Not long after Colorado legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2012, Lori Walker’s daughter came home shaken from a party.
“Mom, what does pot do to the heart?” she asked Walker, PhD, an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Walker had no idea, so she turned to the medical literature for answers. “There was no consensus,” she said of the findings she read after scouring studies, many conducted in the ’70s when cannabis was significantly less potent than today’s strains.
Motivated by the lack of answers for her then-teenage daughter, who had witnessed a bad reaction in a party-goer who told his frightened friends that he felt like he was having a heart attack, Walker now studies the effects of cannabis components (cannabinoids) on the heart and vessels. Currently, she is researching cannabinoids’ potential for designing blood-pressure medications.
Below Walker shares some of what she’s learned in the years since, emphasizing that answers – while urgently needed – remain murky in a field that’s difficult to study.