Hold on everyone, put down your blunts, fattys, joints, water pipes, knife hits, vaporizers, apples, soda cans, or whatever else you are using to administer yourself the devil weed....
Translated from science nerd to normal person: the article basically says that there is a molecule that your body makes normally, called AEA that binds to your cannabinoid receptors (of course THC also binds to these). It doesn't look like weed has this molecule in any significant amount as far as I can tell in 2 minutes of googling.
So what AEA does then according to the paper, is that in huge concentrations for a neurotransmitter (same family as serotonin or dopamine), it appears to kill fibrotic liver cells (HSCs) in a petri dish. Stopping right here, this means that they can kill these HSCs if they give enough AEA... if you read my thing about Tylenol you'll remember toxicity is all about dose. And what works in the lab doesn't always work in people. I remember back years ago there would be papers almost every week talking about things that killed HIV in culture... well yeah, bleach will too, but you aren't going to give that to people. But anyway...
The real bad news for those of you craving Funyuns and Mountain Dew is that they showed that they were unable to block cell death after blocking the cannabinoid receptors. This means that cell death is not happening dependent on AEA binding to those cannabinoid receptors. So, although THC also binds to those receptors, it would likely also not have any effect on the HSCs in that way. However, if you can see the light through all that red-eye squinting, it looks like AEA works through binding to cholesterol on HSCs, but whether weed would also do this and have an effect was not studied, although it is certainly possible. But I'd wager you'd have to do some serious work with the 7 foot bong to get enough concentration to have any effects....
