Study: Caffeine Makes Cannabis More Enjoyable

HIGHTIMES

While researching into how cannabis interacts with other drugs in the brain, scientists inadvertently discovered why coffee and getting high go so well together. Caffeine reinforces the effects with THC, potentially making it more pleasurable.

To get a better grasp of how a substance affects the human brain, scientists sometimes look at the interaction between two drugs. To study THC, researchers gave squirrel monkeys (which have a long history of getting stoned in laboratories) the ability to get high with the pull of a lever, which triggered an intravenous release of THC from a small surgically implanted device.

After making the monkeys plenty familiar with the consequences of pulling the lever, they gave them doses of MSX-3, a water-soluble analog of caffeine. With 1 mg/kg (equivalent to less than half a cup of coffee for the average person), the squirrel monkeys pulled the lever less often than normal; and when they gave them 3 mg/kg (equivalent one or more cups of drip coffee), the monkeys pulled the lever even less. The caffeine-analog made it so they monkeys needed less THC to achieve the same effect.

After keeping the monkeys drug free as a rest period for the second part of the experiment, scientists gave them a shot of either THC or THC + MSX-3 (the caffeine analog), and then allowed them to pull the lever whenever they wanted to. After getting reintroduced to THC, all the monkeys started pulling the lever, but the ones who got an extra dose of MSX-3 pulled it more often.

Scientists conclude that A2A antagonist drugs, like caffeine, “potentiated the effect of threshold doses” of THC and its natural counterpart anandamide, causing a “reinforcing effect.” In layman’s terms, this basically means caffeine allows you to smoke less while still achieving the same effect, but caffeine also makes it harder to quit one or the other if you consume both. On the other hand, very small doses of caffeine, less than half a cup of drip coffee, could theoretically help you stop smoking pot because of how it effects the dose-response curve.

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