There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, but opioids were more casually prescribed a few decades ago. I recall some discussion where one of them said they were seeing good initial results but the effects faded, and then it was hard to get the patients off of the opioids when they were no longer helping. Not surprising to anyone now, but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
I feel like I've seen a weaker version of this in some friends who turned to THC to "treat" their depression: Initial mood boost, followed by dependency, then eventually into a protracted period where they know it's not helping but they don't want to stop because they feel worse when they discontinue. This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems.
There was also quite alot of talk about how doctors, by being reticent to prescribe opioids, were inhumanely forcing patients to live in pain, and not being sufficiently deferential to patient autonomy. Moreover, the rhetoric was incorporated into discussions about racist disparities in treatment, given there was some evidence doctors were less likely to prescribe opioids to black patients, suggesting doctors were systematically being cruel. Naturally, the easiest way to dodge those accusations was to simply prescribe opioids as a matter of course. Even in the absence of Purdue Pharma pushing their claims about lack of significant addictive potential, there was already significant pressure to discount the risk of addiction.
If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment.
Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different
This mistake has been made many time throughout history. Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression. Opioids and amphetamines too. You take them and you feel good for a while, which was mistakenly equated with treating depression.
Many drugs will make you feel good temporarily by blocking certain feelings or tricking your brain into feeling good. This is not the same as treating a condition.
You can think of actual treatments as working closer to the source to reduce the problem, not temporarily overriding it with a powerful drug-induced sensation.
If we take your position and apply reductio ad absurdum, we could say that cocaine is a highly effective treatment for anxiety, although of course we know that in the not-so-long run it has the opposite effect.
Drugs for anxiety treatment do wear off, but not the same way that weed or alcohol does: something like Celexa takes a few weeks to build up in the system, and don’t lose effect 12-24 hours later if you miss a dose. I’m not sure how long you’d have to stop before it loses efficacy entirely.
I’m not Nancy Reagan, though: I would not advise people to self-medicate with booze or pot if they’re suffering from depression or anxiety, but I’m not going to preach at anybody who is doing so and thinks it’s working for them. I will say that I’ve seen that end badly, though. I can think of three people I’m close to who’ve tried it and have had problems with addiction: all of them are now sober and (I believe) on regular antidepressants.
Chasing a high is not a treatment, it merely defers the problem. As tolerance to the high builds, patients lose the therapeutic value but have gained crippling dependency and addiction.
All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”
Edit: I’m referring more to the “self medication” approach. Please don’t take any of this as medical advice.
Perhaps the temporary boost can be used in such a way to effect change that lasts? Sometimes all a person needs is something small to change how their brain is processing things, and with structure perhaps that can be leveraged.
But then again, many people think that all brains work the same, and this underlies 99% of the failings of mental health care.
But did anyone professional made these claims?
I was pretty much told since a child, no physical dependency (unlike alcohol and nicotin) but potentially strong psychological withdraw symptoms.
it works pretty good as a temporary relief from anxiety.
Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely. Getting a good night's sleep or being without chronic pain for a few hours is often enough.
> There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression. Meta-analysis revealed higher odds of all-cause adverse events (OR 1·75, 95% CI 1·25 to 2·46) among those using cannabis versus control group
The paper says there's no evidence of effectiveness in treatment, and evidence of harm.
1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
The paper says "insufficient data" for helpfulness for most positive categories (but leans more positive than negative just doesn't reach 95% confidence), but also insufficient data on most negative categories. It finds 5 conditions it's helpful for, and 3 it hurts for.
> There were no significant effects on outcomes associated with anxiety, anorexia nervosa, psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and opioid use disorder. There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression.
The strongest claim is the lack of significant effects for anxiety, ptsd etc. but it varies a bit whether that's because the effect is too small or because it is not studied enough.
For anxiety for instance the effect they list in the paper is quite big but the error bars are even bigger so the net result is inconclusive. This is quite different from PTSD where they note little to no effect with small error bars.
