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the reason for THC

Fiery Templar, I appreciate the interest in my opinion. I would agree going extinct and dying to spread seeds/help your species are two different things. That was not the subject of the discussion, however.

"No living organism would develop a trait that meant the death of it."
Diegoblunt's example is right on...Here's more simple proof:
Living Organism = Honeybee
Trait = Stinging
Result = Leaving half its junk elsewhere...and DYING.

Still skeptikal...Bio 101 is for you
 
^ Who says THC isn't meant to do the same..? Humans are the ones that cultivate Cannabis, year upon year, because humans find the active compounds useful.. Now a plant dies anyway, but if it can make sure that people harvest seeds and keep on growing more Cannabis plants every year, then this is in order to allow their species to carry on. The very same concept as with the honeybee or the frog..
 
k just building on what everyones saying, though abundant THC will mean death its an anual plant and will dye about a week or 2 after the THC reaches max level.
and a honey bee can't be calssed as an individual organism, a hive is an organism, just more spread out than most. the death of a bee is inconcequntual as its on a hive of several thousand and all workers are infertile females anyway so cant breed which changes things dramaticly, the death of 1 bee is like loosing some skin when ur scratched.
back on subject, if THC is a water keeping method then why only when it flowers instead off when its a seedling and loosing water will have the most disasterous effects. i am controdicing/prooving wrong my earlyer posts cos each time i read this i realise more.
:) (understning seems to dawn)
 
hedgewitch, If you don't choose class a honeybee as an organism, I can see your point. Let's apply that logic to a wider scale, in which you say the earth is itself an organism, "Gaia." To Gaia it does not matter if a single species of plant goes extinct, because millions others are present and ready to evolve into its niche. The death of an individual plant, species, or hell even 300 species is "inconsequential," as you said.

Yeti is still trying to prove that the goal of evolution is to rationally avoid death, which is fundamentally untrue, as every living being dies and 99% of species ever alive have gone extinct. However I can see trying to persuade you is useless.

My personal feeling about cannabis is that 1 million to 500,000 years ago humans learned when they ingested this particular plant it changed their consciousness in a pleasurable way, as it bound to the receptors of the endocannabinoid system already present in our nervous system. As I mentioned before, an endocannabinoid system is found in many other vertebrates and even some invertebrates, so humans were definitely not the first to get fucked up on weed, man.

Now what is the "reason" for THC? I would hypothesize along the lines of the abstract posted by 5HT2. THC, Opium, mescaline, DMT tree bark, all of these happened to evolve certain chemicals similar to neurotransmitters found in our brain. This is logical because evolution is known for its redundancy, which is why neuroscientists study rats' brains in order to better figure out human brains. With the rise of human history and consciousness and our arrogant anthropomorphizing, we assumed nature must have put them their for a reason. We cement our delusion by cultivating and potentiating these plant's chemical production through domestication and selective breeding.
 
This theory still doesn't make sense, as for this theory to work, cannabis had THC before humans found it, and hence this hypothesis doesn't explain the question at hand.
 
Molecular evolutionary studies have shown that a large fraction of processes and structures present in modern organisms have been inherited from remote common ancestors with remarkably small changes from their original genetic coding demonstrating extreme evolutionary conservatism. <---I'm sure you've heard something like this before...What doesn't make sense about the hypothesis? I am proposing cannabinoids randomly happened to evolve in a particular species, because of an evolutionary benefit- be it anti-oxidant properties or just plain stickiness.

Humans, like other vertebrates, share an endocannabinoid signaling system which happens to be modulated with cannabinoids.

It is the same as us having receptors extremely sensitive to capsaicin- the spicy chemical in hot peppers, which acts as an agonist to various sensory nerve systems.

The "Anandamide," or endogenous ligand of that system I believe is yet to be found, but as you know there are some interesting interactions between CB1/2 receptors and capsaicin receptors such as TRPV1s (transient receptor potential channel vanilloid receptor 1).

