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National Geographic
7 days ago
- Health
- National Geographic
Does high-potency cannabis impair mental health?
Photographs by Sergiy Barchuk This article is part of The New Cannabis, a National Geographic exploration into the most critical questions raised by today's stronger, stranger, ever more accessible weed. Learn more. Once upon a time, getting high from marijuana entailed smoking a joint, a pipe, or a bong. Those days are gone. Now there are numerous routes of consumption, some of which deliver a more potent buzz—but carry a risk of more serious side effects. In the latter category are dabbing and vaping, which are most prevalent among adults ages 18 to 24, according to a 2025 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With vaping, cannabis oil or flower is heated to a temperature that releases cannabinoids as vapor to inhale. Some vaping devices can be loaded with dry herb or cannabis flower, while others are intended to be used with high-potency concentrates like oil or resin. One reason it appeals to teens and young adults: 'Vaping is a discreet way to use cannabis in a public space—there's a convenience factor,' says Deepak Cyril D'Souza, professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and director of the Yale Center for the Science of Cannabis and Cannabinoids. 'One hit can deliver a lot, and get you high very quickly.' With dabbing, by contrast, people inhale vapors from highly concentrated THC-based oils—such as wax (a gooey form of hash oil) or shatter (a solid, glasslike version)—that have been heated, often using a blowtorch and a modified bong or a water pipe called a dab rig. Dabbing isn't as discreet as vaping because 'with dabbing, you need paraphernalia,' D'Souza says. Handheld dab pens are simpler alternatives—but some dab fans suggest dab pens can sacrifice flavor. Making such devices smaller, simpler, and cheaper is a major focus of the increasingly innovation-driven cannabis industry. From left to right: DISTILLATE VAPE CARTRIDGE Oil; THC potency as high as 95 percent. THCA SAND Concentrated tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA); converts to 75 to 90 percent THC when heated. INFUSED JOINTS Pre-rolled joints blended with or coated in a concentrate product; varied potency. CANNABIS TOPICALS Balms and creams applied to skin; nonintoxicating, typically low THC content. MARIJUANA FLOWER THC potency can reach nearly 35 percent; average closer to 15 percent. Back in the 1960s, the THC concentration in cannabis was around 4 percent, D'Souza notes. Currently, it's around 18 percent, with some products made from cannabis bud at 35 percent. But 'concentrates that are vaped could have THC concentrations that are 65 to 95 percent. With that comes greater risk,' says D'Souza. THC concentrations in dabs can also range from 60 to 90 percent. A major concern is that using cannabis with high THC concentrations could have harmful effects on mental health, especially with repeated or chronic use. This includes a risk of developing anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, or psychosis, says Akhil Anand, an addiction psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at the Cleveland Clinic. These approaches are 'very dangerous. Patients are putting themselves at high risk for psychotic symptoms.' 'It's not the method per se that's risky. The main issue is that dabbing and vaping are associated with very high levels of THC,' adds D'Souza. 'We know that negative consequences of THC are dose-related. The more you're exposed to the higher concentrations of THC, the more likely there are to be negative consequences.' Meanwhile, some of the mental health risks are especially high for teens. A study in a 2024 issue of the journal Psychological Medicine found that adolescents who used high-potency cannabis weekly had an 11 times greater risk of developing a psychotic disorder. Young adults over the age of 19 did not have an increased risk. Part of the vulnerability is because teen brains are still developing and undergoing changes related to pruning, a process in which the brain eliminates unnecessary neurons and neural connections, D'Souza says. 'This process leads to maturation of the brain,' he explains. Regular use of high-potency THC can disrupt these physiological processes in the brain. 'In younger people, being exposed to these potent psychoactive substances can affect cognitive skills such as memory, concentration, attention, analytical thinking, and impulsivity,' Anand says. 