Front Burner - Cannabis vs. COVID: What the research is showing

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

A study last week from two Oregon universities has generated a lot of buzz, after findings suggested that some cannabis compounds may be able to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering human cells. It adds to a growing body of research on cannabis and the coronavirus, as studies from around the world — including from Canada — have found that the cannabis compound CBD may be effective in helping treat some of the virus’s most deadly symptoms. Today, Katie MacBride, a health science reporter at the online magazine Inverse, joins us for a deep dive into what the research says — and doesn’t say — about cannabis and COVID-19. CORRECTION: This episode misstated that mRNA vaccines are designed to attach to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. To be clear, mRNA vaccines instruct the body's cells to make harmless copies of the spike protein, causing the body to produce antibodies which then attach to the proteins.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I am here with our producer, Allie Gaines. Hi, Allie. Hey, Jamie. So Allie and I both just got back on Monday after recovering from COVID, which let me tell you was not a fantastic time.

Yeah, I got to say on my end was pretty rough. How was it for you, Jamie? I got hit real hard, like a truck. Chills, throwing up, sore throat, couldn't get out of bed for a couple of days, but kind of pulled a 180 on day three. I don't know if it's because I've had three COVID vaccine shots, but I felt okay by sort of end of last week. And tell me about you, though. Bit of a different story. I did not bounce back quickly at all. So I got sick Christmas day and I basically didn't start feeling well until this past weekend. So like three weeks. Wow. Like my lungs were pretty much

clear the whole time, but my head had this just incredibly intense pressure. You know, every part of my head felt like it was just like filled with concrete. So I had these terrible headaches and, you know, fatigue and also this brain fog, which honestly at a certain point started to get kind of scary. And, you know, I know you were pretty much in bed for three weeks, right? And so just tell me a bit about what you, what that was like, what did you, what did you do? How did you pass the time? Yeah, it was pretty, I was getting pretty bored. And, and eventually like, I don't know, I was spending a lot of time just kind of like scrolling on my phone lying in bed while I was doing that. I got kind of obsessed with, like, bed. While I was doing that, I got kind of obsessed with, like, I was just reading all of these studies that have been coming out about cannabis and COVID. And like what they're finding

is amazing. So like I was reading through and trying to decipher all of these scientific papers with all of these words I didn't know. And, you know, they've all been looking at treating COVID with this cannabis compound called CBD, which I imagine you've probably heard of before. Right. A lot of people have probably heard of it. Different from THC, doesn't get you high. But people say it helps with like pain. It calms them down. I have a lot of friends that take it because they say it calms them down.

Yeah, totally. And it's like it's really common. I mean, like whatever. Go to any dispensary, you can get like CBD gummies and oil, there's like creams and bath bombs. And I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. But anyway, so there are all these studies that have been looking at that compound CBD. And what they're finding is that it seems to actually treat some of like the most dangerous effects of COVID, like the things that people die from, which I'm just like amazed by. Wow. That's so cool. Yeah. And then I got even more obsessed with this week because there was this other study that came out and you might've

seen this. I saw it like trending online. It was very viral, but there there's a study from these two universities in Oregon and they found that there are some cannabis compounds that seem like they might actually prevent people from getting COVID in the first place, which is like, it's wild. I actually did see this when you talk about it trending online, our boss, Nick actually posted it on Twitter, joking that this must be why he like he hasn't gotten sick. Yeah. Yes, I also saw that. So coming back to work after like being gone for a few weeks, you know, I was I was really obsessed with this. And actually, Nick was just like, hey, why don't you do a story on it? Why don't we just do a bit of a deep dive on the research around this? So that is what we are going to do today.

But before we dig into it, and we'll talk about this in the conversation too, but I just, we should give a little disclaimer, which is that absolutely no one is suggesting that cannabis could be an alternative to vaccines or masking or any other COVID prevention measures. Yeah, get boosted, get vaxxed if you're not vaxxed. Yeah, you don't want this. All right, and now I'm speaking to Katie McBride, a health science reporter for the online magazine Inverse about what the research says so far about cannabis and COVID. Hey, Katie.

Hi, how are you? Great, thank you. And thank you so much for coming onto the show today. Firstly, I'm wondering if you can tell me about this study out of Oregon. What were the main findings of it? Yeah, it's a really remarkable study. The main findings were that three compounds found in cannabis, in this case, hemp, have the potential, seems like they might be able to glom onto the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2,

of the virus that causes COVID-19, and actually kind of like gum up the works. So the spike protein functions as a key, right? And then our cells have this little lock on it and that's how the virus gets into our cells. And so with antibodies, or in this case, potentially these compounds, what happens is they attach to the spike protein and it's like putting a piece of gum on the end of a key and you can't really get that key in the lock anymore. It doesn't fit quite as well as it used to. And, you know, if that pans out, it would be huge. And it's remarkable if they even found it, honestly. huge. And it's remarkable if they even found it, honestly.

