California’s Problematic Cannabis Commercialization

“Cannabis use can cause addictive tendencies and behaviors,” confirms Dr. Nicholas Reeves, a psychiatrist at Muir Wood Adolescent and Family Services. “It can cause academic and motivational decline. Marijuana decreases the motivation to seek meaning and purpose in life; it diminishes occupational or academic achievement. Users may try to alleviate existential distress through emotional numbing which may lead to avoidance of adaptive anxiety and thus avoidance of pursuing life goals that cause worry or existential distress.”

“In adolescents, epidemiologic studies suggest heavy cannabis use greatly increases the risk of developing schizophrenia,” warns Reeves who is an expert psychopharmacologist. “While responsible recreational cannabis use—similar to alcohol—isn’t harmful for most people, cannabis use can be very harmful for those with a genetic predisposition to addiction or those who have other psychiatric disorders. People often try to self-medicate depression and anxiety with cannabis, which may provide temporary relief, but likely exacerbates the underlying anxiety or mood disorder.”

Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys explains in The Atlantic article that the most compelling evidence of the deleterious effects comes from users themselves. “In large national surveys, about one in 10 people who smoke it say they have a lot of problems. They say things like, ‘I have trouble quitting. I think a lot about quitting and I can’t do it. I smoked more than I intended to. I neglect responsibilities.’ There are plenty of people who have problems with it, in terms of things like concentration, short-term memory, and motivation,” says Professor Humphreys.

Current and former cannabis users told Lowrey about “lost jobs, lost marriages, lost houses, lost money, lost time. Foreclosures and divorces. Weight gain and mental-health problems. And one other thing: the problem of convincing other people that what they were experiencing was real.”

Marijuana growers have been working on increasing the potency of cannabis for over fifty years now. The amount of THC—the chemical responsible for most of the plant’s psychoactive effects—has been increasing steadily over those decades. In the seventies, joints averaged a concentration of about one percent, close to the natural levels of the cannabis plant. In the early nineties, the typical THC concentration had increased to three percent. Now it often exceeds 15 percent.

In addition to that, cannabis is used in an even more concentrated form called hash oil or wax. So-called “dabbing” refers to the inhalation of concentrated THC products created through butane extraction. Butane hash oil (BHO) can reach incredible concentrations of over 50 percent. That is 50 joints of the seventies rolled into one.

Public-health experts are increasingly worried about the potent varieties hitting the legalized market and the rising number of constant users. “Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University told The Atlantic.

The teen rehab professionals at Muir Wood know that all too many young Americans no longer believe using marijuana products involves serious risks. The ongoing normalization of marijuana use in the United States has reinforced the belief that cannabis use is neither harmful nor addictive. After all, their parents probably smoked it and state after state is now making it available for recreational use.

The normalization of marijuana use has led to increased use among young people—a troubling trend “given that the data showing the potential harms of marijuana is clear, strong, and growing.” (Marijuana page 174)

At the end of her article, Annie Lowrey suggests that “perhaps most important might be reintroducing some reasonable skepticism about cannabis, especially until scientists have a better sense of the health effects of high-potency products, used frequently. Until then, listening to and believing the hundreds of thousands of users who argue marijuana is not always benign might be a good start.”