Weed DOES NOT Prevent COVID-19, You Goddamn Stoners.

Most people who can read already know this, but the recently viral articles with headlines like “Cannabis compounds may stop COVID-19 infection, study suggests”, and “Cannabis Compounds Prevented Covid Infection in Laboratory Study,” were written by assholes.   Or at least the editors who wrote those misleading headlines were being assholes.

Dozens of articles…with terribly misleading headlines.

Especially when you consider that stoners are a demographic who may, or may not read the whole article.

I know this, because I am an editor myself and I’ve written literally thousands of headlines over the years, both for articles I’ve written and for articles I’ve edited.  I also have several stoner friends.

I’ve written my fair share of clickbait headlines, but when it comes to a pandemic, where misinformation is at an all-time high, we should have a higher standard.

This week a budtender in Los Angeles told Fox KTVU that “People have been coming in more for CBD–related products. Some people do say often how they hear Sativa weed helps prevent COVID and stuff like that.”

We can’t be surprised when many in the media are doing their absolute best to mislead cannabis consumers.

This is a picture of my friend Stuart hugging several pounds of marijuana during an interview we did at a dispensary a couple years ago. It has nothing to do with this particular article. It’s just a hilarious photo containing a lot of weed. Onward…

If you actually read about the Cannabis/Covid study that was conducted, you will notice that none of it involved actual human subjects.  The study was conducted at Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center, in test tubes, and they found that a few compounds in cannabis can bind to the spike protein of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

What they don’t mention is that there are already dozens of approved drugs that already do this. If you’re interested in the science of inhibiting the binding of COVID-19 to human cells, you can read more here: A Repurposed Drug Screen Identifies Compounds That Inhibit the Binding of the COVID-19 Spike Protein to ACE2.   It’s very dry reading, I know.

So I’ll summarize perhaps the most important takeaways from the cannabis/covid lab study:

1)  Smoking or ingesting cannabis has not been shown to prevent COVID-19 infection in living people.
2) Pharmaceutical studies are meaningless for you, the consumer, until after human trials are conducted.
3) Smoking or ingesting cannabis has not been shown to prevent COVID-19 infection in living people.

In conclusion, the number-one best way to prevent a COVID-19 infection, especially a serious one, is to get vaccinated.  And ask your doctor about getting boosted too.