New federally funded research into the effects of cannabis on alcohol use finds that people who used marijuana immediately before drinking subsequently consumed fewer alcoholic beverages and reported lower cravings for alcohol.
“We found that across the entire sample, self-administering cannabis before alcohol significantly reduced alcohol consumption compared to when alcohol was offered without cannabis,” authors wrote in a study preprint published late last month on the open-access website PsyArXiv.
“Furthermore,” they continued, “we found that cannabis and alcohol co-administration was associated with significant acute reduction in alcohol craving compared to alcohol administration alone.”
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, provides further evidence of a substitution effect, in which users report replacing some or all of their alcohol use with cannabis.
An eight-person research team from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado looked at the behavior of 62 adults who used both marijuana and alcohol and who engaged in heavy drinking for at least three months.
Each person participated in two separate sessions in which they could drink up to five alcoholic beverages—an initial priming drink, followed by up to four more optional drinks offered at 15-minute intervals.
In one of the two sessions, participants were first directed to consume marijuana in a manner of their choosing and at their typical dose, which was weighed and recorded.
And while not every participant drank less after using marijuana, those who did “reported reductions in alcohol craving at several timepoints after consuming cannabis and alcohol compared to alcohol alone,” the report says.