PayPal
BitCoin
Facebook
Twitter
Amazon
RSS
iTunes

DoseNation Podcast

Weekly news, talk, and interviews. More »

SUGGEST A STORY  |   CREATE AN ACCOUNT  |  
DoseNation.com

Marijuana and morphine dependence

Injections of THC, the active principle of cannabis, eliminate dependence on opiates (morphine, heroin) in rats deprived of their mothers at birth. This has been shown by a study carried out by Valérie Daugé and her team at the Laboratory for Physiopathology of Diseases of the Central Nervous System (UPMC / CNRS / INSERM) in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The findings could lead to therapeutic alternatives to existing substitution treatments.

In order to study psychiatric disorders, neurobiologists use animal models, especially maternal deprivation models. Depriving rats of their mothers for several hours a day after their birth leads to a lack of care and to early stress. The lack of care, which takes place during a period of intense neuronal development, is liable to cause lasting brain dysfunction. Valérie Daugé's team at the Laboratory for Physiopathology of Diseases of the Central Nervous System (UPMC / CNRS / Inserm) analyzed the effects of maternal deprivation combined with injections of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main active principle in cannabis, on behavior with regard to opiates...

To these rats, placed under stress from birth, the researchers intermittently administered increasingly high doses of THC (5 or 10 mg/kg) during the period corresponding to their adolescence (between 35 and 48 days after birth). By measuring their consumption of morphine in adulthood, they observed that, unlike results previously obtained, the rats no longer developed typical morphine-dependent behavior. Moreover, biochemical and molecular biological data corroborate these findings. In the striatum, a region of the brain involved in drug dependence, the production of endogenous enkephalins was restored under THC, whereas it diminished in rats stressed from birth which had not received THC.

So adolescent marijuana smoking is a prophylactic against opiate addiction in adulthood? Score!

Thanks to maeneyak for finding this.

Posted By jamesk at 2009-07-07 19:47:19 permalink | comments
Tags: marijuana morphine addiction
Facebook it! Twitter it! Digg it! Reddit! StumbleUpon It! Google Bookmark del.icio.us technorati Furl Yahoo! Bookmark
» More ways to bookmark this page


fuck lude. : 2010-02-04 17:08:44
@lude fuck you
lude. : 2009-07-07 20:35:24
aw I was hoping to hear that after the injections of THC the rats got really hungry in place of opiate withdraw..

The comments posted here do not reflect the views of the owners of this site.

HOME
COMMENTS
NEWS
ARCHIVE
EDITORS
REVIEW POLICY
SUGGEST A STORY
CREATE AN ACCOUNT
RSS | TWITTER | FACEBOOK
DIGG | REDDIT | SHARE