Congratulations to Dave Nutt, Val Curran and their colleagues at Imperial and UCL. Following on from their groundbreaking studies of MDMA on channel 4, they have now repeated the same format with cannabis.

Running live psychopharmacology studies on television is not for the faint hearted, but it offers a unique way to impart public health knowledge in a way which is lively and captures the imagination. And the visual element works well.

The personal testimony of Jon Snow and the other participants was particularly revealing. The channel 4 experiments on cannabis demonstrated that CBD can inhibit the tendency for THC to produce paranoid thinking, a finding that was in complete agreement with two previous studies at the Institute of Psychiatry a few years back.

1. Does CBD inhibit THC?
2. Cannabidiol inhibits THC-elicited paranoid symptoms

All the evidence points in the same direction, skunk cannabis [high THC, zero CBD] is more hazardous for mental health than traditional cannabis [equivalent CBD & THC]. The community-based studies in psychiatric clinics and the experimental studies in the lab are in complete agreement on this point [link]. CBD softens the effect of THC again and again.