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Study: Exercise may curb pot cravings
March 5, 2011 - CalgarySun.com

Regular workouts may help curb marijuana use and cravings, a new U.S. study suggests.

Researchers at Vanderbilt Addiction Centre in Nashville, Tenn., followed 12 participants who met their criteria for being "cannabis-dependent," meaning they smoked on average 5.9 joints each day. The 12 people also did not want treatment to help them stop smoking pot.

The study, which appears in the online peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, found after going through 10 30-minute exercise sessions on a treadmill, the participants found their craving for and use of pot was cut by more than 50%.

Participants were shown pictures of a cannabis-use related stimuli before and after each exercise session and then asked to rank their cravings according to the cannabis craving scale.

The researchers also documented cannabis use, which reduced to an average of 2.8 joints per day during the exercise portion of the study.

"This is 10 sessions but it actually went down after the first five. The maximum reduction was already there within the first week," co-author of the study Dr. Peter Martin said in a release.

"There is no way currently to treat cannabis dependence with medication, so this is big considering the magnitude of the cannabis problem in the U.S. And this is the first time it has ever been demonstrated that exercise can reduce cannabis use in people who don't want to stop."

In 2009, approximately 16.7 million Americans over the age of 12 reported using pot, while 6.1 million smoked it on 20 or more days each month, the authors said.

Martin sees the study results as the beginning of an important area of research to better understand brain mechanisms of exercise in addiction.

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