Vaping Cannabis Gets You A Lot Higher Than Smoking

It appears that vaping cannabis will get you that much more high than smoking the equivalent amount of cannabis flower. According to new research conducted by the Johns Hopkins Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit in Baltimore and funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the effects of smoking versus vaping cannabis was tested on a total of 17 participants. All participants had previously smoked cannabis, but not within the 30 days leading up to the beginning of the study, and the study was conducted over the course of six 8.5-hour sessions.

The participants were asked to vape or smoke a cannabis dose containing either 0 milligrams, 10mg or 25mg of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) during each of the sessions. Although each of the study’s participants wound up consuming all three possible doses over their six sessions by vaping and smoking, they were not privy as to how much THC was being administered each session. The goal of this was to avoid any potential bias on the impairment questionnaire that the participants had to complete at the close of each session. Along with the questionnaires the participants also took part in a number of different physical and cognitive tests that included having their heart rates and blood pressure measured over the 8 hour periods, completing tasks that involved replicating shapes on a screen, solving simple math equations as well as responding to two different stimuli simultaneously using a mouse and a keyboard.

The research yielded results that unequivocally showed that consuming a 25mg dose of THC will get an individual extremely high, no matter whether it was smoked or vaped, with two participants that ending up vomiting, and another that wound up experiencing hallucinations. The study also showed that for both the smokers and vapers the majority of the effects like increased heart rate, dry mouth, paranoia, etc., all peaked within the first hour after getting consuming the cannabis, and sometimes did not return to their baseline levels for more than 8 hours.

The results of the research corroborated the belief that the effects of vaping cannabis were significantly greater at every one of the doses. The researchers wrote in their study, published this past week on Nov. 30th in the journal JAMA Network Open: “Vaporized cannabis produced significantly greater subjective drug effects, cognitive and psychomotor impairment, and higher blood THC concentrations than the same doses of smoked cannabis.” Regardless of the dose, vaping the cannabis resulted in significantly higher concentrations of THC in participants’ blood and the vapers were shown to make twice as many mistakes on the cognitive portions of the study and felt greater negative side effects than the smokers did.

In short, vaporized cannabis got people significantly more stoned even though researchers admit that the dosages they used weren’t as strong when compared to what’s commercially available nowadays. “Notably, the highest dose of cannabis administered in this study (25mg of THC: 0.19 g; 13.4 percent THC) is substantially smaller and has a lower THC concentration than what is typically contained in pre-rolled cannabis cigarettes available for purchase in cannabis dispensaries, which commonly contain roughly 1.0 g of cannabis with THC concentrations often exceeding 18 percent,” the researchers wrote.

Did you suspect that vaping your cannabis got you more high than just smoking it?