Why did the human body develop the ability to engage with cannabinoids? I’ve heard people postulating that we’re practically build to get high, as a justification for cannabis usage, but I can’t really believe it would be the main cause for this specific natural selection. I mean; from a darwinian perspective it doesn’t really make sense – how would getting high be survival of the fittest? Also, there exist other cannabinoids than THC, so what is the effect of these, and how present are they in our daily lives and what are the effect of these?
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As others have said here, the brain produces it’s own chemicals and we happened to come across a plant that makes chemicals that imitate the ones our brain uses.
This is a common pattern: nicotine from the tobacco plant imitates acetylcholine in our brain, morphine from the poppy plant imitates endogenous opioids (e.g. endorhphins, endomorphin), and caffeine from the coffee, tea, and matè plants imitates adenosine. There’s more to it than that but it’s the same idea. Cannabinoids like THC imitated the endocannabinoids normally produced in our brain (anadamide, 2-AG).
For many years we had discovered the cannabinoid receptor in the brain but we didn’t know which brain chemical went with it. It would seem unlikely that nature gave us a cannabinoid receptor just so we could use the cannabis plant. So scientists kept searching and eventually found a new, previously unknown group of neurotransmitters, which they named the endocannabinoids, which literally means the cannabis-like chemicals from within the body.
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