Posts by Steve Gold
Clearing the Fog Around THCA
Separating Facts, Assumptions, and Unknowns Cannabis vocabulary was built around a single compound. THC set the terms: potency measured against it, effects described through it, even the idea of a product being “active” defined by it. That vocabulary became the default way to talk about anything in cannabis, including compounds it was never built to…
Read MoreTHCA and THC: Related, Not Equal
Walk into most cannabis conversations and you’ll hear THCA and THC treated as if they’re the same thing wearing two different labels. One version says THCA is just “inactive THC,” a placeholder waiting to become the real thing. Another says THCA is “the safe one,” a gentler cannabinoid usable freely without the baggage of THC.…
Read MoreDoes THCA Cross the Blood-Brain Barrier?
What the evidence can and cannot show Someone asks whether THCA crosses the blood-brain barrier expecting a single answer, built on a single kind of evidence. That expectation is the problem. The question is actually addressed through three different kinds of information: what THCA’s chemical structure predicts about its ability to pass through the barrier,…
Read MoreWhen the Heart Races After Stopping THC
A nervous system in transition. Somewhere in the weeks or months after quitting, the heart starts doing something unannounced. It picks up pace while sitting still. It pounds harder after a single flight of stairs that never used to register. It flutters mid-sentence in an otherwise calm conversation, for no reason anyone can name. There…
Read MoreHow Cannabis Disappeared From Western Medicine
The decline of cannabis medicine. Cannabis did not leave Western medicine because it had suddenly been proven ineffective. By the time it was effectively removed from clinical practice in the mid-twentieth century, it had established a place in nineteenth-century medicine through roughly a century of documented use, practitioner observation, and published case literature. The question…
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