When the first-ever reported death from THC in the United States was declared by a local coroner in Louisiana earlier this month, media reports across the country jumped on the claim.<\/p>\n
Fox News<\/a>, predictably, ran the most credulous headline: \u201cLouisiana coroner says woman died of THC overdose.\u201d Other mainstream sources aired skepticism from experts in the field, whose voices carry far more weight than that of Christy Montegut, coroner of St. John the Baptist Parish, some 30 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans.<\/p>\n The unnamed 39-year-old woman was found dead in her apartment in the town of La Place in February, and the autopsy determined that she had healthy organs, no evident illnesses, and no elevated levels of alcohol or other drugs in her body \u2014 just high levels of\u00a0THC<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt looked like it was all THC because her autopsy showed no physical disease or afflictions that were the cause of death,\u201d Montegut told the\u00a0New Orleans Advocate<\/a>. \u201cThere was nothing else identified in the toxicology \u2014 no other drugs, no alcohol. There was nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n Based on an interview with her boyfriend, Montegut said the THC in the woman\u2019s system likely came through the use of a vaping device with highly concentrated THC oil, even though no such device was actually found. The toxicology report said she had 8.4 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood \u2014 about 15 times the detection level. In the absence of the vape pen, Montegut went on the internet to try to determine what the concentrate level of the oil may have been and came up with a surmised 80% THC.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m thinking this lady must have vaped this THC oil and got a high level in her system and [it] made her stop breathing, like a respiratory failure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Montegut asserted to local CBS affiliate\u00a04WWL<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cat high levels, marijuana can cause respiratory depression, which means a decrease in breathing, and if it\u2019s a high enough level it can make you stop breathing.\u201d<\/p>\n Montegut\u2019s claim was met with skepticism even from the highest levels of prohibitionist officialdom.<\/p>\n Keith Humphreys, a former senior policy adviser at the White House\u00a0Office of National Drug Control Policy<\/a>, told the Advocate that with the huge quantities of cannabis consumed across the United States each year, more overdose deaths would logically be occurring if THC were really toxic at consumable levels.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year,\u201d Humphreys said. \u201cSo, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the generally reactionary\u00a0New York Post<\/a>\u00a0noted that the federal government\u2019s\u00a0National Institute on Drug Abuse<\/a>\u00a0admits that there have been no recorded deaths attributable to a cannabis overdose.<\/p>\n States the\u00a0NIDA website<\/a>: \u201cCan a person overdose on marijuana? An overdose occurs when a person uses enough of the drug to produce life-threatening symptoms or death. There are no reports of teens or adults dying from marijuana alone.\u201d It goes on to warn (of course) of\u00a0\u201csymptoms such as anxiety and paranoia, and in rare cases, an extreme psychotic reaction\u201d (this latter a\u00a0dubious enough<\/a>\u00a0claim) that can lead to an emergency room visit (theoretically). \u00a0<\/p>\n Go higher up the rungs of officialdom, to the global level, and the notion is dismissed more forthrightly.\u00a0The World Health Organization\u2019s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD<\/a>) stated in a 2018\u00a0report on cannabis toxicology<\/a>: \u201cCannabis is a relatively safe drug, which is not associated with acute fatal overdoses\u2026 Lethality studies in animals show the doses needed to induce mortality are well beyond what could possibly be consumed by a human.\u201d<\/p>\n Even Fox News, after their credulous headline, did cite Bernard Le Foll, an addiction specialist at the University of Toronto. He estimated that any dangerous threshold would likely fall between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the THC level found in the woman\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n The cannabis industry trade journal\u00a0MG Retailer<\/a>\u00a0spoke to Bonni Goldstein, a pediatrician who treats conditions such as epilepsy with cannabis medicines, and was featured in the 2018 documentary\u00a0\u201cWeed the People<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no known fatal overdose with cannabinoids,\u201d Goldstein said. \u201cIt is physiologically impossible, as there are no cannabinoid receptors in the area of the medulla oblongata [brain stem] that controls respiration.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And indeed the woman\u2019s boyfriend told investigators that she had three weeks before her death visited an emergency room over a chest infection, and was given over-the-counter medication. Complications related to this infection may be a far more likely culprit in her death than use of cannabis oil \u2014 but would have certainly failed to grab headlines.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Humphreys, the former advisor to the Drug Czar, told the Advocate, perhaps somewhat understatedly: \u201cThere\u2019s always some imperfection in these kinds of assessments.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Nonetheless, there is cause for caution where use of highly concentrated extracts is concerned. In a 2012\u00a0commentary for O\u2019Shaughnessy\u2019s<\/a>, the San Francisco-based \u201cJournal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice,\u201d\u00a0California NORML<\/a>\u2019s longtime leader Dale Gieringer related numerous cases of fainting (sometimes causing injury) due to over-indulgence in \u201cdabbing\u201d concentrates such as\u00a0butane hash oil<\/a>. He warned that \u201cincreased use of BHO has led to an increase in hospitalizations for cannabis overdose.\u201d<\/p>\n Advocates of good old-fashioned marijuana bud have a point when they diss\u00a0the current concentrate craze as making possible a cannabis \u201coverdose,\u201d the very notion of which was rightly dismissed as ludicrous when smoking in the herbaceous form was ubiquitous. That said, use of the term \u201coverdose\u201d even in regard to dabbing is inherently misleading, as it inevitably invokes the deadly OD from heroin or cocaine.<\/p>\n All things considered, the possibility that the unfortunate La Place woman died due to THC is vanishingly small.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, has anyone you know raised alarms about overdosing cannabis?<\/p>\n The post A Cannabis \u2018Overdose\u2019 Death in Louisiana? Why Experts Don\u2019t Buy It<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When the first-ever reported death from THC in the United States was declared by a local coroner in Louisiana earlier this month, media reports across the country jumped on the claim. Fox News, predictably, ran the most credulous headline: \u201cLouisiana coroner says woman died of THC overdose.\u201d Other mainstream sourcesContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,53,5719,2026,4144,5638,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36189,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36188\/revisions\/36189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Don\u2019t Believe the Hype<\/h4>\n
But, Reason for Caution with Extracts<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: A Cannabis \u2018Overdose\u2019 Death in Louisiana? Why Experts Don\u2019t Buy It<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"