So animals don't eat peppers or weed because it either hurts their mouth or disorients them. Humans know better, because of our so-called technology and society, and we have domesticated and potentiated both of these evolutionary products.
 
I was talking about the weed evolved THC for humans argument.

I don't think that cannabinoids were developed to be noxious. For one, most of the cannabinoids in hemp aren't active, why would a plant produce so many inactive cannabinoids to produce a couple of important one?

Also, insects don't express CB1 receptors (or at least no ones found one that does yet), and the main "predator" of wild hemp is insects.

Yeah, I've often wondered whether people should start calling the VR1 receptor the ionotropic cannabinoid receptor. Besides anandamide, the endogenous N-arachidonyl dopamine is another potential endo-vanniloid.
 
Maybe the cannabinoids are not noxious, just significantly disorienting enough to sway birds or animals not to eat them while attracting insects with its sticky resin?
The only reason THC is important is merely because it happens to cause significant/desirable changes in consciousness, causing humans to abuse it. Other than that THC is just another chemical in nature.

BilZ0r and 5HT2, do you think pain circuits regulated by vanilloid receptors will be successfully targeted by cannamimetic molecules?
Also, BilZ0r, I remember you saying in a different thread you did not see clinical success for rimonabant SR141716 CB antagonist. What is your reasoning for that? Do you see safety concerns or do you think a more specific cannabinoid antagonist will be more successful?

Gotta love PubMed!
Br J Pharmacol. 2004 Jul 26
"Anandamide acts as a vasodilator of dural blood vessels in vivo by activating TRPV1 receptors."
Pub Med: 5277315
 
But birds and animals don't eat wild hemp... At least not if we're assuming that the original source for hemp is south-east-asia, which I'm confident in doing.

Well, I know VR1 is used in intergrating peripheranl noxious stimuli, but I didn't know it had a defined cental role yet, or are you talking about CB-R-VR1 receptor interactions?

I don't think a CB1 antagonist will have much of a place. Why I say this is more of a gut feeling. But I suppose when a system has nothing to do with the etiology of a disease, or when the system has no obvious linkage to a disease, I doubt screwing with that system will have much of an effect.
 
well i think i'm gonna go with slaughterhouse, we share something like 70% of our DNA with a bannana so its probab;y just chance that we share canabinoid type substances between species if plant and animal, prehapse the reason for THC was developed for an ancestor of the cannabis plant and is no longer necesary just like our apendix. i didn't think that we'd clear thin up but its interesting to get other peoples perspectives on the idea.;)
probably the end of this thread... or is it.
 
Plant hormones would not be found in such high concentrations as THC. Plants
produce a wide variety of compounds that have no direct role in growth and
development. They are termed secondary products or secondary compounds. Examples
include caffeine, nicotine, rubber and menthol. Their main functions appears to
be in protecting the plant from herbivores and pathogens. THC's most likely
function is thus to protect the plant from herbivores or pathogens.

Reference

Taiz, L. and Zeiger, E. 1991. Plant Physiology. Redwood City, CA:
Benjamin/Cummings.
 
BilZ0r said:
Yeah, I've often wondered whether people should start calling the VR1 receptor the ionotropic cannabinoid receptor. Besides anandamide, the endogenous N-arachidonyl dopamine is another potential endo-vanniloid.
Click to expand...

How strong is the evidence for this? I mean, there is that convincing Nature paper from David Juliuses lab, but I really believe that they have to prove that anandamine or 3-arachidonyl glycerol (a molecule whose importance is itself somewhat controversial) can bind to these channels with high enough affinity and selectivity over other channels, or correlate it definitively with some endocannabinoid-mediated behavior via knockout/knockin mice or a selective antagonist.
 
Yeah, anandamides affinity is quite low, around 1µM right? But it does seem to be near to a full agonist, at least relative to capsaicin. I have seen evidence that endogenous anandamde modulates Substantia Nigra dopaminergic neurons via the VR1 receptor... though it was in vitro, I'd love to see some in vivo recordings along the same line.
 
