Health - Can Melatonin really be the answer to "Cannabis Fatigue"?

[FuBai]

A little while ago I was in New England, browsing one of the huge and homogeneous super-market things they have there and wandered into the OTC drugs isle, remembering articles I had read on line about DXM containing cough syrups and whether they were really that available. Browsing through the different medications and being constantly stupified by the open hypocrisy of the American drug regulations I found Melatonin, a natural substance that, it claimed, would help allay my god awful jet-lag. You seemed to get allot of pills for your money, and the whole thing cost less than $5 so I thought I'd give it a try.

Obviously, as anyone would, I decided that before I took the melatonin I'd better find out a little bit about it. Browsing on-line I found some interesting references to the use of Melatonin in allaying some of the short term side effects of cannabis use, which interested me:

I see so many posts here about many hard core smokers that find throughout the years they begin to lose the fun out of weed and become anxious, stressed, and cant sleep at night. You people need to realize that the reason this happens is because marijuana is directly linked to your body's melatonin system.

Melatonin (not the pigment melanin in your skin) is the protein that is responsible for sleep regulation, hunger, and nausea. When you consume weed your body's melatonin levels surge to a whopping 4000%. However, your body cant produce enough melatonin to keep up with the huge release when you smoke everyday and bleed out your melatonin reserves dry.

So the only ways to replenish your melatonin are to take a break from weed for a couple weeks and eat healthy and exercise so that your body can produce more in the given time, or to take melatonin supplements at night which can be purchased from the grocery for dirt cheap.

So stop feeling like you have lost the love of your life and start feeling good again!

Taken from a forum which, due to the rules in force here, I am unwilling to name

And an experience report on Erowid entitled Melatonin is the Answer.

The major problem is, of course, that these are individual experiences and purely anecdotal. There appears to be little hard evidence to go on. I have found a few articles that seem to back up the idea of the importance of melatonin in the cannabis high, that levels greatly increase and, by inference, may be depleted, but only a passing comment in a Cannabis Health article caught my eye ("I will explain the health benefits of melatonin supplements for regular cannabis users in my next article."[Full article here])

Of course I cannot conduct tests upon myself for two reasons: 1) I do not use illegal drugs and 2) Melatonin is not available OTC in the UK, the USA is its last bastion of free dispense, so I wondered whether or not forum users have any experience of this, whether it works or not and, indeed, whether the short term conditions that the Melatonin is supposed to counter even exist. From a purely theoretical point of view (and I know very, very little about the actual chemical reactions that take place when Marijuana is consumed) it seems to make sense that this could be of some use.