How drinking caffeine saves you money on weed

Vices

There's been some buzz-killing debate about the interaction of caffeine and marijuana in the scientific community, but now, a new study has proven caffeine's weed-enhancing effects by figuring out the underlying chemical mechanisms that make the two pair together so well.

As High Times explains it:

To get a better grasp of how a substance affects the human brain, scientists sometimes look at the interaction between two drugs. To study THC, researchers gave squirrel monkeys (which have a long history of getting stoned in laboratories) the ability to get high with the pull of a lever, which triggered an intravenous release of THC from a small surgically implanted device. After making the monkeys plenty familiar with the consequences of pulling the lever, they gave them doses of MSX-3, a water-soluble analog of caffeine. With 1 mg/kg (equivalent to less than half a cup of coffee for the average person), the squirrel monkeys pulled the lever less often than normal; and when they gave them 3 mg/kg (equivalent one or more cups of drip coffee), the monkeys pulled the lever even less. The caffeine-analog made it so they monkeys needed less THC to achieve the same effect. After keeping the monkeys drug free as a rest period for the second part of the experiment, scientists gave them a shot of either THC or THC + MSX-3 (the caffeine analog), and then allowed them to pull the lever whenever they wanted to. After getting reintroduced to THC, all the monkeys started pulling the lever, but the ones who got an extra dose of MSX-3 pulled it more often.

The study's researchers concluded that drugs like caffeine, “potentiated the effect of threshold doses” of weed and its natural counterpart anandamide, causing a "reinforcing effect." In Communications major terms, that just means caffeine makes it so you have to smoke or eat less weed to achieve the same effect.

Weirdly enough though, researchers also found that very small doses of caffeine paired less than half a cup of drip coffee could potentially help you stop smoking pot because of how it effects the dose-response curve. Less pot = more cash for baby.

What does that mean for your weekend forecast? Either way, caffeine saves you money on weed. Drinking a double-mocha-no-fat-soy-whip-latte-sludge while you get high might mean you need to use less weed to feel as high, meaning your weed lasts longer.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you save up money to to buy jet skis and Zima and not pay your student loans.

Doesn't it make you feel fuzzy and cozy to know that two natural substances (caffeine and weed) that humans have been consuming for thousands of years are not only perfectly safe, but also compliment each other as well? Sometimes things just work out. Now if you need us, we'll be over here filling our Keurig canister with weed and drawing a treasure map for our future children that leads to the buried and hidden tens of dollars we saved by getting caffeinated and high at the same time.