Episode #70 High Truths on Drugs and Addiction with Dr. Stuart Reese on Genotoxicity of Cannabis Products

Stuart Reece, MD

Dr. Stuart Reece is a family physician working in Brisbane with a special interest in the medical treatment of drug addiction.  He is interested both in the underlying pathophysiology of drug addiction – how drugs work on the body and becomes so destructive to long term health – and also in the treatment of drug addiction including its radical cure.  He is one of the Australian pioneers of the use of both implant naltrexone and flumazenil infusions and implants for drug addictive disorders.  Dr Reece has written many papers on the pathophysiology of opioid addiction.  Dr Reece has a long-standing interest in cannabis dependency particularly as it relates to its neurotoxicity in both the adult and developing human organism, and cannabis genotoxicity, epigenotoxicity and chromosomal toxicity which has downstream effects lasting for multiple generations.  For these reasons, Dr Reece has done research on cellular and organismal aging in multiple addictions, and cannabis induced neurotoxicity and genotoxicity as reflected in the incidence of both birth defects and cancer development both in exposed adults, and in the offspring of exposed individuals and subsequent generations.  Dr Reece extensively uses advanced space-time statistical analytical techniques and the formal techniques of causal inference to analyze not just associations across space and time simultaneously but also to quantitatively evaluate the evidence for truly causal relationships.  Dr. Reece was appointed and now re-appointed a Professor in the School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences at both the University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University in recognition of his many contributions to our understanding of the toxicophysiology and treatment of drug addiction.