Tolerance Arguement

[soupmoose]

So my friend and i are smoking the other day and one of my other pals mentioned that the last time we smoked together he was still high when he woke up. And my friend C claims that that is impossible because it has never happened to him but i know i've woken up high. so he tells me that it is because he has a higher tolerance level than me but i smoke 4 times as much as he does and a told he that he has never been really blazed because he hits like a bitch and doesnt even inhale. He then told me that smoking more does not increase your tolerance level and i was just arguing my head of with him about so maybe someone here can help me out.

So here are my two questions:
1) Have any of you ever woken up high after a night of smoking? and
2) Does smokiing more increase your tolerance or is my dumb friend right when he says that somehow biologically he has a higher tolerance than me?

i appreciate any input

[GreenLantern420]

1) Ive woken up feeling, 'different' not really high.
2) Smoking more increases tolerance, but ive noticed somepeople have naturally high or low tolerances to different drugs.

[Gag On Grass]

i've been smokin for awhile and i can hardly smoke a bowl and i cough quite a bit if that helps any, and when i inhale i don't inhale much before i stop.

[Rajel]

1)I almost always wake up half-baked.
2) Here is a section from the Institute of Medicene's 1999 report on Medical Marijuana on marijuana and tolerence. It just happens to be my favorite section, due to the title, "Chronic Effects of THC"


CHRONIC EFFECTS OF THC

Most substances of abuse produce tolerance, physical dependence, and withdrawal symptoms. Tolerance is the most common response to repetitive use of a drug and is the condition in which, after repeated exposure to a drug, increasing doses are needed to achieve the same effect. Physical dependence develops as a result of a resetting of homeostatic mechanisms in response to repeated drug use. Tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal are not peculiar to drugs of abuse. Many medicines that are not addicting can produce these types of effects; examples of such medications include clonidine, propranolol, and tricyclic antidepressants. The following sections discuss what is known about the biological mechanisms that underlie tolerance, reward, and dependence; clinical studies about those topics are discussed in chapter 3.
Tolerance

Chronic administration of cannabinoids to animals results in tolerance to many of the acute effects of THC, including memory disruption,34 decreased locomotion,2,119 hypothermia,42,125 neuroendocrine effects,134 and analgesia.4 Tolerance also develops to the cardiovascular and psychological effects of THC and marijuana in humans (see also discussion in chapter 3).55,56,76

Tolerance to cannabinoids appears to result from both pharmacokinetic changes (how the drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted) and pharmacodynamic changes (how the drug interacts with target cells). Chronic treatment with the cannabinoid agonist, CP 55,940, increases the activity of the microsomal cytochrome P450 oxidative system,31 the system through which drugs are metabolized in the liver; this suggests pharmacokinetic tolerance. Chronic cannabinoid treatment also produces changes in brain cannabinoid receptors and cannabinoid receptor mRNA concentrations--an indication that pharmacodynamic effects are important as well.

Most studies have found that brain cannabinoid receptor concentrations usually decrease after prolonged exposure to agonists,42,119,136,138 although some studies have reported increases137 or no changes2 in receptor binding in brain. Differences among studies could be due to the particular agonist tested, the assay used, the brain region examined, or the treatment time. For example, the THC analogue, levonantradol, produces a greater desensitization of adenylyl cyclase inhibition than does THC in cultured neuroblastoma cells.40 This might be explained by differences in efficacy between these two agonists.18,147 A time course study revealed differences among brain regins in the rates and magnitudes of receptor down regulation.16 Those findings suggest that tolerance to different effects of cannabinoids develops at different rates.

Chronic treatment with THC also produces variable effects on cannabinoid-mediated signal transduction systems. It produces substantial desensitization of cannabinoid-activated G proteins in a number of rat brain regions.147 The time course of this desensitization varies across brain regions.16

It is difficult to extend the findings of short-term animal studies to human marijuana use. To simulate long-term use, higher doses are used in animal studies than are normally achieved by smoking marijuana. For example, the average human will feel "high" after injection of THC at a level of 0.06 mg/kg,118 compared with the 10—20 mg/kg per day used in many chronic rat studies. At the same time, doses of marijuana needed to observe behavioral changes in rats (usually changes in locomotor behavior) are substantially higher than doses at which people feel "high." The pharmacokinetics of THC distribution in the body are also dramatically different between rats and humans and depend heavily on whether it is inhaled, injected, or swallowed. It is likely that some of the same biochemical adaptations to chronic cannabinoid administration occur in laboratory animals and humans, but the magnitude of the effects in humans might be less than that in animals in proportion to the doses used.
Reward and Dependence

Experimental animals that are given the opportunity to self-administer cannabinoids generally do not choose to do so, which has led to the conclusion that they are not reinforcing and rewarding.38 However, behavioral95 and brain stimulation94 studies have shown that THC can be rewarding to animals. The behavioral study used a "place preference" test, in which an animal is given repeated doses of a drug in one place, and is then given a choice between a place where it received the drug and a place where it did not. The animals chose the place where they received the THC. These rewarding effects are highly dose dependent. In all models studied, cannabinoids are only rewarding at midrange; doses that are too low are not rewarding; doses that are too high can be aversive. Mice will self-administer the cannabinoid agonist WIN 55,212-2 but only at low doses.106 This effect is specifically mediated by CB1 receptors and indicates that stimulation of those receptors is rewarding to the mice. Antagonism of cannabinoid receptors is also rewarding in rats; in conditioned place preference tests, animals show a preference for the place they receive the cannabinoid antagonist SR 141716A at both low and high doses.140 Cannabinoids increase dopamine concentrations in the mesolimbic dopamine system of rats, a pathway associated with reinforcement.25,39,161 However, the mechanism by which THC increases dopa-mine concentrations appears to be different from that of other abused drugs51 (see chapter 3 for further discussion of reinforcement). THC-induced increases in dopamine are due to increases in the firing rate of dopamine cells in the ventral tegmental area by 9-THC.47 However, these increases in firing rate in the ventral tegmental area could not be explained by increases in the firing of the A10 dopamine cell group, where other abused drugs have been shown to act.51

