Study: Cannabis May Fight Intestinal Worms
By Eric Sorensen, Washington State University Science Writer
The Africa Congo Basin, where the study was conducted.
VANCOUVER, Wash. – Washington State University researchers have found that the more hunter-gatherers smoke cannabis, the less they are infected by intestinal worms. The link suggests that they may unconsciously be, in effect, smoking medical marijuana.
Ed Hagen, a WSU Vancouver anthropologist, explored cannabis use among Aka foragers to see if people away from the cultural and media influences of Western civilization might use plant toxins medicinally.
“In the same way we have a taste for salt, we might have a taste for psychoactive plant toxins because these things kill parasites,” he said.
In an earlier study, Hagen found that the heavier tobacco smokers among the Aka also had fewer helminths, parasitic intestinal worms.
He cautions, however, that the studies have their limits. While nicotine has been seen killing worms in livestock, that hasn’t been directly demonstrated in humans. Cannabis kills worms in a petri dish, but researchers have not shown it killing worms in animals, Hagen said.
The Aka are a “pygmy” people of the Congo basin. As one of the world’s last groups of hunter-gatherers, they offer anthropologists a window into a way of life accounting for some 99 percent of human history. They might also offer an alternative hypothesis to explain human drug use.
The prevailing explanation is that recreational drugs “hijack the pleasure centers of the brain,” making people feel good. But by tasting bitter and making us feel sick, they also trigger mechanisms that tell us we’re consuming something toxic.
“So we thought, ‘Why would so many people around the world be using plant toxins in this very “recreational” way?’ ” said Hagen. “If you look at non-human animals, they do the same thing, and a lot of biologists think they’re doing it to kill parasites.”
The issue is significant on at least two fronts, write Hagen and his colleagues, because substance abuse and intestinal helminth infection are “two of the developing world’s great health problems.” Their study appears in the American Journal of Human Biology.
Researchers are unsure when the Aka might have first smoked cannabis or when it arrived on the continent. It may have come with traders from the Indian subcontinent around the first century A.D., but Hagen and his colleagues say it might not have been smoked until European colonization in the 17th century.
Hagen surveyed almost all of the nearly 400 adult Aka along the Lobaye River in the Central African Republic and found roughly 70 percent of the men and 6 percent of the women used cannabis. The polling was supported by bioassays of the men that found high enough levels of THCA, a metabolic byproduct of cannabis’s active ingredient, to indicate that 68 percent of them had recently smoked.
Stool samples collected from the men to gauge their worm burden found some 95 percent of them were infected with helminths. But those who consumed cannabis had a significantly lower rate of infection. A year after being treated with a commercial antihelmintic, the cannabis users were reinfected with fewer worms.
While the Aka deliberately consume a tea of a local plant, motunga, to fight parasitic infections, they do not think of cannabis or tobacco as medicine, Hagen said. This suggests they are unconsciously using cannabis to ward off parasites, he said.
Hagen’s co-authors on the study are Casey Roulette, who did the research as part of his WSU Ph.D., and Pasteur Institute researchers Mirdad Kazanji and Sébastien Breurec. Hagen and Roulette were funded in part by the State of Washington Initiative Measure No. 171.
A pdf of the paper can be downloaded at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.22740/epdf.
David M
The new’s keeps getting worse for Washington’s many ill medical marijuana patient’s. That’s because with every new health related discovery, every new medical determination, those of us living with chronic pain, illness’ and disability must now come to terms with the grim realization that the clock is ticking over us and that those to whom we believed had our best interests in hand have instead just thrown us to the wolves. Medical marijuana in Washington is now as dead as fried chicken. .
Todd Hasson
I found that the more cannabis that modern foraging tribes smoke, the less they are infected with parasitic intestinal worms. Scientists are trying to determine if ancient-hunter gatherers were aware of this connection. Anthropologists have been studying the marijuana use of a modern hunter-gatherer culture in Central Africa order to shed light on human history, and the purposes behind ancient drug use.