Human Laboratory Models of Cannabis Use: Applications for Clinical and Translational Psychiatry Research

Abstract

Cannabis is increasingly used by individuals with mental health diagnoses and often purported to treat anxiety and various other psychiatric symptoms. Yet support for using cannabis as a psychiatric treatment is currently limited by a lack of evidence from rigorous placebo-controlled studies. While regulatory hurdles and other barriers make clinical trials of cannabis challenging to conduct, addiction researchers have decades of experience studying cannabis use in human laboratory models. These include methods to control cannabis administration, to delineate clinical and mechanistic aspects of cannabis use, and to evaluate potential treatment applications for cannabis and its constituents. In this paper, we review these human laboratory procedures and describe how each can be applied to study cannabis use in patients with psychiatric disorders. Because anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric illnesses affecting American adults, and anxiety relief is also the most commonly-reported reason for medicinal cannabis use, we focus particularly on applying human laboratory models to study cannabis effects in individuals with anxiety and related disorders. Finally, we discuss how these methods can be integrated to study cannabis effects in other psychiatric conditions and guide future research in this area.

Cannabis self-administration in the human laboratory: a scoping review of ad libitum studies

“…Furthermore, reliable drug self-administration paradigms can be used for pharmacotherapy development (Panlilio et al, 2016;Ray et al, 2021). In order to model specific aspects of addiction, various drug self-administration designs have been developed, such as operant self-administration procedures in which participants are required to complete a task (e.g., pressing buttons) in order to receive the drugs (Haney, 2009;Stangl et al, 2022), controlled-smoking procedures (e.g., smoking inhalation guided by an experimenter's instruction or cues) to standardize consumption (Kayser et al, 2021), choice procedures where participants are given the option to choose between the drug and one or more alternatives (e.g., money or other drugs) (Haney, 2009;Jones & Comer, 2013;McKee, 2009;Sloan et al, 2022), and free-access or ad libitum procedures (Gowin et al, 2017;Sloan et al, 2020). Ad libitum procedures are one of the most common self-administration paradigms (Chukwueke & Le Foll, 2019;Gowin et al, 2017;Jones & Comer, 2013;Sloan et al, 2020).…”