#226 Daniele Piomelli is Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry and Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). In addition, he is the director of the UCI Institute for the Study of Cannabis, a multidisciplinary research institute led by the UCI's Schools of Medicine and Law.

Daniele studied pharmacology and neuroscience with James H. Schwartz and Eric Kandel at Columbia University, and with Paul Greengard at Rockefeller University. Daniele is an author of more than 400 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, PNAS and Nature Neuroscience, three full-length books, and 34 patents. He co-founded the unit of drug discovery and development (D3) at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy) which he directed from 2007 to 2016, and the biopharmaceutical start-ups Kadmus Pharmaceuticals, NeoKera Therapeutics and Aspire Biosciences, all based on discoveries made in his lab. 

He is Editor-in-Chief of Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, the only peer-reviewed journal entirely dedicated to the study of cannabis, its derivatives, and their endogenous counterparts in the human body.

 

In this episode we cover

• History of human use of cannabis
• Why we have an endocannabinoid system and cannabinoid receptors?
• How cannabis works, especially in relation to chronic pain
• Current research on its use in chronic pain
• The duration of time someone should use cannabis for pain
• Why opioids shouldnt be used as the first line of therapy for pain
• Cannabis dependency
• Cannabis toxicity
• Withdrawal symptoms 
• And so much more