'It's bad for everybody, but it's devastating in younger people because these effects can be permanent.' Research has also found that people who experience cannabis-induced psychosis at any age have a 47 percent higher risk of developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. In addition to these mental health risks, there are potential consequences for physical health. Use of vaping concentrates can lead to 'popcorn lung' (aka bronchiolitis obliterans, a disease that affects small airways in the lungs), shortness of breath, a nagging or persistent cough, and wheezing, says Robert Welch, a pharmacist and director of the National Center for Cannabis Research and Education at the University of Mississippi. Over time, chronic irritation of lung tissue could increase the risk of long-term damage to the lungs. And dabbing can expose people to contaminants, including heavy metals, solvents, and pesticides. Among Gen Z consumers of legal cannabis—those born between 1997 and 2009—sales of vaping products exceed all other categories, including edibles and flower, according to the industry data firm Headset. Who's at risk for addiction? With these high-potency forms of cannabis consumption, there's a greater risk of developing cannabis use disorder—'which boils down to a loss of control of cannabis use even though it interferes with your personal life, academic life, or professional life,' D'Souza says. Generally, 'most people who are using these high levels of THC started at a lower level, with milder THC potency, and developed a high tolerance so they need more, more, more,' Anand says. 'People can develop an addiction where they need it or crave it.' This is a greater concern with today's high-potency cannabis. 'We used to think the risk of cannabis use disorder was less than one in 10—that's because the cannabis used to be much weaker,' D'Souza says. 'In the current cannabis landscape, the rates of cannabis use disorder are closer to one in three. And the younger brain is much more likely to develop addiction because the brain undergoes its greatest changes in early to mid adolescence.' In fact, research has found that teens are at significantly higher risk of developing cannabis use disorder within the first year after starting to use cannabis than adults are. 'There's this misconception that you can't get addicted to cannabis,' Welch says. 'That's just not true, especially with regular or high use' of today's high-potency cannabis. Perhaps counterintuitively, concerns about high-potency pot have prompted calls for the federal government to remove cannabis from its most restrictive class of illicit drugs. Legal limits on THC content vary at state levels, and moving cannabis from the Drug Enforcement Administration's Schedule I to Schedule III would allow for federal regulations on potency. This reclassification was initiated in 2024, during the previous presidential administration, but it's now in limbo. A version of this story appears in the September 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Health
- National Geographic
The Potent Promises (and Perils) of Modern Marijuana
The New Cannabis is a National Geographic exploration into the most critical questions raised by today's stronger, stranger, ever more accessible weed. Pot is more popular than it's ever been—and more powerful too. Driven by precision-cultivation techniques, sophisticated extraction, and old-fashioned consumer demand, the rise of ultrapotent cannabis (and its knockoffs) is sparking new science, new health concerns, and new ways of thinking about an increasingly destigmatized drug. National Geographic dives into the cutting-edge frontier of marijuana today. Inside the lab-driven quest for the ultimate high By Rosecrans Baldwin Think the heart of the United States' $32 billion cannabis industry looks like a greenhouse? Think again. It increasingly looks like a chemistry lab, full of scientists remixing marijuana into startlingly powerful concentrates—and just starting to reimagine what compounds in the plant can do. Photograph by Sergiy Barchuk; Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists By Stacey Colino and Brian Kevin What's causing the bizarre, debilitating symptoms that seem to afflict more and more users of high-potency pot? As diagnoses surge, researchers want answers. Sufferers of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome just want relief. Photograph by Sergiy Barchuk; Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists What exactly is in gas station weed? By Stacey Colino Fake pot? Marijuana lite? Thanks to legal loopholes, sketchy cannabis alternatives are readily available, even in states where plain old weed is outlawed. The highs are real—and so are the risks. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic Does high-potency cannabis impair mental health? By Stacey Colino For all marijuana's therapeutic benefits, medical researchers are also sounding alarms about frequent use of its high-octane derivatives—especially among teens. And as supercharged pot goes mainstream, it's dispelling the myth of a nonaddictive drug. Photograph by Sergiy Barchuk; Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists Why synthetic pot could be the future of pain relief By Devin Powell Scientists set out to conquer chronic pain by sidestepping the parts of the nervous system that get cannabis users high. To pull it off, they needed help from an unlikely molecule: a designer street drug so noxious it's been blamed for causing 'zombie outbreaks' around the world. Photograph by Sergiy Barchuk; Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Health
- National Geographic
Inside the lab-driven quest for the ultimate high