BilZ0r said:
But birds and animals don't eat wild hemp
Click to expand...

Obviously you've never grown weed outdoors. Deer, rabbits, and raccoons all love that shit. They know theyre getting high, otherwise they wouldnt come back to eat more.
 
No, I mean naturally, historically... There are very few herbivores in south east asia. Not ones big enough to get a fully grown hemp plant at least. The odd dear, but I though they were restricted to the larger indonesian islands. Anyway, I'm not making this up, I read this in either;
Abel, E 1980, Marihuana: The rist 12,000 years
McKenna T, 1992 Food of the Gods, the search for the original tree of knowledge
or Small, E 1979, the Species problem in cannabis.

I can't actaully be fucked going through the books to find out which one said it... it doesn't really matter, as I suppose there isn't that good an argument to argue that cannabis came from southeast asia, and not the mainland.
 
Swayne I see your point about the relatively high amount of THC in modern cannabis, but it the first cannabis species there was probably just a bit of THC, which eventually became greater in its descendents as it conveyed a selective benefit, in the form of antioxidant, sticky resins, increased seed dispersal by animals, etc.-It was probably a combination of different factor on various levels, as biological "reasons" usually are.
Before humans took over, the percentage of THC probably wasn't 1%.

And I know my friend has had patches eaten by random drug addicted animals.

It's just a matter of nature ramping up the genetic machinery to produce more cannabinoids.

The definition you provide is quite unclear and dated:
"Plant hormones would not be found in such high concentrations as THC. Plants produce a wide variety of compounds that have no direct role in growth and
development. They are termed secondary products or secondary compounds. Examples include caffeine, nicotine, rubber and menthol. Their main functions appears to be in protecting the plant from herbivores and pathogens. THC's most likely function is thus to protect the plant from herbivores or pathogens."

Inherent in that definition is ignorance. To decide that a certain compound has no chemical role in a plant and yet is still expressed time after time is an assumption I don't human science can rest upon yet.
Basically you're saying THC evolved to protect the plant from herbivores or pathogens, which could be true.
 
Swayne I see your point about the relatively high amount of THC in modern cannabis, but it the first cannabis species there was probably just a bit of THC, which eventually became greater in its descendents as it conveyed a selective benefit, in the form of antioxidant, sticky resins, increased seed dispersal by animals, etc.-It was probably a combination of different factors on various levels, as biological "reasons" usually are.
Before humans took over, the percentage of THC probably wasn't even 1%.

And I know my friend has had patches eaten by random drug addicted animals.

It's just a matter of nature ramping up the genetic machinery to produce more cannabinoids.

The definition you provide is quite unclear and dated:
"Plant hormones would not be found in such high concentrations as THC. Plants produce a wide variety of compounds that have no direct role in growth and
development. They are termed secondary products or secondary compounds. Examples include caffeine, nicotine, rubber and menthol. Their main functions appears to be in protecting the plant from herbivores and pathogens. THC's most likely function is thus to protect the plant from herbivores or pathogens."

Inherent in that definition is ignorance. To decide that a certain compound has no chemical role in a plant and yet is still expressed time after time is an assumption I don't human science can rest upon yet.
Basically you're saying THC evolved to protect the plant from herbivores or pathogens, which could be true.
 
"The intoxicating resin is secreted by glandular hairs located around the flowers and to a certain extent in the lower portions of the plant. The actual substance in the resin responsible for the plant's inebriating effects is a chemical called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In very hot climates, as in India and North Africa, so much resin is produced that the plant appears to be covered with a sticky dew even as it bakes under the parching rays of the hot sun. This resin serves as a protective shield preventing loss of water from the plant to the dry air. And of course, the more resin, the more THC likely to be present. "

taken from
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/history/first12000/abel.htm

is this the actual reason?
 
I doubt its the water loss reason. Alpine plants frequently DO do that; have leaves covered in a wax. Thats so that stomata can control the transpiration of water very tightly. But in those cases, the wax covers the leaves completely, it isn't just little spots.
 
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