As of noon Thursday, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States had topped 10,000. As testing becomes more widely available, that total is expected to climb dramatically.
Well over half of all Americans have legal access to recreational or medicinal marijuana, and just like toilet paper hoarding, people are stocking up on cannabis products. While hunkering down with a good supply of weed to ride out the lack of social contact may sound appealing, cannabis users should know that if they are quarantined because they have shown symptoms of COVID-19 or have tested positive for coronavirus, consuming cannabis products containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) may have harmful side effects.
Julie Armstrong, CEO of Aurelius Data, a big-data company focused on plant-based medicines, said:
We know that the epidemiology of COVID-19 is similar to the influenza virus and has a similar disease presentation. And we know that in studies where THC was administered to mice with influenza, we saw an increase in viral loads and a decrease in the immune system to fight off the virus. It stands to reason that the same would hold true for Coronavirus and THC consumption could diminish the immune system of someone infected with the virus.
There have been no human trials demonstrating poorer outcomes in patients infected with the coronavirus who also use medicinal or recreational marijuana products. However, Dr. Barry Mennen, an adviser to Aurelius Data, notes that “the data from pre-human studies urge caution for these individuals in the face of the current viral epidemic.”
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Aurelius Data comments that “it’s well established that CBD [the non-psychoactive strain of cannabis] helps modulate autoimmune and inflammatory responses.”
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