Extraction labs take the oily essence of cannabis and transform it into highly potent concentrates with dramatically varied textures. Both the live sauce and crushed diamonds shown here, from California cannabis producer Raw Garden, can be consumed by dabbing, a process of heating a concentrate and inhaling its vapors. Photographs by Sergiy Barchuk This article is part of The New Cannabis, a National Geographic exploration into the most critical questions raised by today's stronger, stranger, ever more accessible weed. Learn more. In a white-walled lab inside the vast manufacturing facility of California cannabis company Raw Garden, the bouquet of marijuana is unmistakable, even without a plant or bud in sight. Technicians in lab coats monitor armoire-size machines that rattle as they refine flask after multi-liter flask of amber-colored, cannabis-scented oil. In a room around the corner, near a row of vacuum ovens, the same extracted oil has been used to make an array of concoctions set out on steel tables in trays, jars, and Pyrex dishes. They range from viscous semiliquids that ooze like tree sap to creamy pastes resembling peanut butter. A few trays contain glasslike golden shards, and there's a crystallizing substance akin to aging honey. Together the products represent a substantial shift in how Americans consume pot: Year after year, they are smoking proportionately less of it and instead embracing more products made with its extracted oil. These include edibles, like gummies and beverages, but also new types of high-potency concentrates that are consumed, not by smoking, but by vaping or what's known as dabbing—flash vaporizing dabs of thick extract. And these concentrates are radically altering the experience of getting high. Like other modern cannabis companies, Raw Garden still grows weed, but it is primarily a raw material, something to be processed into goop for an arguably heightened experience. If you think the heart of the United States' roughly $32 billion cannabis industry looks like a farm or a grow room, think again: It increasingly looks like these industrial chem labs, full of scientists imagining new frontiers of mind-blowing offerings. Such cannabis concentrates are often named for their textures: sauce, wax, shatter, diamonds, and more. They are dizzyingly more potent than the joint you might have smoked 20 or 40 years ago. And, of course, they are now legal in many states, as policy shifts have helped launch a space race in the cannabis industry, with entrepreneurs developing more sophisticated techniques to alchemize plant matter into a kaleidoscope of forms and flavors. The rise of the high-potency concentrates market comes at a time when marijuana flower—traditional smokable cannabis—is already pretty darn powerful. Thanks to advances in crop science, pot grown in the U.S. has been bred to be substantially stronger than it was a few decades back. Potency in cannabis products is typically expressed as a concentration of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the compound in marijuana that is primarily, though not exclusively, responsible for its psychoactive effects. While precise numbers are tricky to come by, studies suggest that THC levels in marijuana sold in the U.S. 30 years ago averaged somewhere in the single digits. Today, at a time when many states require lab-verified potency labels on legal products, the average is somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. Cannabis concentrates, however, result from an extraction process that isolates only the desired compounds, prominently including THC, from pesky plant matter. Raw Garden advertises a product called live sauce—a golden goo described as having an applesauce consistency—at around 70 percent THC potency, depending on the strain used to make it. The company's refined live resin diamonds, which look like something you'd find at a gem show, can top out above 85 percent. For some, the THC content—and hence, the rapidity and intensity of the buzz—is the point. High-potency vapes and dabs get users high with smaller amounts than other means of ingesting cannabis. But the draw also has to do with the subtlety of flavors and precision of one's intake, says Raw Garden chief brand officer Dmitri Siegel. It's 'a purity thing,' he says, 'where you're either getting a really distilled high or you're getting a really distilled flavor. You're not burning a whole lot of organic matter.' The many manifestations of modern cannabis include (left to right) cartridges of vape oil, gummy candies of varying potency, pre-rolled joints sold like cigarettes, and the buds the industry calls "flower." Handheld vaporizers are also less conspicuous, notes cannabis-industry analyst and consultant Tom Adams, president of Adams Research. Some concentrate users are enticed by the discreetness of taking a quick toke off a small amount of oil or applesauce-like gel. 'It just seems odd as an adult to be taking weed out of a bag, crushing it up, and rolling it,' he says. 'What am I, a cowboy?' Adams, who has analyzed the legal cannabis market since 2015, says demand for legal concentrates originated in the first medical dispensaries. Smoking can be impractical for those looking to consume hundreds of milligrams of THC each day—a substantial amount, but which may nonetheless be what brings relief to chemotherapy patients or sufferers of chronic pain. Edibles can pose problems for patients with appetite or gastrointestinal issues. And concentrates, whether for medical or recreational use, arguably make it easier to regulate dosage. Sure, Adams allows, pre-rolled joints, with measured amounts of flower, offer some consistency. 