According to recent study, caffeine can increase or diminish highs, and increase pot intake in individuals.
If you are one of the millions of people who use coffee and marijuana, America’s favorite drugs, the findings of a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience may be of particular interest to you. The study, conducted on monkeys, essentially found that consuming high amounts of coffee together with marijuana could bring people to crave more pot. Caffeine, like marijuana, acts on dopamine in the brain. Whether it enhances a weed high is debatable and not fully proven, but many pot users have found that caffeine intake during a weed high can make it more enjoyable. This is due to the fact that caffeine works to provide a sort of reinforcing effect to marijuana’s effects.
Self-medicating monkeys wanted more THC after taking coffee clone chemical.
The study was conducted on a sample of monkeys that had been taking delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the main active ingredient in pot. The monkeys were free to take as much THC as they wanted to by self-administering it. The study found that the monkeys chose larger doses as time went on while they were being given a chemical called MSX-3, which mimics the effects of caffeine. It is, in this case, theorized that the monkeys were choosing more THC because they wanted to offset the effects of the caffeine-like MSX-3 molecule. Researchers do warn that it’s still too early to determine whether humans would be affected the same way in the given circumstances.
Coffee activates your brain’s “reward system”
According to professor of psychology, neuroscience, molecular virology, immunology, and medical genetics Dr. Gary Wenk, coffee makes us feel good by grace of its crucial chemical getting into our brain’s “reward system,” sometimes even mimicking the effects of marijuana. The caffeine starts to stimulate the brain’s marijuana neurotransmitter system, due to its acting on dopamine. For this reason, people who quit smoking marijuana can use small amounts of coffee to keep their psychological craving at bay. The mechanisms behind psychological addiction to marijuana are still relatively unknown, and it’s still too soon to say exactly how much coffee is the ideal amount for that situation.