Exactly.
People looking for long term solutions to those issues need to address the root cause(s), which often requires therapy, lifestyle alterations, and work on the self. Change doesn't happen overnight, and it might even take a few tries to find the right therapist.
Obviously can't speak for everyone, but I know people who do think literally that. They think that weed will actually cure their depression, and they'll allude to some studies about it that I'm pretty sure don't exist and that they just made up.
Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.
The risks to cognition and health exist, but they’re no where near as bad as alcohol or cigarettes (and the negative effects basically don’t exist at low, even moderate doses)
The biggest negative effect of using weed regularly is it seems to slowly kill people’s motivation to do stuff over time. It will turn just about anyone into a couch potato. That’s more dangerous than any other effect IMO.
That may be but I see no reason to encourage it either, which is what I feel is happening.
Full agree here. Unfortunately, history is what clarifies why pot is SO HUGE now rather than being something indifferent about, like it should be.
I'm not sure I buy your theory even a little, to be honest. The children of the 60's have, by and large, gotten FAR more conservative as they've gotten older.
Also makes me laugh whenever I see right wingers accuse the left of post-modernism, when Trump is the most post-modernist guy I know. The man literally never says the truth: according to him, we destroyed 100% of Iran's armament [1], Iran were the ones to strike their own girls school and oil prices are as low as ever.
[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1162279041433...
Weed was the worst thing ever. Weed is the best thing ever. Eventually weed will be in the same category as coffee.
Just about all drugs would benefit from people doing the unobtrusively.
I'd have friends that would be more or less down to earth, start smoking weed, then start finding and watching videos of Alan Watts and Carl Sagan and convince themselves that they knew everything in the world about physics and philosophy, and they became utterly insufferable in the process, and whenever anything negative about weed was ever said, they would provide me a lecture about how weed is a cure to pretty much everything and how no one has ever had a negative effect from it ever in history.
I think there's been a huge over correction; there was so much bullshit about the dangers of weed that people started acting like it's some miraculous cure-all and ignoring actual issues.
This was such a visceral turn-off for me that I to this day have never used weed, and the idea of using it still kind of makes me viscerally annoyed. It's entirely possible that my friends were insufferable teenagers purely because teenagers can be insufferable, and that's not even unlikely, but the way I remember it is the weed making them annoying it. Not saying it's rational, just that memory and human brains are weird.
Really? I think the opposite is true.
Given 1/6 adults admit to using it, I think it's totally underrepresented in media -- in theory 1/6 characters would be using it.
It's only very recently that I see characters who just casually say something like "I take a gummy for a long flight" or whatever, rather than be a stereotypical comedic stoner character.
I feel like really it's alcohol that's glamorized in the media, and before that it was smoking.
That seems high to me. (sorry) ;-)
Seriously though, by the time I was 15 several of my classmates were drunk most weekends and smoked cigarettes regularly, but even decades later I have still never seen or heard of anyone I know smoking weed. That's why it sticks out so much to me.
If 1/6 is true it would be interesting to see how it has changed over the past say 20 years or so.
I think cigarettes and alcohol were established vices when media became a thing so media can be semi-excused from those. It would be interesting to know if the same is true for weed. Has it just gotten so common that media has to show it to be realistic, or did it get more common after media started to show it?
Cigarette smoking is an interesting counterexample, it has been extremely de-glamorized since the heydays and sales of cigarettes have halved since 2000.
DISCLOSURE: I use large amounts of high potency cannabis flower with CBD/CBG edibles for intractable neuropathic pain. I also smoked a hell of a lot of weed in my 20s and 30s. I've more experience of Pot than most. MMJ lowers my pain a bit, and reduces suffering a lot. Its the suffering that makes life difficult.
Would love to hear your experiences. What is the longest flowering cultivar you’ve tried, versus the shortest, and difference in effects on your ASD?
For randomized controlled trials, even in "legal" states, university scientists can't just walk into a dispensary and buy cannabis to then administer to test subjects.
