Article today in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) at [www.wsj.com]. I searched and was able to read it free at livemint.com. Very relevant for ablations and other cardiac procedures as regular users may need double the amount of anesthesia. Many medical centers ask about cannabis use but many do not. I heard an anesthesiologist on YouTube say that use in the month before surgery could affect the necessary level of anesthesia.

Color me skeptical about that double the amount of anesthesia stuff. Cannabis just doesn't have that level of effects, and it's not an antagonist against the drugs typically used in anesthesia. I know of no mechanism of action that could even begin to explain a 50% reduction of effect. It almost seems like doctors are equating narcotics abuse with cannabis and not segregating the two. A huge percentage of the people who abuse narcotics and other hard drugs also use cannabis. So if you ask them if they use narcotics the answer will most likely be a lie if they do, but they might be okay with telling the truth on the pot, especially now that it's legal in much of North America. So the end result is a very skewed, non-representative sample. Do a study where drug use history is determined by hair testing, not patient reporting, and we might learn the truth.

The trouble for doctors is it's been virtually impossible to do research on cannabis for the last 100 years (still is), and medical schools have never included it in their curriculums since it was outlawed (it was previously). And even as things loosen up today, there are few sources for them to learn about it, so they tend to operate on a lot of hearsay, articles in the popular press, and so forth.

I lost an on-line argument with a person several years back over the harms of smoking marijuana. I know that this is aside from the topic, but he was able to pin me when I tried to find empirical evidence to show that smoking weed was about as deleterious as was smoking pretty much anything else. It wasn't that I was wrong. It was that there was no literature that I could find to support my contention, and all he had to do was to raise an eyebrow after asking me for proof of my position.

I still haven't bothered to look, but my guess is that there's a lot more evidence about the benefits and harms of the various ways of using cannabinoids and how they are taken into the body.