“Marijuana may hijack cannabinoid receptors in the amygdala to reduce anxiety.”
“An international group of researchers led by Vanderbilt University has discovered for the first time that there are cannabinoid receptors in the amygdala. The amygdala is one of the primary brain regions involved in regulating anxiety and the flight-or-fight response.
“The discovery may help explain why marijuana users say they take the drug mainly to reduce anxiety” said Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D., the paper’s senior author and professor of Psychiatry and of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt. He said, “this could be highly important for understanding how cannabis exerts its behavioral effects.”
The study titled, “Multiple Mechanistically Distinct Modes of Endocannabinoid Mobilization at Central Amygdala Glutamatergic Synapses” is published in the March 2014 issue of the journal Neuron.”