That's Post-Prohibition for you.
As far as I can tell, most (EDITED FROM ALL) of the studies utilize isolates - and not necessarily in conjunction.
For instance, none of the 6 anxiety studies included in this metastudy used THC and CBD together.
The headline could read instead: No evidence cannabinoid isolates help anxiety, depression, or PTSD.
Cannabis advocates are the first to mention the entourage effect. Cannabis prohibitionists on the other hand, love nothing more than to cite incomplete science.
Claims that you need a special combination of exactly the right strains are just a way to move the goalposts forever. They could study 10 different strains in controlled trials and the same people would show up to dismiss this study because they weren't using some random strain that has some perfect combination of entourage effect.
Using actual plants and smoking would also introduce another major variable, with further claims that the strains they were giving patients were too weak or they were smoking it wrong.
EDIT: I don't have time to read every single citation included, but the claim above that they were all THC or CBD isolates does not appear correct. One randomly selected citation:
> The short-term impact of 3 smoked cannabis preparations versus placebo on PTSD symptoms: a randomized cross-over clinical trial
So the claim above that they didn't investigate smoked cannabis or "entourage effect" is false.
It’s not smoking 10 strains in a row it’s the fact that you need CBD THC and all the terpenes to get the effects. So the current growing trend of just getting the THC number higher tends to result in plants that don’t actually give people the full spectrum of effects, beneficial or not.
So the correct way to do this would be a full spectrum isolate, which again you coincidently forgot to mention I’m sure.
That's the correct way to do a controlled study on the isolate - not the plant that it comes from.
It's clear to me at least that the authors of the metastudy conflate the two and many shades between them for purposes of this study.
That particular study did look at High THC low CBD, mid THC mid CBD, and high CBD low THC. There's no information on the terpene profile of the smoked cannabis preparations, though, and that is a confounding variable in the entourage effect that potentially defeats the part of the entourage effect they did test. Additionally, a quick look at the cannabinoid %s in those smoked preparations rehighlights my point that these are not inclusive of all the chemical compositions that the cannabis plant could present itself in.
I still stand by my point and hope the clarifications bring the conversation back on track to the fact I was highlighting which is simply that this is a metastudy built off of studies that were conducted with restrictions on experimental design that few observers fully understand the research implications of.
You could study one combination that is broadly representative and is much much closer than the isolate.
There’s no evidence that what they tested with was pure THC isolates. If they’re using cannabis in plant form, even if it was bred for higher thc content, there is still cbd.
tldr; "If they're using cannabis in plant form" is a very, very high bar for the current state of cannabis (really cannabinoid) research.
Old man joint pains. Not headaches, broken bones, etc. But it nearly erases achy joint pain for me.
Being angry. I am much less angry in general when I'm smoking a bit every couple of days. That said, when I take a break I feel like my testosterone goes through the roof. I get more irritable and, TMI, I get a lot more spontaneous boners.
I also had debilitating anger in my teens and weed really helped calm that down. I’ve been off it for years at a time and I still can’t get past my anger without it.
That said my memory is shit
However, I was able to fix all of those problems by consistently ceasing use 4 hours prior to going to sleep.
Recently I just quit everything yet again and now I sleep well for 6.5 hours, wake up refreshed, and have a lot more alertness and motivation during the day. My past experience says this will last for a while until I yet again find I need weed or melatonin to get more than 4 hours. I don't get it.. probably other factors in my life affecting my sleep.
It's like comparing a casual light beer with the 90% moonshine or 45% bathtub gin sold during prohibition.
I think alcohol is bad for people but I don't think it should be illegal. I also think weed is probably bad for people but probably shouldn't be illegal.
For people using cannabis as medicine in both legal and illegal markets, the trend to buy higher THC potency products is all about stretching their medicine with their limited budget.
To continue your analogy, it’d be like buying 90% moonshine, diluting it 20:1, and then drinking it as a mixed drink the same potency as a casual light beer.