'But even that is less predictable than the cleaned-up, scientifically produced concentrate that you know exactly what the impact is going to be,' he says. Rolling your own? Stuffing erratic hunks of vegetable matter into a pipe? It's a hard sell, says Adams: 'Consumers are just not used to the primitiveness.' The quest to concentrate the psychoactive components of cannabis goes back to at least the 11th century, when hashish caught on recreationally in the Arab world. Hashish is made from plant glands now known as trichomes, which early hashmakers rubbed or sieved off the surface of cannabis leaves and buds, then pressed into a sort of cake. Trichomes are rich in bioactive compounds called cannabinoids, the most well known of which are THC and cannabidiol, or CBD. They also contain other specialized compounds, such as terpenes, the hydrocarbons responsible for plants' aromas and flavors. Today's cannabis processors have built on medieval methods, finding new, efficient ways to isolate those prized compounds. Among the most common is hydrocarbon extraction, in which a solvent separates desired chemicals from raw plant material. Butane and propane are the industry-standard solvents, and prior to widespread legalization, back when extraction was an underground hobby, use of these combustible materials occasionally resulted in hotel rooms and apartments blowing up. FEMA went so far as to issue a bulletin in 2013 warning, 'Hash Oil Explosions Increasing Across U.S.' But during the wave of state legalization that has swept the country since, cannabis extraction has gone mainstream, and today companies like Raw Garden are subject to licensure, regulations, and inspections. The basis of nearly all Raw Garden products is the oily substance known as live resin, a cannabis extract that aims to capture a wide array of those cannabinoids and terpenes (some extraction processes, by contrast, isolate only a single compound—usually THC or CBD). But before they become oil, all of the company's offerings start out as plants on 54 acres of farmland in the Santa Barbara wine country. At harvest time, the plants are cut, then the buds are removed and immediately flash frozen with liquid nitrogen in a cryogenic tunnel, preserving all those volatile organic compounds. From the farm, the pot is trucked to a cold-storage warehouse in nearby Lompoc, where it's placed in a deep freeze. When any given strain is up for extraction, the frozen buds are moved to a manufacturing facility up the road, where they're loaded into six-foot-tall stainless steel columns, each of which can hold about 18 pounds of pot. Inside, they're saturated with pressurized solvent that dissolves the desired chemicals and leaves behind unwanted biomass. Later stages for some products include one in which the crude extract is purified, with fats, waxes, lipids, and other solids filtered out. Other products cook for 24 to 36 hours in a vacuum oven to purge away residual solvent, the pressure inside the oven lowered so that the solvent evaporates without any of the good stuff boiling off. Using solvents isn't the only way to make an extract. Raw Garden sends a small amount of its harvest to a partner facility, where it's turned into a hashish-like product called rosin via a simpler process, using only ice water, heat, and pressure. But hydrocarbon extraction is scalable and highly efficient: Raw Garden's facility processes around 1,200 pounds of cannabis a day, and has plans to expand. This isn't to say there's no art to it. A concentrate's consistency—that is, whether the live resin turns into something creamy or crispy or oily—results from the strain one starts with, as well as small, inspired interventions during extraction. What if we whipped the extract before purging it? What if we cured it so that crystals form? Extract bound for vape cartridges sometimes involves an additional step, in which terpenes are evaporated and collected in a distillation column, then selectively reinserted to achieve specific scent and flavor profiles. In Raw Garden's vape lab, a colorful aroma wheel shows a hundred-plus fragrances one might allegedly encounter in cannabis, like apricot, sage, pine tar, and espresso. 'We're taking aromatic compounds from plants,' says vice president of agricultural operations Casey Birthisel. 