Legalized Cannabis in Colorado Emergency Departments: A Cautionary Review of Negative Health and Safety Effects.

Cannabis legalization has led to significant health consequences, particularly to patients in emergency departments and hospitals in Colorado. The most concerning include psychosis, suicide, and other substance abuse. Deleterious effects on the brain include decrements in complex decision-making, which may not be reversible with abstinence. Increases in fatal motor vehicle collisions, adverse effects on cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, inadvertent pediatric exposures, cannabis contaminants exposing users to infectious agents, heavy metals, and pesticides, and hash-oil burn injuries in preparation of drug concentrates have been documented. Cannabis dispensary workers ("budtenders") without medical training are giving medical advice that may be harmful to patients. Cannabis research may offer novel treatment of seizures, spasticity from multiple sclerosis, nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy, chronic pain, improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, and sleep disorders. Progress has been slow due to absent standards for chemical composition of cannabis products and limitations on research imposed by federal classification of cannabis as illegal. Given these factors and the Colorado experience, other states should carefully evaluate whether and how to decriminalize or legalize non-medical cannabis use.

Screening phosphatidylcholine biomarkers in mouse liver extracts from a hypercholesterolemia study using ESI-MS and chemometrics.

When fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet (HFD), homozygous LDL receptor knockout mice exhibit extremely high levels of plasma cholesterol that are expected to influence liver metabolism. One step in the investigation of potential hepatic alterations was the analysis of organic extracts of livers from these and control mice by electrospray mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). Chemometrics (bioinformatics) analysis shows that the sample spectra cluster into two groups: one from mice with plasma cholesterol levels in excess of 900 mg dL(-1) and one from animals with cholesterol levels of 60-250 mg dL(-1). The loadings plot of the first PC in the principal-components analysis (PCA) reveals the chemical basis for clustering, i.e., biomarkers present at different concentrations in the different groups. The exact masses of the key peaks in this loadings plot indicate these species are phosphatidylcholines (PtdChos). This assignment is confirmed by tandem MS. Partial least-squares (PLS) with variable selection shows that the spectra are well correlated with plasma total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and triglyceride (TG) levels.