And these compounds that they were studying, these are not what you consume by, say, smoking a joint, right? Absolutely. They're very different. And they're different in that it's more like if you were just walking along and you found a cannabis plant and you ate a butt of it, you, you wouldn't end up getting high from it. Um, you wouldn't have any psychoactive effects because in order for what, you know, we all know is the most prominent sort of psychoactive substance in cannabis for THC and it's raw form, it's called TH thca and in order for it to have that psychoactive effect you need to heat it up and so what they found were these compounds sort of raw not having been heated up are the ones that have the potential to sort of attach to the spike protein and gum up the works. So are you saying I could just like eat part of a marijuana

plant raw and it might do this, do the same thing as a study found? I think what I'm saying is that if you were to do that, you would be getting THCA, CBDA, and CBGA in some levels. However, whether or not, you know, that would actually have any effect if they'd be doing it in the right number of milligrams or whatever, you know, like that's going to be entirely dependent. You can get THCA tinctures, but again, we don't know what the right dosage is. This is still a little bit in a theoretical stage, but it's very promising at this point. So the compounds that people might be more familiar with, the compounds that we use when we are smoking a joint or let's say eating a gummy, it's CBD, THC, right? Could potentially they also have these

kinds of effects? Yes, it's entirely possible. And there have been some really promising studies with CBD in particular, though, again, I would say just in general with any respiratory virus, if you want to, you know, try to prevent yourself from getting it or prevent yourself from getting sick, inhaling any kind of smoke is really going to not help you. But yes, there is definitely some really promising research with CBD. I don't know of as much with THC, but I think, you know, there are some limitations given the fact that it's bafflingly still a schedule and drug in the United States that puts really severe research limits on it. to get a grant through the DEA. Even with the Oregon study, the researcher was talking about how he couldn't study THC, he couldn't study CBD. And even THCA, which is, as we know, not psychoactive, because he was using hemp, and I think because he had to use hemp because it has such a small amount of THC or THCA in it, he was really limited in what he could kind of determine from that. So, you know, who knows

what we might find were we not to have those. So very early days, but we've got this one recent study looking at cannabis as a possible tool to help prevent COVID. But then now I want to move on to talking about cannabis and its compounds as a possible treatment for people who are already sick with the virus. And before we get into those studies, let's kind of back up a little bit and talk about what researchers already knew pre-pandemic about CBD in the immune system. And can you tell me a little bit about that? You referred to it earlier.

Maybe you could just elaborate. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all mammals have an endocannabinoid system. So it's these systems of receptors that go throughout our body. And when we naturally make these things called endocannabinoids, it's picked up by the receptors. It's used to sort of regulate various systems, including the immune system in our body. So what CBD can do is function. It's sort of like an artificial endocannabinoid it's a cannabinoid

it's just coming from a plant instead of your body so if you need a little extra help regulating those systems cbd can help bring those systems back to homeostasis within a sort of normal and and static range of health right because basically our endocannabinoid systems and CBD have the same kind of properties. Exactly. So for example, I worked on a documentary about the pediatric use of medical cannabis, and it's really effective in helping kids with epilepsy, CBD is, and both THC and CBD have been shown to be fairly effective in treating kids who have severe autism. There was one girl who really has very extreme self-injuring behavior and basically would punch herself in the face all day long.

And the only way her parents had to deal with it was either kind of like drug her into a stupor with, you know, a variety of pharmaceuticals or let her injure herself, which is really just a nightmarish position for any family to be in. But what they found was that marijuana with THC was able to quell that self-injuring behavior and not make her sort of a zombie because she was so heavily medicated. So it's, you know, there are these really incredible, incredible findings, incredible possibilities with these two substances. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Can we talk a little bit about research around CBD and THC and viruses? You know, I know you talked to one immunologist who said that CBD can essentially give the immune system a break. Like, what did he mean by that? Right. So your immune system, you know, is incredibly effective at sort of combating pathogens.

But sometimes what can happen is that it goes into like overdrive. So inflammation very often can be good. When you have a fever, there's inflammation because your body is trying to fight this pathogen or cut or any other thing like that. Problems occur when your body doesn't know how to stop doing that. And so that's when you need a little bit of help. And what's great about CBD is it does that without suppressing your immune system so much that you're not able to fight what you need to fight still. Okay. Okay.

So knowing that that's sort of the foundation here, the research that's been done on CBD so far, that brings us to all these studies about using CBD to treat COVID, right? And it looks like most of them have focused on treating this one really dangerous condition that can happen in severe COVID cases called cytokine storm, a cytokine storm. Am I pronouncing that right? I have been calling it cytokine storms and then someone said cytokine storm. So I'm not the person to ask if it's actually the correct pronunciation or not. So I might go back and forth. Okay. So I guess, can you just briefly explain what that is to me? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we have to remember that this, you know, to our

bodies, this is a novel pathogen. This is something very new to our body. So when your system detects this, it goes into overdrive. It's like, I'm going to send all of my best fighters, but they kind of go so hard that it becomes a bit of a friendly fire situation. It stops being able to distinguish from the good, healthy cells that you have and this very dangerous foreign pathogen. It's just like, I'm just going to get everything. And one thing that can happen is that it can start attacking healthy lung tissue, specifically some of the cells that help expel carbon dioxide from the lungs. So that's why with cytokine storms, you're often seeing people go into acute respiratory distress because their lungs aren't able to expel this carbon

