Can Cannabis Help Against COVID?

As Covid-19 continues to dominate the world, there are always bound to be rumors of home remedies and ways to lessen the symptoms. The world thrives on rumors in general, so when people began hearing that cannabis may help fight against Covid, it was no surprise that studies were quick to begin in order to prove or refute this claim. Labs everywhere began combining Covid virus samples with different cannabis samples, while plenty of home-scientists were doing their own experimentation and getting the same results without the fancy equipment.

In January of 2020, one study from the Journal of Natural Products found that compounds within cannabis could help prevent Covid altogether. After publishing their results, countless amounts of people began to mask-up and travel to their nearest dispensaries to stock up on their favorite products. The bad news is that this particular study was quickly proven to be false, in regards to lighting up a joint, with one Harvard Medical School Instructor pointing out that any type of smoking during a lung-afflicting pandemic is probably a bad idea. If your lungs are sick or struggling to work, inhaling any type of smoke – even from a vape – can cause your lungs even more distress and can actually worsen the symptoms of Covid.

The good news is that smoking is not the only form of cannabis ingestion, and cannabis itself can be beneficial overall. There are two cannabinoid acids that are found in many varieties of hemp and cannabis which can bind to the spike protein in SARS-Cov-2. This is the Covid-19 causing virus that attacks our systems and makes us feel like garbage. These acids in the cannabis prevent the Covid proteins from entering cells and causing infection. Essentially, the acids in the cannabis bear-hug the proteins in Covid and prevent it from infecting our cells. The virus may still be inside your body, but you won’t feel any of the awful symptoms and it will die off fairly quickly, since it can’t bind to anything and survive or grow.

This is amazing news for the prevention and rapid recovery for the current strain of the virus, however we have discovered that Covid is still evolving. There is still the possibility for new variants to arise and become resistant to CBDA and CBGA, meaning that cannabis will not always be able to save us from Covid. For now, however, who are we to fight the science that has been proven to work?