Cannabis Consumption - The Thin Line Between Wellness and Recreational Use
Back in 1996, California became the first US state to legalize cannabis for medicinal use, and soon after, other states followed suit: Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington in 1998; Maine in 1999; Colorado and Hawaii in 2000; and so on. And now, 39 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana.
Following Colorado and Washington in 2012, a further 16 states as well as DC and Guam have legalized recreational adult-use cannabis.
But there is a thin line between wellness and recreational use of marijuana. What are they, how do they differ, and how are they the same? Let’s take a deeper look at the current state of legalized cannabis.
Cannabis For Wellness
There are very few subjects as polarising as the use of cannabis for health and wellness routines. Even today, while legalized in 39 states, still doctors, researchers, scientists, legislators, and the general public seem to have more questions than answers on this topic.
Is the consumption of marijuana safe? Should it, in fact, be legalized on a federal level? Is its use in health and wellness routines backed up by scientific evidence? What health conditions can it be used to treat? Is it habit-forming?
These are all valid questions and are ones we will attempt to answer in this article. Let’s start at the beginning.
Is the consumption of marijuana safe? Is it habit-forming?
When it comes to answering this question, people tend to be in one of two camps: Marijuana is harmless and is the world’s greatest medical invention, or cannabis is as dangerous as fentanyl.
The thing is, neither of these two camps is right, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The problem that arises from this is that both of these camps tend to think that even a single piece of data that contradicts their narrative is harmful to them. So, at the end of the day, much of what we hear about marijuana is either inaccurate or simply completely incorrect because both sides promote polar contrary opinions of cannabis consumption.
The truth of the matter is that marijuana is neither completely safe nor devastatingly harmful. Contrary to popular myth, the consumption of cannabis can be addictive. It’s not as addictive as, say, the use of opioids or even alcohol, but the fact that it’s less addictive than other harmful substances doesn’t negate its addictive properties altogether.
Is its use in health and wellness routines backed up by scientific evidence? What health conditions can it be used to treat?
One of the most widespread uses of medical cannabis is for pain control. While it can’t be used for the extreme pain that comes along with, for instance, a broken bone or post-surgery healing, it is used in the treatment of chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain, and Multiple Sclerosis.
A research article published in the medical journal Circulation, written by the American Heart Association entitled Medical Marijuana, Recreational Cannabis, and Cardiovascular Health: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association, states that not only is the consumption of cannabis for wellness backed by scientific evidence for pain management, but also for spasticity caused by Multiple Sclerosis, weight loss caused by anorexia and cachexia, motor seizures in epilepsy sufferers, as well as nausea and vomiting suffered by chemotherapy patients, cancer and HIV sufferers, and those dealing with hyperemesis.
Cannabis For Recreation
According to the WHO, roughly 147 million people globally consume cannabis on a regular basis for recreational use. That’s about 2.5% of the global population. Compared with the global use of opiates and cocaine (both sitting at 0.2%), that’s a vast margin.
“In the present decade, cannabis abuse has grown more rapidly than cocaine and opiate abuse. The most rapid growth in cannabis abuse since the 1960s has been in developed countries in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Cannabis has become more closely linked to youth culture and the age of initiation is usually lower than for other drugs.”
This leads us to another pressing question when it comes to cannabis use: how does the use of recreational cannabis affect teens and young people?
A study conducted in Dunedin, New Zealand beginning in the 1970s, followed a group of individuals from the ages of three years old to adulthood. Researchers tracked participants' use of cannabis from early adolescence through their late thirties. And while those who had never used cannabis had minor IQ gains over time, those who did use it had persistent IQ losses according to how long they smoked and how much.
Users who began smoking cannabis when they were young tended to report more issues with subjective thinking, and their friends often described them as suffering from memory and attention issues. The study also reported that those who smoked cannabis heavily as teenagers and then stopped never fully recovered cognitively. Furthermore, it was reported that the IQ of the 36 people who had been the heaviest and longest users of cannabis dropped by six to eight points.
Another study, published on the National Library of Medicine website, that investigated 1601 students between the ages of 14 and 15, across 44 schools in Victoria, Australia, found that frequent use of cannabis in teenagers - especially young girls - resulted in their being five times more likely than their non-consuming peers to develop depression and/or anxiety.
“Some 60% of participants had used cannabis by the age of 20; 7% were daily users at that point. Daily use in young women was associated with an over fivefold increase in the odds of reporting a state of depression and anxiety after adjustment for intercurrent use of other substances (odds ratio 5.6, 95% confidence interval 2.6 to 12). Weekly or more frequent cannabis use in teenagers predicted an approximately twofold increase in risk for later depression and anxiety after adjustment for potential baseline confounders.”
The Thin Line Between Medical and Recreational Cannabis Use
While we’ve tried to answer the original questions mentioned above in this article, the main question remains: what is the difference between those who use cannabis for their health and wellness routines in a medical regard, and those who use it recreationally.
The short answer is: we don’t really know.
“The lower common ground of both wellness and medical use of cannabis, need to be scientific-based evidence for bioavailability and safety data, for each product in the market,” said Golan Vaknin, CEO of ESEV R&D, “If we want to make sure people will consume cannabis responsibly, we need to provide them with the data”.
To explain, there hasn’t been a lot of research done regarding the differing uses of cannabis, and of the research that has been conducted, not a lot of information has been gleaned. One such study, published in 2016 in the journal Addict Behaviors, and republished on the Science Direct website, entitled Comparing Adults Who Use Cannabis Medically With Those Who Use Recreationally: Results From a National Sample, reported, “17% of adults who used cannabis in the past year used cannabis medically. There were no significant differences between those who used medically versus recreationally in race, education, past year depression, and prevalence of cannabis use disorders. In adjusted analyses, those with medical cannabis use were more likely to have poorer health and lower levels of alcohol use disorders and non-cannabis drug use. A third of those who reported medical cannabis use endorsed daily cannabis use compared to 11% in those who reported recreational use exclusively.”
As it stands the line between medical users and recreational users is somewhat blurred, and more research to learn the differences between the two, how they consume, geographical or economical factors, etc., needs to be done.
There is much more to learn when it comes to both recreational use and medical use of cannabis. Though research and studies are constantly being conducted, as it stands, we aren’t much closer to knowing the differences and similarities between the two than we were 6 years ago.
Written by Lisa Parker - Dingus & Zazzy