Chronic cannabis consumption: Suggestions for future research

Abstract

The literature on cannabis has been growing tremendously throughout the last fifteen years. A worldwide comprehensive annotated bibliography on marihuana, recently published under the sponsorship of the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Mississipi cited 5715 entries most of which appeared between the years 1964 and 1980. Until the time is ripe for looking into the mosaic picture that emanated from research efforts and carefully delineating its main features one cannot help stating some impressions about the picture which by necessity will remain global yet sufficiently illuminating. It would be noted that our remarks are relevant only to behavioural studies conducted on human subjects. Within this rather circumscribed sphere, our main contention is that the accumulated experimental research, so far, seems quite rich regarding the acute effects of cannabis and/or THC, but rather inadequate with respect to chronic residual effects of the drug. With the exception of very few investigations the majority of the published work has been based on data gathered on male healthy youngsters, especially students, at the expense of females and other sectors of the population. One has, also, the feeling that some questions of theoretical and/or practical significance never had a fair chance to be researched adequately. A multiplicity of reasons might be hypothesized to account for this kind of shortcoming. For example, some problems might have seemed very much complicated compared with the questions readily handled by investigators anxious to satisfy a pressing need for quick publication. Other problems, apparently, did not lend themselves readily to be tackled by the fashionable approaches and techniques of study but required some creative turn of the mind to start with. Other questions, still, seem to have been, simply, aversive to a sizable number of workers. The problems were not fitted to the intellectual/temperamental climate that pervaded the academia during the past decade. Guided by many such remarks, we intend to present in this paper some suggestions for future research. We do not claim that these ideas would cover the most important