Physical dependence on cannabinoids has been observed only under experimental conditions of "precipitated withdrawal" in which animals are first treated chronically with cannabinoids and then given the CB1 antagonist SR 141716A.3,166 The addition of the antagonist accentuates any withdrawal effect by competing with the agonist at receptor sites; that is, the antagonist helps to clear agonists off and keep them off receptor sites. This suggests that, under normal cannabis use, the long half-life and slow elimination from the body of THC and the residual bioactivity of its metabolite, 11-OH-THC, can prevent substantial abstinence symptoms. The precipitated withdrawal produced by SR 141716A has some of the characteristics of opiate withdrawal, but it is not affected by opioid antagonists, and it affects motor systems differently. An earlier study with monkeys also suggested that abrupt cessation of chronic THC is associated with withdrawal symptoms.8 Monkeys in that study were trained to work for food after which they were given THC on a daily basis; when the investigators stopped administering THC, the animals stopped working for food.

A study in rats indicated that the behavioral cannabinoid withdrawal syndrome is consistent with the consequences of withdrawal from other drugs of abuse in that it correlates with the effects of stimulation of central amygdaloid corticotropin-releasing hormone release.135 However, the withdrawal syndrome for cannabinoids and the corresponding increase in corticotropin-releasing hormone are observed only after administration of the CB1 antagonist SR 141716A to cannabinoid-tolerant animals.3,166 The implications of data based on precipitated withdrawal in animals for human cannabinoid abuse have not been established.166 Furthermore, acute administration of THC also produces increases in corticotropin-releasing hormone and adrenocorticotropin release; both are stress-related hormones.71 This set of withdrawal studies may explain the generally aversive effects of cannabinoids in animals and could indicate that the increase in corticotropin-releasing hormone is merely a rebound effect. Thus, cannabinoids appear to be conforming to some of the neurobiological effects of other drugs abused by humans, but the underlying mechanisms of these actions and their value for determining the reinforcement and dependence liability of cannabinoids in humans remain undetermined.


http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/marimed/ - Link to the whole report. This section is in Chapter 2. Oh, and the random numbers that show up in the post are links that show up in the real reports page, and since I'm lazy I'm not going to go through the whole thing and remove them all.

[rwilliams]

I remember waking up high once although I'm still not sure if I was truely high. I smoked a lot of weed at about 1:30 (probably a little more than an eighth), went to bed at like 2 (I know what a waste) and I remember waking up and driving to school and feeling high. As for the tolerance thing, I remember getting high off a lot smaller amounts when I first started smoking, but that's all I know.

[nelswick]

1) I've woken up high plenty of times. When I first started smoking it was normal to stay high for 2 or 3 days.
2) Everybody has a sort of preprogrammed tolerance. For some people it's super high and for some, like me, it's extremely low.

[emagdnim13]

when i first started smoking 7 of us pitched in on a half of dank for 160.

i woke up the next morning extremely high.

i had a school function to go to and another friend who was there the night before was just as stoned as me.


your tolerance goes up the more you smoke. simple as that.

i've watched it happen.

one bong used to do it. but now to get the same feeling i have to smoke back to back. then take a break and enjoy the high.

[watermelon]

when i started i always felt high the next morning. not stoned, but a little diffrent from normal.

now i still feel stoned in the morning even though i have tolarence. but i think thats just becuase i smoke everyday and i never give it the chance to leave my system.

i think everyones tolarence is diffrent, i say who cares as long as you enjoy getting stoned.

[Amp]

Yeah, I wake up high quite a bit. Usually its after somking alot more than I normally do the night before. However, I still smoke the same amount per day, maybe a little less than I did a couple years ago, just gotta take a week off every now and then.

[sloppyjoe]

I will wake up from tyme to tyme and feel strange, like kinda high but not, as far as the tolerance, I know people who can hang out da' box, and I now people who can't hardly smoke their first tyme. I guess it just depends on the person. JOE>

[soupmoose]

thanks for the feedback fellas. i just wanted to be assured so i could rub it in his little smug face. haha

[Alex_09]

Originally Posted by GreenLantern420

1) Ive woken up feeling, 'different' not really high.
2) Smoking more increases tolerance, but ive noticed somepeople have naturally high or low tolerances to different drugs.

Yea for sure I agree with the 2nd thing 100%. I wake up 50 % of the time after I smoke kind of buzzed, or really feeling good at least, some people say they get hangovers from weed, I get like backup highs lol. I dont act different, just feel different.

[StonedSkunk]

tolerance is a sad thing, but a true fact.

[HerbsINtheBurbs]

I think alot of people confuse waking up high with waking up still drowsy from THC, or because THC stays in your system, still mellowed and all, but I can't see waking up high after 6-8 hours of sleep. I have on occasion however, smoked till 5 am and woken up 7 am blazed, but thats an entirely different scenario.