Marijuana has some incredible pain relief properties. It can also make people incredibly paranoid. A team of biochemists believes it has found a way to separate these two properties and pave the way for a very legal, very helpful new line of medication. And it all began with skunk.
“A current strain of marijuana known as skunk has high levels of THC [tetrahydrocannabinol], which resulted in an increase of adolescents having psychedelic episodes,” Peter McCormick of the University of East Anglia, and coauthor on a PLOS Biology paper on the find, tells WIRED.co.uk. “Maybe large amounts of THC were somehow working through the serotonin receptor and giving kids this overdose in terms of memory and the high feeling – typically it’s in lower doses.”