Cannabis scientists are trying to find a predictable, reliable product (2020)

Summary

He received Food and Drug Administration approval to run a clinical trial of cannabis as a treatment for migraines, but the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which must approve such research with illegal drugs, refused to sign off. The bureaucratic resistance “really stimulated my sense of adolescent rebellion,” he told me, and he decided to investigate terpenes’ role in the entourage effect on his own — legally, but using a method that, while once the backbone of medical research, had fallen into disrepute: self-experimentation.He ordered terpenes from chemical-supply houses and, along with a few friends, began to blind-test them by transferring small amounts of them from coded bottles into a vaporizer designed to minimize odors and keeping track of their effects. In 2004, he went to Amsterdam, where he was able to obtain pure THC legally, pair it with different combinations of terpenes and record the effects they had on a group of volunteers.Russo’s research was not without its problems. Scents could not be totally eliminated, the effects of THC couldn’t be successfully blinded and the prodigious daily cannabis intake of at least one participant made him a poor judge of the effects of individual THC/terpene combinations. Still, Russo found consistent correlations. THC alone, he found, lowered mood and distorted perception, and proved over all to be “really hard to function on.” He recalled one session in which, as it turned out, he had inhaled pure THC. “It was my turn to make dinner that night, and it was like: ‘Oh, God, I’m not sure I can do this. Where’s the knife? What do I need to do next?’ Everything was so hard.” But throw in pinene, the terpene that gives a pine woods its scent, and “all of a sudden that’s gone. You’re clear. You have no problem remembering anything.” Limonene, one source of citrus’s distinctive odor, also cured the THC blues, “making this unpleasant thing vibrant and alive and electric.” On the other hand, some terpenes just made things w...