A recent United Nations Children’s Fund study on the well-being of children1 found that Canadian adolescents (aged 11 to 15 years) have the highest rate of cannabis use among the 29 advanced economies of the world; an estimated 28% had used cannabis at least once in the past year. The 2011 Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, which surveyed older youth, found slightly lower rates of...

Oral fluid (OF) is an important matrix for monitoring drugs. Smoking cannabis is common, but vaporization and edible consumption also are popular. OF pharmacokinetics are available for controlled smoked cannabis, but few data exist for vaporized and oral routes. Frequent and occasional cannabis smokers were recruited as participants for four dosing sessions including one active (6.9% Δ9 -tetrah...

The Center for Disease Control estimates 128,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized annually due to food borne illnesses. This has created a demand for food safety testing targeting the detection of pathogenic mold and bacteria on agricultural products. This risk extends to medical Cannabis and is of particular concern with inhaled, vaporized and even concentrated Cannabis products . As a resu...

BACKGROUND Experimental evidence suggests the endogenous cannabinoid system may protect against colonic inflammation, leading to the possibility that activation of this system may have a therapeutic role in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Medicinal use of cannabis for chronic pain and other symptoms has been reported in a number of medical conditions. We aimed to evaluate cannabis use in pati...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the relative risk of being responsible for a fatal crash while driving under the influence of cannabis, the prevalence of such drivers within the driving population, and the corresponding share of fatal crashes. DESIGN Population based case-control study. PARTICIPANTS 10 748 drivers, with known drug and alcohol concentrations, who were involved in fatal crashes in Fra...

Although the general public perceives cannabis as one of the less harmful illicit drugs, the past decades saw a surge in treatment demands for CUDs (UNODC, 2014). Cannabis nowadays is the primary illicit drug of concern in drug treatment services across North America, Oceania and Africa (UNODC, 2014). The low perceived harms of cannabis use are reflected in the small number of studies investiga...

Decisions regarding the legal status of cannabis have long been framed (for the public at least) with reference to the perceived health risks and harms associated with use. Yet, drug policy and legislation relating to the use of cannabis are rarely based on the scientific evidence of the known risks and harms. There are many reasons for this discrepancy, with the politicization of cannabis use,...

BACKGROUND In epidemiology, it always has been important to study local area patterns of disease occurrence. New methods to quantify local area and household clustering of disease emerged late in the 19th century and were refined during the 20th century. Nonetheless, multi-level models to estimate local area clustering of illegal drug use did not appear until the 1990s, and to date, there is ju...

AIM To explore the role of cannabis use for the availability of ecstasy as a potential pathway to subsequent first ecstasy use. METHODS Baseline and 4-year follow-up data from a prospective-longitudinal community study of originally 3021 adolescents and young adults aged 14-24 years at baseline were assessed using the standardized M-CIDI and DSM-IV criteria. RESULTS Baseline cannabis users ...

IMPORTANCE There are no medications approved for treating cannabis dependence or withdrawal. The cannabis extract nabiximols (Sativex), developed as a multiple sclerosis treatment, offers a potential agonist medication for cannabis withdrawal. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the safety and efficacy of nabiximols in treating cannabis withdrawal. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A 2-site, double-blind...