'There's a lot here that's parallel to the perfume industry.' Some medical professionals see more alarming parallels, however, to drugs ostensibly harder than cannabis. The sky-high potency of concentrates has raised red flags, as multiple epidemiological studies have found correlations between their frequent use and increased risks of psychosis and cannabis use disorder, a form of dependence. Those risks seem particularly acute for teenagers. Colorado and Washington, the first states to legalize recreational pot, are among the states where bills to limit THC potency have been introduced, then rejected or withdrawn amid industry pushback. Meanwhile, according to analyst Adams, sales of marijuana flower made up about 70 percent of the recreational market when the first legal retailers opened in Colorado in 2014. Today, according to point-of-sale data from Adams and market research firm BDSA, that number has dropped to 40 percent. In the same span, sales of vaping and dabbing products have climbed from around 15 percent of the legal market to 32 percent, though the pace of that growth now seems to be slowing. It's all a function, Adams says, of a 'reunion of technology and cannabis' brought about by legalization. Ironically, what excites him most about the future of extraction has nothing to do with THC. The next big thing in cannabis, Adams suggests, might derive from the industry's ability to efficiently isolate all those other compounds. What new effects are there to discover from the terpenes? Or from the more than a hundred other little-researched cannabinoids that aren't THC or CBD? 'We are totally revolutionizing the view of what the compounds in the plant can do through the concentrates side of the market,' he says. 'That opens up the uses to all sorts of things other than sitting on the couch watching Netflix.' This story appears in the September 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Health
- National Geographic
Why synthetic pot could be the future of pain relief
Photographs by Sergiy Barchuk This article is part of The New Cannabis, a National Geographic exploration into the most critical questions raised by today's stronger, stranger, ever more accessible weed. Learn more. They call it the holy grail of pain-relief research: a medicine that is comparable to the strongest opioids but lacks their potentially devastating side effects. When biophysicist and structural biologist Kaavya Krishna Kumar set out looking for a novel way to develop one, she knew she needed to start with a substance that hit the body incredibly hard. So she took to the seedier corners of the online forum Reddit, where she learned about an illicit street drug with a reputation for making people both very high and very sick. 'It's OUT OF THIS WORLD POTENT,' read one recreational user's post. 'A very, very small, almost invisible amount of powder skyrockets you into stoned euphoria.' The drug is called FUBINACA, and it's what's known as a synthetic cannabinoid, a molecule designed in a lab to target the same parts of the nervous system affected by tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. Underground chemists have been making drugs like it since the early 2000s, when recreational marijuana was still criminalized in the United States and synthetic cannabinoids began catching on as cheap, quasi-legal alternatives. From their powdered form, they're typically dissolved into solvents, which are then sprayed onto plant shreds to be sold, with a wink, as incense or potpourri. 'Not for human consumption,' the label may read—a dodge against regulation. Sold under monikers like spice or K2, these gray market synthetics have raised public health alarms for both their toxicity and their contamination risks. The exact chemicals and their concentrations can vary from product to product, with side effects ranging from mania to heart attacks. But Krishna Kumar—then at Stanford Medicine, now at Weill Cornell Medicine—saw in FUBINACA a tool for better understanding how our pain-management system works. And after some clever molecular modeling, she and a team led by researchers from Stanford and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis devised an innovative way of modifying it. Earlier this year, the team published a study showing a FUBINACA-derived drug providing sustained pain relief in mice, seemingly without psychoactive or tolerance-building side effects. Such side effects have stymied progress on other would-be cannabinoid pain relievers, dampening enthusiasm for what once seemed like a promising opioid alternative. Now some scientists hope the research can breathe new life into that work—and perhaps open up even wider therapeutic frontiers. Fubinaca wasn't always a street drug. It was developed by Pfizer and patented in 2009, part of an effort to create 'a superpowered aspirin with no side effects,' according to former Pfizer chemist Darin Jones. Like THC, synthetic cannabinoids activate a powerful chemical receptor known as CB1. In humans and other mammals, CB1 is found on nerve cells in the brain and, crucially, on cells elsewhere in the body. It's known to influence not only the perception of pain but also sleep, metabolism, and memory, making it a promising target for pharmaceutical research. (A second cannabinoid receptor, CB2, seems mostly to regulate the functions of immune cells.) Of course, the path to market for any new drug must take into account future profitability. And while it's unclear just what scuttled Pfizer's research, Jones theorizes it had to do with the increasing legality of medical marijuana, which was suddenly 'pennies a pound' at proliferating dispensaries. But when the company published its patent, that became a blueprint for so-called garage chemists to replicate the formula and create analogues. