. 2.05). Among the 424 men who reported reaching orgasm too quickly, there was an association between frequency of cannabis use and the extent to which reaching orgasm too quickly was experienced as proble