Of course, if only 90% moonshine is available, cuz of Prohibition or Post-Prohibition, then you’re going to have more people “binging” as opposed to “budgeting.”
The THC percentage variation in different varieties varies from say 0-35%. The better analogy for prohibition’s effects are for the explosion in concentrated forms like hash oil specifically. That is the same prohibition pressure that turned opium into heroin.
- Not adjusted for strain, dose or delivery method across all studies.
- Not adjusted for receptor downregulation, for which rotation and/or drug holidays would be appropriate strategies.
- Not adjusted across all studies for time effect, e.g. 6 hours of relief, 1 hour, etc.
I can tell you from personal experience with a related disorder that disciplined rotation of 10mg edible cannabis provides 90% relief, 90% of the time, with far fewer side effects than alternative medications for the same disorder.
Cannabis, like alcohol and tobacco, is a vice. It definitely helps with some physical ailments (like helping stimulate hunger in cancer patients), just like alcohol and tobacco can with other ailments, but it’s not a panacea for mental health disorders.
We need to stop marketing these things as curatives when they’re mostly just coping mechanisms or social lubricants. We’re doing more harm than good by leaning into the “legitimate pharmaceutical” angle.
Okay, I've read the meta-study now and I think the summary article isn't representing the picture very well. In particular they found for anxiety there actually seems to be evidence in this exact data set that does help.
What they are doing is saying "there isn't 95% evidence it reduces anxiety" therefore "no evidence" even though they mean "some evidence, just not at the statistical significance level" -- it's one of the biggest confusions (and sometimes it feels deliberate) you'll see people do.
Also when you have a confidence interval that big it's a red flag. They themselves admit the data is all over the place.
In summary, don't assume much from the title of the summary article.
It's really easy to convince yourself that something works when it doesn't, that's the whole reason why people have to take statistical significance seriously. Maybe it really does work and a really good study could shrink the error bars but that's more hope than anything.
Uhhh... no? Did you even read it? This research actually found more benefits than harms. I see it only identified two harms both graded very low.
Let's just quote here the researcher's own conclusions:
"Interpretation There was some evidence that cannabinoids can reduce symptoms of cannabis use disorder, insomnia, tic or Tourette’s syndrome, and autism spectrum disorder, but the quality of this evidence was generally low. Cannabinoids were associated with a greater risk of any adverse events but not of serious adverse events. Overall, there is a crucial need for more high-quality research. Given the scarcity of evidence, the routine use of cannabinoids for the treatment of mental disorders and SUDs is currently rarely justified"
>>> "The error bars are too big to say it works, so we shouldn't tell people it works"
I can see you didn't really understand my comment. There's a huge difference between not saying something is proven to work, and saying it's proven not to work. This study falls in the former category, by the authors own words.
I like how confident the author is to just say stuff that’s not covered by his study while promoting his study.
“I didn’t look into this but I bet pot is bad!” doesn’t solicit a lot of confidence in the neutrality of the guy who previously brought us hits like “Does smoking weed lead to doing heroin?” and “Is ChatGPT good for doing medical research?”
Might be different for THC/CBD in different ways.
there's lived reality vs what you wish reality was (lab conditions)
some people do find relief in marijuana etc to treat pain, some people find relief in treating ptsd with LSD
while at the same time - we find more cases of psychosis from marijuana
telling someone their lived experience is a lie is very foolish and looking down on people.
Tangentially, The etymology nerd in me has been taunted by the current article thats been on the front page for the as of now last 19 hours[1] which conveniently has the origin of the term linked to in the first sentence! [2]… which @suprisetalk also links to in the article description!…
So now I’m wondering why mdma has got the street name molly… and if they're not perhaps related?
As in molly (aka mdma) has got the name as its used as a guard against these ailments specifically…
In fact, it's quite the contrary.
The only times when it's really enjoyable is when you're with someone and you chill out and lightens the mood.
