NEWS YOU CAN USE? Why Some People Can’t Handle Their Weed.

When humans consume weed, it stimulates their endocannabinoid system (ECS), which plays a key role in regulating our response to reward, stress and emotions. “What the ECS does is it optimizes our brain between excitation and inhibition,” says Dr. Baler. But when chemicals found in weed, such as THC, enter the ECS, they perturb the system’s ability to act in synchrony, which can disrupt our ability to regulate our response to stress, potentially causing anxiety.

“Fear stimuli that we can normally cope with can become unmanageable under the effects of marijuana because our fight-or-flight response gets disrupted,” says Dr. Baler. “You may not be able to keep those stimuli under control because your ECS is so out of whack because of all the THC in your system,” he says.

Chelsea Wind, a 46-year-old caregiver from Anderson, California, has been using medicinal marijuana every day for the past six years for pain management. One night she had a panic attack when she was at her friend’s house. “He was encouraging me to smoke more and more and get as high as humanly possible,” says Wind. “It felt like I had stopped being able to breath. I was panicking so much and I made him call 9-1-1.”

Too much is too much.