What Gets You Higher, Vaping or Smoking?
A study on cannabis, from 2018. by researchers from the renowned Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that in 6 sessions of 8.5 hours, you get higher from vaping than smoking.
Extensive smoking for science
Seventeen people were chosen by the Johns Hopkins Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit in the American city of Baltimore to partake in 6 extensive test sessions, each lasting approximately 8.5 hours.
Three different doses of THC
This study was subsidized by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The scientists published their findings at the end of 2018 in the journal JAMA Network Open, under the title: ‘Acute Effects of Smoked and Vaporized Cannabis in Healthy Adults Who Infrequently Use Cannabis‘.
For each session, a participant smoked or vaporized a dose of weed with 0 mg, 10 mg or 25 mg of THC, the primary and psychoactive cannabinoid in cannabis.
They all smoked and vaporized all three amounts during the 6 sessions, although they did not know how much THC they were using each time. They were also kept in the dark by the researchers to prevent prejudice when filling out a ‘subsequent drug-impairment questionnaire’,
During each high, the participants were also subjected to a series of physical and cognitive tests. For example, blood pressure and heart rate were measured 10 times during an 8-hour session. Participants had to perform tasks on the computer, such as copying shapes on a screen, solving simple equations, and simultaneously responding to two different stimuli with the mouse and keyboard.
The scientists first found that a dose of 25 milligrams of THC makes you “really, really high,” regardless of whether you smoke or vaporize it. After consuming this (largest) dose, 2 participants vomited and one experienced hallucination!
For both the pure joint smokers and the vaporizers, the majority of drug effects—including increased heart rate, dry mouth, red eyes, paranoia, and the munchies—peaked during the first hour after getting high. Sometimes these effects didn’t return to normal for more than 8 hours, and often the effects lasted for hours after the blood THC level had long since returned to normal. But the American researchers say that the effect of vaporizing is much more potent with every dose!
“Vaporized cannabis produces significantly stronger drug effects, cognitive and psychomotor impairment, and higher THC concentrations in the blood than the same dose of smoked cannabis,” the scientists write in JAMA Network Open.
This has to do with the difference between burning at a very high temperature (smoking a joint) and vaporizing at a much lower, ideal temperature. Ideal for the cannabinoids in cannabis to do their work, while in a joint they burn partly pointlessly and can do their work less effectively anyway because it gets too hot.
According to these scientists, smoking joints also produces quite a bit of ‘sidestream smoke’, or THC-rich smoke that is created but not inhaled. Vaporized weed therefore results – at both high and low doses – in significantly higher concentrations of THC in the blood of the participants than with weed that is smoked.
The vaporizers also made roughly twice as many mistakes on the cognitive tests and experienced greater ‘negative drug effects’ – such as dry mouth, itchy eyes and paranoia – than the weed smokers.t.
So in conclusion: vaporized weed makes people higher. And their doses were not even that strong compared to what is available on the commercial market, the researchers dryly note.
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