British health experts are urging policymakers to regulate the potency of cannabis due to concerns that high-potency products increase the risk of psychosis, according to a report from Reuters. The cohort is concerned that as legalization proliferates there are not yet enough studies on the possible risks associated with high-test products.
“Worldwide there is a trend towards liberalization and increasing consumption,” Robin Murray, a professor at King College’s London’s the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, said in the report. “More people are going to be smoking cannabis, whether we like it or not, so we want to explore whether there are safer varieties.”
Murray co-authored “Can Cannabis be Safer?” with Amir Englund, a cannabis scientist at the Institute, which appeared in the Lancet Psychiatry journal.
“It is vital, especially now that cannabis is becoming increasingly liberalized, that we explore alternative and innovative ways by which we can reduce and mitigate cannabis related harms,” Englund said, suggesting that it might be wise to increase CBD levels, which some studies show can offset possible detrimental effects of THC, such as memory loss or paranoia, without compromising some of the compound’s more pleasurable effects such as relaxation.
In the U.S. cannabis products can contain as much as 75 percent THC; and some officials in Uruguay and the Netherlands – which have either legal or extremely lax cannabis laws – have suggested capping THC content there to 15 percent.