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that law enforcement has encountered hundreds of different synthetic cannabinoids, most of them manufactured in Asia. Variants of Pfizer's FUBINACA, the first of which was detected in Japan in 2012, are known as some of the most toxic. In 2014 dozens of deaths in Russia were linked to an analogue called MDMB-FUBINACA. Two years later, another variant was behind a mass overdose in Brooklyn, New York, that the media characterized as a 'zombie outbreak.' But Krishna Kumar hoped to pick up where Pfizer left off, harnessing that potency. First, she examined how MDMB-FUBINACA attached to human CB1 receptors in a dish. Compared to other synthetic cannabinoids, she found, it held tighter and activated effects more powerfully. Then, using a Nobel Prize–winning technology called cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), she flash froze that FUBINACA molecule while it was affixed to CB1 and scanned the conjoined pair with a beam of electrons. The result was a 3D picture, down to individual atoms, of how the drug fit so well into a pocket, or binding site, on the receptor's surface—like a key in a lock. Chronic pain affects as many as one in five people worldwide. As early as the Middle Ages, Arab physicians sought dosages of cannabis that 'killed pain but did not intoxicate,' wrote historian Martin Booth. That image provided a starting point for designing new versions of FUBINACA that might, by stimulating the receptor in new ways, keep the original's potency while limiting side effects. For that, Krishna Kumar turned to Susruta Majumdar, a Washington University chemist and pharmacologist, whose lab had previously shown that activating a particular site on an opioid receptor could inhibit chemical reactions that lead to tolerance. Might this be possible for CB1? The researchers knew that CB1, a cousin to that opioid receptor, had a potential binding site with similar qualities—but it was deep inside the receptor and, in Krishna Kumar's cryo-EM snapshot, blocked by clusters of atoms. It was also the wrong shape to fit FUBINACA. So Majumdar's team started sketching bespoke attachments for the cannabinoid, chains of atoms that might help the molecule worm its way in. Meanwhile, Stanford scientists took another approach, animating the static snapshot using computer simulations, showing how atoms in the drug and the receptor moved around each other. The simulations revealed something surprising: The atom clusters blocking that tantalizing site sporadically moved aside, opening what biochemists call a cryptic pocket, allowing researchers a glimpse in. Tweaking their designs to fit, Majumdar's team made one other crucial adjustment in the hope of nixing FUBINACA's psychoactive side effects. The newly accessible site, it turned out, could accept a compound with a positive electric charge, which hinders a molecule from crossing the membrane separating blood from the brain. By tacking a charged group of atoms onto FUBINACA, researchers confined its activity to CB1 receptors outside the brain—where it can't get anyone high or act on the brain's reward circuitry, limiting risks of misuse and abuse. New versions of FUBINACA were injected into rodents experiencing various kinds of pain. And one variant, which the researchers called VIP36, showed indicators of relieving chronic pain from three different sources—inflammation, nerve damage, and headaches—even after days of repeated injections. True, says Washington University neurobiologist Robert Gereau, all that molecular tinkering had reduced the drug's potency—and thus its pain-relieving effects. But where that might have left other cannabinoids toothless, Gereau says, VIP36 remained 'effective in a range that is useful clinically,' precisely because FUBINACA packed such a wallop to begin with. VIP36 is still in its baby steps phase. It has yet to be tested in humans, who have fewer CB1 receptors outside of their brains than rodents do. And, for now, the new compound can't be taken orally, only injected. But even if the drug never reaches your medicine cabinet, the research could still chart new pharmaceutical paths. For one, it might occasion a reassessment from those skeptical of cannabinoids' potential as medicine—a constituency that includes the world's largest pain-research organization, the International Association for the Study of Pain, whose official position is that science has so far failed to prove cannabinoids either safe or effective. 'This is the perfect paper to help re-put steam into the cannabinoid field,' says Michael Burton, a neuroscientist and cannabinoid researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas. What's more, Majumdar says, there may be other cryptic pockets in other receptors related to CB1, many of which have nothing to do with pain. Some have been linked to heart disease, for instance, or substance abuse disorders. This opens an enticing possibility: What the researchers have learned about changing a receptor's behavior could help them tinker with a whole range of drugs. Majumdar is already planning to revisit a previous study that unsuccessfully targeted a hard-to-reach opioid receptor. He imagines redesigning antidepressants, maybe cancer drugs. 'Targeting diseases beyond pain is expected in the near future,' he says. 'We are just scratching the surface.' This story appears in the September 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. Set Design: Mat Cullen, Lalaland Artists
