The mid-2010s were an era of ready-to-drink cocktails, which were eclipsed in more recent years by hard seltzers, those fruit-flavored fizzes perfect for barbecues and beaches. Now, weed drinks may be having their moment.
With recreational marijuana becoming legal in several states, cannabis-infused mocktails, seltzers and alcohol-free wines are hitting the market, often sold as a shortcut to a healthier high. These drinks are not the beverages that contain small doses of CBD, a compound found in marijuana and hemp that doesn’t get you high, which have been trendy for the last decade. Marijuana drinks are made with THC, the intoxicating substance in cannabis, and customers seem willing to try them. But doctors and cannabis researchers said marijuana beverages come with their own set of risks, and a long list of questions.
According to BDSA, a market research firm in Colorado that specializes in legal cannabis, dollar sales of marijuana beverages are up by around 65 percent from 2020 to 2021 in the 12 states they track. In California, the state with the largest market for weed drinks, the number of cannabis beverages available nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021, growing to 747 distinct products, according to Headset, a company that collects and analyzes data on cannabis.
Pabst, known for its Blue Ribbon beer, now sells lemon-flavored “High Seltzer,” a canned cannabis drink promising “a different kind of buzz.” The cannabis beverage company Cann calls its carbonated cocktails “social tonics”; it also sells “roadies,” cannabis-infused drink mix in ready-to-go foil packets. Rebel Coast, a California-based winemaker, makes cans of alcohol-free sparkling wine infused with 10 milligrams of THC.
Cannabis-infused beverages are often branded as a healthier alternative to alcohol — “No painful days after drinking or regrets,” a tagline on Cann’s site reads. These kinds of drinks carry a connotation of health, said Emily Moquin, a food and beverage analyst at Morning Consult. They tout themselves as “hangover-free” and without the high calories of alcohol; they claim to help you feel “focused,” balanced, relaxed. One cannabis beverage company even suggests pairing their drinks with a spa day.
But experts worry that products like weed drinks are becoming more popular than health research can keep up with, leaving big questions about how best to consume them and what impacts they may have on the brain and body.
Wait, we’re drinking weed now?
Just a few years ago, the idea of drinkable cannabis seemed far-fetched, said James MacKillop, director of the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research at McMaster University.
Many past attempts to concoct cannabis beverages were often unsuccessful or unsatisfying because THC is hydrophobic — drop it into water and it will just form a sludgy goop on the sides of a glass. But in recent years, nanoemulsion technology, which can smoothly blend cannabinoids into a seltzer or cocktail, has become more widely available.
In a July survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults, 10 percent of respondents — and 19 percent of millennials — said they had tried a THC-infused beverage, Ms. Moquin said. She expects that number to grow in part because marijuana is marketed as a form of self-care. “It’s associated with health benefits, things like sleep, anxiety reduction — some things that people might reach for a drink to try to solve,” she said.
Consumers often associate the drug with nature, Ms. Moquin added. “People say, ‘It’s a plant.’” That link may drive the public to see marijuana as intrinsically healthier than alcohol, organic and unfiltered. But substituting one psychoactive agent for another comes with its own set of risks, experts said. “You’re not switching from alcohol to vitamins,” Dr. MacKillop said.
What are the risks of cannabis-infused drinks?
It’s easy to accidentally consume too much THC.
“It’s really a Wild West of products out there,” Dr. MacKillop said. Some drinks contain just THC, or CBD or both, and drinks on the market vary vastly in how many milligrams of these compounds they contain.
While there is no standard unit for THC product potency, Dr. MacKillop said, most experts in the field consider five milligrams of THC to be a typical single dose, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse sets it as standard unit of research.
According to Headset, over half of cannabis beverage units sold in the U.S. in 2021 contained 100 milligrams of THC, an amount that could significantly intoxicate or impair the average person.
For comparison, most edibles are taken in five or 10 milligram doses, and many popular cannabis beverages only contain that amount. But casual consumers may not know how to interpret the numbers listed on their labels.
“If you tell someone, this is an 8 percent beer, they say, ‘That’s a strong beer,’’ Dr. MacKillop said. “If you tell someone this is a 20 milligram drink versus a five milligram drink, that’s Greek to many people.”
That is particularly true for people who are new to cannabis, lured by the prospect of an alternative to alcohol, or who reach for a THC-infused drink without realizing it. “You could have these things sitting on a counter and a party, and someone says, ‘Ooh, watermelon,’ and drinks it — that could cause problems if they’re not expecting it,” Dr. Vandrey said.
And people who drink both alcohol and cannabis beverages in the same sitting, over the course of a party, could end up “significantly impaired,” Dr. MacKillop said, potentially even passing out.
The stomach absorbs liquids more quickly than solids, so weed drinks can kick in relatively fast — between 10 and 15 minutes to feel the first effects — while an edible can take three or four times that long to start sinking in. Still, it’s possible to reach for a second or third marijuana beverage while waiting to feel high, and end up ingesting 20 or 30 times the standard dose of THC, which could induce paranoia, nausea and vomiting, and increases in heart rate and blood pressure.
In large quantities, THC can even trigger psychosis in some people; it can induce schizophrenia in rare instances, said Dr. Collin Reiff, a psychiatrist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “We’d be very foolish to think it’s benign.”
The high can be unpredictable, and potentially more intense.
Just as an edible would be considered more potent than a few puffs on a joint, weed drinks might induce more psychoactive effects than cannabis products that you smoke, Dr. MacKillop said, though the effect of these drinks still needs to be studied more broadly.
And while most alcohol drinkers can anticipate how they’ll feel after three drinks, cannabis-containing beverages create a less predictable high.
“With hard seltzer, you go to a party and drink two, three, maybe four of those things,” said Ryan Vandrey, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine who studies cannabis. “With cannabinoids, you can go from a pleasant experience to a really unpleasant, dysphoric experience really quickly as you start to double or triple or quadruple your dose.”
Marijuana can be addictive.
Marijuana also has addictive potential, although studies have shown that fewer people are dependent on marijuana than alcohol. Around 10 percent of cannabis users will become addicted, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that one in three adults classifies as an “excessive drinker,” and one in 30 are dependent on alcohol.
The faster a drug takes to kick in, the greater potential it tends to have for abuse and addiction, Dr. MacKillop said — which raises concerns over cannabis-infused beverages, since they might have a faster onset than other marijuana products.
Doctors just don’t know enough about these drinks.
Because weed drinks are so new, they are “an incredibly understudied class of cannabis products,” Dr. MacKillop said.
There aren’t yet robust studies on how drinkable cannabis products affect the body long term, Dr. Vandrey added, and it’s unclear how the health effects — positive or negative — of marijuana translate into a drinkable beverage.
“The cannabis industry has evolved much faster than the data,” he said. “This is just another great example of that.”
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