Joint Venture
Ten years since the first US states legalised cannabis for recreational use, medical professionals are still conflicted over what to tell their patients about edibles, vaping and joints. Here’s what psychiatrist Dr Gregory Scott Brown wants you to know
W eedcan be relaxing. It can make you feel good. It’s cheaper than therapy. Although it remains illegal in the UK (for now), cannabis is now approved for recreational use in 19 US states. So it’s not surprising that my patients often ask me, ‘A little pot can’t hurt, right?’ No one ever wants to hear a pause right after they drop that question – especially when there’s some legit research into weed as a treatment for anxiety, PTSD and insomnia. But the fact is, when it comes to mental health, cannabis is a little squishy.
It’s been 10 years since the first states legalised recreational weed and a big research report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says there’s evidence it does more than get you high. Cannabis and the cannabinoids in it (compounds that interact with receptors that control sleep, pain management, eating, emotional processing and other functions) have medical effects, particularly for chronic pain, muscle spasticity from MS and nausea from chemotherapy. Yet there are so many questions to tackle, so many intricacies and so many cannabinoids being studied that there’s no standardised playbook yet. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hasn’t approved cannabis for mental health conditions, and the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t recommend it, either. Of course, no one is waiting for official approval, so I make sure my patients know these things:
Weed can ease anxiety. Or make it worse.
I checked in with Staci Gruber, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) programme at McLean Hospital, Massachusetts. She confirmed that cannabis with a low concentration of THC, the ingredient that makes you high, but with high levels of other, non-intoxicating cannabinoids, can improve anxiety. However, the high-THC stuff – often considered to be anything over 10% THC – can worsen anxiety for some people.
If you buy from an unlicensed seller – like all are in the UK – it’s hard to know how much THC, or any of the other 400 active ingredients in cannabis, you’re getting. Even those who have access to legal weed are smart to ‘start low and go slow’ and pay attention to its effects. If you always get paranoid or have mood swings, maybe high-THC cannabis is
THE EXPERT
Dr Gregory Scott Brown is a psychiatrist, a Men’s Health adviser and the founder and director of the Center for Green Psychia