But overall it's a drug which I haven't seen bringing any good effect on people's mental health.
Furthermore, people with mental health issues are known to self-medicate, which will introduce a bias if the correlation is seen as causation.
This review seems dubious considering the huge gap in motivations and scientific rigor between 1980 and 2025.
Who even replicates review articles?
I am calling it quits for now it's been making m a little crazy and I want to see what life is like without it for a while.
Only smoke when at parties and in company.
Alone smoking is terrible. You enjoy the first, then you know very well how you feel the following ones.
Only the bad effects of being lazy, tired, sleepy, none of the pros.
> Only the bad effects of being lazy, tired, sleepy, none of the pros.
... You are allowed to stop at one you know.
It gives me some respite, that’s it.
So, why do people use cannabis then?
Not because they're effective treatments for mental disorders
Cocaine is a party drug afaik, I'll give you that one.
Hallucinogens have the ability change people's perspectives on the world, often for the positive. Now the current psychiatry lens is you can only have "medicine" if you have a "disorder" but that doesn't really seem to make sense. Why can't you take medicine to move something from average to above-average? So I agree it's not prescribed for treating many disorders, but that doesn't mean it isn't therapeutic.
Because it’s marketed as cool and edgy.
As someone who's used cannabis regularly for over a decade, I tried to start to explain in this body my experience but every sentence written ends with me deciding, "that's too circumstantial to my lifestyle-physiology to include."
I think at the end of the day, empirical research's purpose is to get us closer to being able to just make our own decisions surrounding mind-altering drugs. Beyond that, cannabis affects a great deal of systems in our body concurrent to the rest of our environment's effects. Use your autonomy to determine if it's a positive or a negative for you. Don't drive fucked up, please.
These gaslighting studies are unhelpful. For me cannabis has been life changing, no more pain killers and I live very much pain free. But I read studies claiming cannabis doesn't help with pain.
Then you'll have anti-drug crusaders taking these headlines and abuse people for whom cannabis made massive positive difference.
To those scientists: Go fuck yourself.
I mean if I told you I wanted to have fun you’d lose your mind. But if I told you I needed to heal you’re fine with it. So I make it so I’m always ill and needing pharmacological therapy.
I don’t really enjoy the feeling of a normal dose of shrooms, but with a microdose below a noticeable effect (sometimes I overshoot a little and it gets a little warm and tingly), I have in fact had a huge quality of life increase.
I guess in some ways “not wanting to die regularly” could be seen as “having fun” by some people, and I’m sure that if a proper study was done the result would be inconclusive. I mostly think that the inconclusiveness in these depression studies has much to do with a lack of understanding of what depression even is and thus a lot of them have people with very different root causes of their pathology all being labeled “depression.”
But it works for me, and it works very well. (And 2g of shrooms per month is also dirt cheap compared to expensive anti-depressants.)
Sometimes I feel that way too, but I'd love to hear more on your theory of this.
It's a highly regarded journal, but it doesn't mean 100% of the papers published are perfect.
If you're trying to dismiss a study because it was published in The Lancet then that's not a convincing line of reasoning to anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape.
Anyone genuinely familiar with the scientific publishing process probably holds the most skepticism around publications. I could probably get ANYTHING published if I wrote it well enough.
IMO, publications are mostly useful if you're already a bit of an SME in the field so that you can parse snake oil from gold. Certain publishers and institutions also hold more credibility, depending on the topic. Broadly speaking, there's a ton of crap in the journal space and the ratio of crap/good grows by the year.
The above view is independent of the current article. But it's embarrassing to see people praise the heck out of publications in 2026 in a vacuum. Reeks of young PhD student vibes. Even nature is not what it was even 10 years prior.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...
(Yah this probably sounded woo-woo, but I am speaking from a different, non-western context/lens that views this as a spiritual malady. So take that as you will)
It’s a nervous adaptogen.
Not the fix.
It's a shame that first experiences with stress also coincide with that phase of life, so the debate never ends.
