Cannabis

What does it look like?

Soft black resin, furry green leaves and hard brown lumps, cannabis can look very different depending on its type – but it all comes from cannabis plants.

What does it smell like?

Cannabis has a musky, sweet smell. Some of the more potent types of cannabis can have a more pungent smell, but this isn’t a reliable guide to the strength of any batch.

How do people take it?

Splif, joint or botjie: Roll it into a cannabis cigarette known as a spliff or joint. Some people don’t use tobacco at all and make weed-only spliffs – either because they prefer it that way or to avoid becoming dependent on nicotine.

Bongs: Users do this mix by mixing the drug with tobacco and putting it in a pipe, lighting it, and then inhaling the smoke through water out of a large tube. There are many types of bongs, and not everyone uses tobacco. Like with joints, using tobacco in bongs increases the risk of nicotine dependence.

Edibles: People mix it into cakes (hash brownies), tea, yoghurt, or sweets (gummies/lollipops). The amount of cannabis in these products can vary greatly, and sometimes – especially in sweets – other harmful drugs are added or used instead. The effects of consuming edibles are unpredictable, and it can be very easy to take a larger dose than you want to accidentally.

Vaping and e-cigarettes: This method has become more popular in recent years. Most people use a vaporiser which heats the cannabis rather than burning it. Very little is known about the health impact of vaping cannabis. Ready-made vapes and vape juices, like nicotine ones but claiming to contain cannabis chemicals like CBD (legal) and THC (not legal), are also available. Still, illegal vapes might contain synthetic cannabinoids instead.

Smoking cannabis with tobacco increases the risk of becoming dependent on nicotine. To avoid this, don’t use tobacco in bongs and spliffs.

How does it make you feel?

The effects of cannabis can vary massively. Some say feeling ‘stoned’ makes them feel chilled out and happy in their thoughts, while others say it makes them giggly and chatty. But it can also make people feel lethargically unmotivated, and some people become paranoid, confused, and anxious.

Cannabis changes how you think; some say it gives them a different perspective. It does affect your judgement, though; people often think conversations or thoughts they have (whether good or bad) are much more deep or important when they’re stoned than they would normally.

It can also make you hungry, known as having ‘the munchies’, or make you feel sick, known as a whitey or a green. It can make you feel drowsy or sleepy and can give you the sense that time is slowing down.

THC and CBD

The hallucinogenic effects of cannabis are mainly due to a compound in cannabis called THC (tetrahydrocannabinol).

The other important compound in cannabis is CBD (cannabidiol). Skunk and other forms of strong cannabis contain high levels of THC but very little or no CBD.

It’s thought that CBD can balance out some of the effects of THC and make users less likely to feel anxious and paranoid. You can’t tell from looking or smelling cannabis whether there’s a balance of CBD and THC in it, but in general, hash may have more CBD than skunk.

How does it make you behave?

Cannabis can make some people giggly and chatty and other people paranoid, confused and anxious – it depends on the type of person taking it and the circumstances under which they take it.

Some people:

• Experience mild hallucinations if they take particularly strong cannabis.
• Become lethargic and unmotivated.
• Have problems concentrating and learning new information. This is because studies suggest that cannabis affects the part of the brain we use for learning and remembering things.
• Perform poorly in exams. Because cannabis impacts the part of the brain we use for learning and remembering things, regular use by young people (whose brains are still developing) has been linked to poor exam results.

After effects:

People may still feel the effects the next day, particularly after a heavy session.

How long will it be detectable?

If you’ve used cannabis as a one-off, it will show up in a urine test for around 2 to 3 days afterwards. However, this can go up to a month for regular users. How long a drug can be detected depends on how much is taken and which testing kit is used. This is only a general guide.

The Risks:

Smoking cannabis can.

• make you wheeze and out of breath.
• make you cough uncomfortably or painfully.
• make your asthma worse if you have it.

There’s been less research on it, but smoking cannabis is likely to have many of the long-term physical health risks as smoking tobacco (even if you don’t mix the cannabis with tobacco). So, smoking cannabis can also be.

• increase the risk of lung cancer.
• increase your heart rate and affect your blood pressure, which makes it particularly harmful for people with heart disease.
• reduce your sperm count if you’re male, affecting your ability to have children.
• suppress your ovulation if you’re female, affecting your ability to have children.
• increase the risk of your baby being born smaller than expected if you smoke it while pregnant.

Mental health risks

Using cannabis can:

• affect your motivation to do things.
• impair your memory so you can’t remember things or learn new information.
• give you mood swings.
• disturb your sleep and make you depressed.
• make you anxious, panicky, or even aggressive.
• make you see or hear things that aren’t there (known as hallucinating or tripping)
• cause hours (or days) of anxiety, paranoia, and hallucinations, which only settle down if the person stops taking it – and sometimes don’t settle down at all.
• cause a severe relapse for people with psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia.
• increase your chances of developing illnesses like schizophrenia, especially if you have a family background of mental illness and you start smoking in your teenage years.

What is cannabis cut with?

Lots of things. Dealers cut hash with similar-looking substances or heavy materials to increase the weight of the drug and make a bigger profit.

Although not all cannabis is cut, it’s tough to know when it is or isn’t – so you could be smoking, eating, or vaping chemicals from all sorts of unknown substances, including pesticides used when growing the cannabis.

Tobacco is often mixed with cannabis for making joints or smoking bongs. If you mix cannabis with tobacco, you’ll be taking on the same risks you get from smoking tobacco.

These are addiction to nicotine (the drug in tobacco), coughs, chest infections and, in the longer term, cancer and heart disease.

Addiction:

Can you get addicted?

Yes. Heavy cannabis users often get cravings and find it hard not to take the drug – even when they know it’s causing them physical, mental, or social problems.

When heavy users do try to stop, they can:

• feel moody and irritable.
• feel sick.
• find it hard to sleep.
• find it hard to eat.
• experience sweating and shaking.
• get diarrhoea.

If you roll your spliffs with tobacco, you’re also at risk of getting addicted (or staying addicted) to nicotine.