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• Posted January 24, 2025

Medical Weed Users At Risk for Addiction

People using weed for medical purposes are as likely – or more – to become addicted to cannabis as recreational tokers, a new study says.

Folks using medical marijuana were more likely to have cannabis use disorder than those who get high recreationally, researchers reported in a study published Jan. 22 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Medical marijuana patients also had more days of weed use than recreational users, researchers found.

“These findings suggest that medically recommended cannabis is not associated with reduced addiction risk compared with nonmedical use,” the research team led by Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, concluded.

“Clinicians should consider addiction risk before recommending medical cannabis and, if they do, should monitor for CUD [cannabis use disorder] emergence,” the researchers added.

About 3 in 10 people who use weed develop cannabis use disorder, in which they can’t stop toking even though it’s causing health and social problems in their lives, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

To see if medical users run the same addiction risk as recreational users, researchers analyzed data from a federal survey on drug use and health conducted in 2021-2022.

Among nearly 73,000 adults who reported recent cannabis use, about 84% said they got high solely for recreational purposes. Another 9% reported medical-only use, and nearly 6% said they used both medically and recreationally.

Overall, about 35% of the entire group had cannabis use disorder, based on the symptoms they reported in the survey, researchers said.

Those who used medical marijuana were more likely to have problematic use, results show:

• About 14% of medical users and 13% of medical/recreational users among men 18 to 34 had severe cannabis use disorder, compared with more than 8% of recreational users.

• About 7% of medical users and 12% of medical/ recreational users among women 18 to 34, had severe cannabis use disorder, compared with 6% of recreational users.

• Among men 35 to 49, 5% of medical users, nearly 7% of medical/recreational users, and 4% of recreational users had severe cannabis use disorder. Among women in the same age group, 2% each of medical and nonmedical users and 4% of those with both medical and recreational use had severe cannabis use disorder. 

Medical marijuana patients also tended to use weed more days on average during the past year.

Medical and medical/recreational users smoked an average 40% to 70% more days each year than recreational tokers, researchers found.

For example, 18- to 24-year-old men used medical marijuana 217 days on average, compared with 212 days for medical/recreational users and 154 for purely recreational users.

“Higher cannabis use disorder prevalence among adults with medical-only use might reflect more frequent cannabis use,” the researchers concluded in their paper.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on cannabis use disorder.

SOURCE: JAMA Psychiatry, Jan. 22, 2025