Researchers find link between cannabis use and fewer parasites

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The more that hunter-gatherers in the Congo smoke cannabis, the less they are infected by parasitic intestinal worms, according to Washington State University (WSU) researchers who say that the tribe may unconsciously be, in effect, smoking medical marijuana.

Ed Hagen, a WSU Vancouver anthropologist, explored cannabis use among the Aka foragers to see if people away from the cultural and media influences of Western civilization might use plant toxins medicinally. "In the same way we have a taste for salt, we might have a taste for psychoactive plant toxins, because these things kill parasites," he said. Hagen's study appears in the American Journal of Human Biology.

 

The Aka are a "pygmy" people of the Congo basin. As one of the world's last groups of hunter-gatherers, they offer anthropologists a window into a way of life accounting for some 99 percent of human history. They might also offer an alternative hypothesis...

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