What is The Endocannabinoid system?

Have you ever wondered how cannabinoids interact with your body? The answer is through the endocannabinoid system and natural cannabinoid receptors in the human body.

The endocannabinoid system is responsible for regulating balance in our body’s immune response, communication between cells, appetite and metabolism, memory, and more. In spite of the integral role it takes on, until the recent endocannabinoid system discovery, it remained an unknown part of the human body’s functions.

Named for the plant that inspired its discovery, the endocannabinoid system is important to your overall health and equilibrium, but its importance is only just becoming understood by the medical community. It is through the endocannabinoid system that the naturally occurring cannabinoids from medical marijuana interact with our bodies and trigger its beneficial effects. With the potential to greatly affect the way our bodies work, a healthy endocannabinoid system is essential and it’s key that we recognize how to maintain it.  

THE HISTORY OF THE ENDOCANNABINOID SYSTEM

Across cultures and building through the 19th century, extractions of the cannabis plant were widely used for a number of medicinal purposes. However, following practical prohibition of the cannabis plant in 1937 by the U.S. government for fear of abuse of its psychoactive properties, the medical use, experimentation, and study of cannabis were eliminated, stalling the progress of our understanding of the endocannabinoid system and the possible medical effects of cannabis. For nearly 50 years, marijuana fell from popular pharmacopeia and was labelled as illicit in the minds of Americans.

Scientists were finally able to define endocannabinoid in the early 1990’s when Lisa Matsuda announced that her team at the National Institute of Mental Health had first identified a THC-sensitive receptor in lab rat brains.

The path to the discovery of the endocannabinoid system and cannabinoid receptors in the human body, however, started more than a century earlier.

In 1895, researchers T. Barlow Wood, W.T. Newton Spivey, and Thomas Hill Easterfield became the first to isolate and identify a cannabis-derived cannabinoid, cannabinol (CBN) (Wood, Spivey & Easterfield, 1896). Over the next 70 years, researchers identified more cannabinoids, including R. Adams and others who identified and isolated CBD in 1940, and in 1964, Ralph Mechoulam and colleagues isolated and identified tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) (Pertwee, 2006) (Gaoni & Mechoulam, 1964). Following those monumental breakthroughs, researchers spent decades exploring those cannabinoids and their properties.

Before Matsuda’s discovery of the cannabinoid receptor in the animal’s brain, however, it was often speculated that cannabinoids produced their balancing effects via nonspecific interactions. Following this revelation, the National Academy of Science predicted the 1990s would be the “Decade of the Brain”. It turned out to be true as the following 10 year period would produce “more advances in neuroscience than in all previous years combined” (Lee, 2012).

It was in the early and mid-1990s Mechoulam and colleagues officially discovered the endocannabinoid system. It happened after he and his team were able to locate and identify two of the body’s naturally produced major endocannabinoids, anandamide and 2-arachidonoylglycerol, or 2-AG (Mechoulam & Hanus, 2000).

Since then, scientists have labored to learn as much as they can about the endocannabinoid system, our naturally occurring cannabinoids, and the ways cannabis alters this balance, publishing over 20,000 scientific studies referencing cannabinoids in just the last two decades.  

WHAT IS THE ENDOCANNABINOID SYSTEM?

The endocannabinoid system is made up of several integrated mechanisms:

• Enzymes responsible for creating and destroying cannabinoids
• Receptor sites on cells to receive cannabinoids
• Endocannabinoids themselves (cannabinoid-like compounds that are naturally produced by the human body)

These mechanisms are predominantly responsible for communication within the body to best regulate various biological responses.

One of the prime questions raised in these early studies was whether or not the body produces its own natural equivalents to the previously discovered compounds called phytocannabinoids, like THC and CBD, found in the cannabis plant (Mandal, 2014). The answer turned out to be “yes” – in the form of the endocannabinoids anandamide and 2-AG, which are like the two prominent analogs to THC and CBD, (Pacher et al, 2006). With the understanding that the cannabinoid system allows humans to create our own cannabinoids, the door to deconstructing their purpose was opened.

ENDOCANNABINOIDS AS A RESPONSE

Endocannabinoids are created in response to needs within the larger physiological system and are largely understood to be used for the body’s regulatory functions. Acting backwards on presynaptic cells, they control the volume at which communicating signals are sent. It is in this way that endocannabinoids affect duration and intensity of the wide range of physiological processes under their control.

However, it has been repeatedly noted that, while the endocannabinoid system is linked to a number of important processes and is concentrated in the brain, nervous system, and reproductive organs, it does not affect regions of the brain controlling heart and lung function. This is one of the main reasons that fatal overdoses of cannabinoids do not occur (NCI, 2016).