The cannabinoid system: from the point of view of a chemist

Raphael Mechoulam; Lumir Hanuš

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511543630.003

1 - The cannabinoid system: from the point of view of a chemist

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009

Raphael Mechoulam and

Lumir Hanuš

Edited by

David Castle and

Robin Murray

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Raphael Mechoulam: Affiliation:
Hebrew University Medical Faculty, Israel
Lumir Hanuš: Affiliation:
Hebrew University Medical Faculty, Israel
David Castle: Affiliation:
Mental Health Research Institute, Melbourne
Robin Murray: Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, London

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Summary

This book is about cannabis (marijuana) and psychotic illnesses; more specifically, it outlines how our increasing understanding of cannabis itself, the effects of cannabis on the brain and psychic functions and of the cannabinoid system can inform our understanding of the relationships between cannabis and psychosis. This chapter serves as an introduction to this topic, with a brief historical overview of the psychic effects of cannabis, followed by an exposition on the cannabinoid system.

Cannabis and mental illness

J. J. Moreau, the first nineteenth-century psychiatrist with an interest in psychopharmacology, described in great detail his experiments with hashish (Moreau, 1973). He took the drug himself and asked his students to follow his example. He also administered it to his patients. By modern standards the doses used were enormously high. The effects on one of his assistants, who swallowed 16 g of an extract – presumably containing several hundred milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which we know today to be the major psychotropic principal of cannabis – were intense agitation, incoherence, delirium and hallucinations. On the basis of numerous such experiments, Moreau declared that ‘there is not a single, elementary manifestation of mental illness that cannot be found in the mental changes caused by hashish, from simple manic excitement to frenzied delirium, from the feeblest impulse, the simplest fixation, the merest injury to the senses, to the most irresistible drive, the wildest delirium, the most varied disorders of feelings’.

Type: Chapter
Information: Marijuana and Madness
Psychiatry and Neurobiology
, pp. 1 - 18

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543630.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2004

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