Why A Lethal Cannabis Overdose Is Impossible (www.aleafiate.com)

Why A Lethal Cannabis Overdose Is Impossible
We’ve all heard the sad news of someone dying from an opioid overdose or alcohol poisoning, but a victim of a fatal overdose of cannabis is never in the media. Ask anyone who knows much about cannabis and they will gladly tell you that, in fact, there has never in recorded medical history been a single death attributed to a cannabis overdose. But how can that be? Well, it all has to do with the way cannabis effects our bodies.
When people die of an opioid overdose, it’s because of the way that opioid receptors are positioned in our brains, and therefore the way our brains react to the substance. One of the areas that is most heavily affected by opioids is a part of the brain stem that is known as the pre-Bötzinger complex, which controls many of our most basic functions, most importantly how to breath. During an overdose, opioids depress the pre-Bötzinger complex to the point that it actually forgets to tell your body to take in oxygen, which can lead to you essentially suffocating. As Dr. Karen Drexler, the director of the addiction psychiatry residency training program and an associate professor in Emory University's psychiatry and behavioural sciences department explains, opioids can make “someone calm and a little bit sleepy, but if you take too much then you can fall asleep, and when you are asleep your respiratory drive shuts down…Usually when you are sleeping, your body naturally remembers to breathe. In the case of a heroin overdose, you fall asleep and essentially your body forgets."
Opioid overdoses can also have similar effects on the parts of the brain that regulate our heart beats and blood pressure, and can cause blood pressure to drop to dangerously low levels or even make our hearts stop beating all together.
As for alcohol, the lethal effect is not in our brains so much as it is in our livers. Every time we drink an alcoholic beverage, our liver sets to work clearing the alcohol out of our system, but it takes time to fully break down all of those toxins. This leads to something of a backup with each additional drink adding more and more to the liver’s workload, and as a result much of the alcohol ends up in our bloodstream, increasing our Blood Alcohol Content (BAC). Too much alcohol in our blood can depress the vital nerves that allow us to breath or even gag (which prevents us from choking to death). As the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism explains, “with no gag reflex, a person who drinks to the point of passing out is in danger of choking on vomit, which, in turn, could lead to death by asphyxiation. Even if the drinker survives, an alcohol overdose can lead to long-lasting brain damage.” Even worse, it can lead to severe dehydration, and in the worst cases even cardiac arrest.
Cannabis, however, does none of these things. Cannabinoid receptors are certainly found in the brain, but their highest concentrations can be found in the basal ganglia, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum, which regulate our cognition and movement, and not our most vital life-sustaining processes. In contrast to opioid receptors, cannabinoid receptors are very rare in the more important brain stem area, and are instead very spread out in that part of the brain. As a study from the National Institutes of Health in 1990 reported, “sparse densities [of cannabinoid receptors] in lower brainstem areas controlling cardiovascular and respiratory functions may explain why high doses of THC are not lethal.”
This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to over consume cannabis. Overconsumption is indeed not only possible, but most regular users have, at one point or another, gotten themselves into this unfortunate position. Overconsumption is not lethal, but, because of the parts of the brain that it works on, it can certainly lead to feelings of uncomfortableness, severely slowed motor skills, and even outright misery or panic. But fear not, it will pass in time, and, as said earlier, there has never been a single reported case over a cannabis overdose in history and because of the way it reacts in our brains, there never will be in the future either.

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