NIH awards Dustin Stairs, PhD, $400k grant to study cannabis abuse potential

Question: What do a farm bill, Covid and cannabis have in common?

Answer: They are all the impetus for cutting-edge research on potential CBD abuse in adolescents.

The 2018 Farm Bill made hemp and its byproducts legal, as long as the amount of delta-9 THC (the chemical in marijuana that gets you high) is under 3%. This led to a rise in cannabis dispensaries and easy access to vaporized CBD and other non-delta-9 THC cannabis drugs even for teens.

Throughout his career, Dustin J. Stairs, PhD, professor of psychological science, has conducted extensive research in the rewarding effects (meaning, abuse potential) of stimulant drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamines and nicotine. But when he was homebound during the pandemic, he started to think about applying his research to a newly popular delta-8 THC — still a psychoactive but not as strong as delta-9 — because, he says, “No one was looking at it.”

So, he developed a vaporized model in his lab, published a paper that generated interest and applied for a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant while on sabbatical.

The NIH awarded Stairs $440,924 to study how one’s environment affects the likelihood one will abuse delta-8-THC and CBD across adolescent development. The NIH’s National Institute on Drugs of Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) are jointly funding the grant.

Stairs and his undergraduate research laboratory within the Department of Psychological Science will collaborate with Charles Bockman, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, on the three-year research project titled “The Developmental Effects of Environmental Enrichment on the Minor Cannabinoid Drug Reward and Cannabinoid Receptor Levels.”

The team hopes their research will fuel better prevention and treatment strategies for countering cannabinoid abuse and better inform law makers in regulating these compounds.

Approximately 12 students make up Stairs’ undergraduate research team. They come from a myriad of majors, ranging from biology and neuroscience to psychology and exercise science. The lab is truly student-run, with Stairs overseeing the project. “Once I get the students trained, it’s their baby,” he says.

The team will investigate two groups of rats: “addiction prone” or “addiction resistant.” Researchers will consider how environment affects addiction, how long the rats must remain in the environment before they exhibit “addiction prone” or “addiction resistant” characteristics and how these environments alter the rewarding effects of delta-8 THC.

It is illegal for adolescents to consume alcohol but legal for them to get high with these non-delta-9 THC compounds. Recognizing this reality, Stairs, Bockman and their undergraduate researchers seek to better understand the abuse potential of vaping delta-8 THC and CBD in teenagers.