dioxide as well. And there have been studies looking at CBD specifically for treating these cytokine storms. And they're really very, very promising. Several different studies you mentioned from the U.S., Israel, but also from Canada at the University of Lethbridge. What I find really interesting about them, looking at how CBD could be a possible treatment for these cytokine storms, is that the studies didn't all use the same methods, but they all came to really similar results. And I don't know, that's interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's really interesting and it's really exciting. I mean, I think the more avenues you get that you take to land you in the same place makes it all the more promising. So some of the studies were looking at like 3D printed tissue

and they artificially damaged the tissue and then they saw how CBD could repair it. And then another study was done in mice and they gave mice COVID, they sort of induced these cytokine storms. And they found that after administering these high levels of CBD, the oxygen returned to the lungs in higher levels, lung structure improved in the mice, and all of the things that are exactly what you would want to see for someone who is dealing with that because of COVID. Probably worth noting here, have any of these studies been done on humans? Have there been human trials yet? Yes, there have. So in early 2021, there was a clinical trial in Austria, and they found that 300 milligrams of CBD for three weeks

allowed patients to clear the virus faster. And so they've been using it just at this one clinic in Austria ever since. I should note that there was a study in Brazil that sort of tried to look at the same thing, and they found that it didn't make a difference. They didn't find any harmful effects, but they found that it didn't make a difference. So conflicting information at this stage of research when there's so many limitations on what you can research is not unheard of, but I think by and large, the majority of the studies, whether done in animals or, you know, lab-grown tissue or humans, are all, for the most part, pointing in a really promising direction. And these studies that we're referencing here,

we're talking about credible, peer-reviewed science here. Like, I know one of these papers was published in Nature, which is one of the most reputable scientific journals out there. Yeah. Are there any other limitations of these studies that you think we should mention? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, like I said, with both the Austria, at least if you're looking at the clinical trial that they did, that was with a relatively small number of patients, as was the one in Brazil, though that said, Austria has been doing it ever since and continues to see pretty good results. restrictions on research. So I think it's always, it comes back to the regulations and the limitations that are sort of federally or legally imposed on cannabis research. Okay. Okay. And I guess sort of as an extension to that, when we're talking about the treatment

of COVID, a lot of this research is mainly focused on CBD. But is there any research that other compounds like THC would do the same thing? I haven't seen any research to that effect. That is not to say that it does not exist. But most of the research that I have come across has, has focused on CBD. And I think largely because we know that it has this immune modulating effect. Um, we know there's no psychoactive effect, which I think makes it really promising when you're giving these high doses, like 300 milligrams of CBD is very different than 300 milligrams of THC. And so I think for a variety of reasons, you know, there's probably not as much study into THC, but it's, again, you know, I think we can't say anything too definitively when we

still have restrictions on research, you know, and no part of cannabis is there more restrictions on research than THC for obvious reasons. You just can't, just can't walk around giving, giving people THC. Look, some people may be listening to this. I just want to be very clear here. And they might be thinking to themselves, you know, I just tested positive for Omicron. I'll just get some weed. I'll get some CBD oil. I'll eat a gummy. Is that a conclusion that they should be drawing here? The most important thing is I would just really, really avoid smoke in any form. If you have a respiratory virus, that's like my number one thing. And I actually just recovered from COVID and I can say the last thing that you probably want to do is smoke something. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would stick away from that. You know, the trial from Brazil says that, you know, there was no harm to the CBD, like they didn't see any worse outcomes as a result. But, you know, it's still important to be clear about this is early, very promising, but still somewhat limited research. And so it's, you know, far from a guarantee that it's going to help in one way or another. But I think at least when you're talking about CBD, it's unlikely to hurt significantly. But again, don't take that as medical advice. That's my analysis based exclusively on the

research and I am very much not a doctor. Okay. Neither am I. So I will. And, you know, another caveat we should probably throw up around this, this conversation is that the research that we were talking about to treat the cytokine storms with CBD, like we don't have much evidence yet that it could help just run of the mill regular COVID, right? Like what I just got. Right. I mean, we don't, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that suggests that it can. I mean, the one thing I would say is, you know, things that are important when you're sick with anything are sleep and not being too stressed out. And I know that lots of people find CBD helps with those. So, you know, it might

be helpful in a somewhat tangential way, if it's helping you get better sleep or helping you not be freaked out about the fact that you have this thing that you've been trying to avoid for the past two years. But in terms of clinical benefit for the virus itself, I don't think we can say that yet. Okay. And just one more, I just want to stress again, that this is by no means being looked at as a substitute for vaccines, right. Or, or other COVID prevention measures. Right. I mean, right. What they say, you know, this, this promising research about it, you know, these compounds may be being able to stick to the spike protein, protein, you know, especially mRNA vaccines, like that is what they were designed to do. Yeah. To stick to the spike protein. Like we made them in a lab for this

purpose. So it's great that, you know, cannabis might have compounds that are able to work in a similar way, but in no way would they ever be a substitute for it. Okay. Thank you for this. This was really interesting. Thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.