Real evidence of marijuana’s dangers should not get lost in the weeds.
A second independent study released in less than a month offers serious warnings that even so-called medical marijuana easily can do more harm than good. The first lesson from these studies ought to be that lawmakers should not make marijuana generally legal and that they should go slow, with stringent regulations, even in legalizing medical marijuana. The second lesson is that even when legal, doctors should be wary of prescribing it.
As this newspaper editorialized March 6, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that even medical marijuana “is associated with higher opioid mortality” and that legalizing recreational marijuana is “associated with greater death rates relative to the counterfactual of no legal cannabis.” This comes on top of earlier studies finding that habitual marijuana use can cause permanent brain damage, that marijuana use is a huge risk for heart and lung health, that it can cause psychosis and addiction, and that states that legalized it have suffered numerous measurably bad consequences on their roads and in their hospitals.
Then, on March 18, Massachusetts General Hospital released a report finding that medical marijuana not only can cause serious harm but that despite claims to the contrary, it usually “failed to improve” symptoms “of pain, anxiety, and depression” even when the cannabis use was prescribed by a licensed physician. Among the dangers frequently associated with even the medical use of marijuana is a significant risk of addiction to the drug and of various other “physical or psychological problems caused by the cannabis.” In fact, the addictive results even from prescribed use generally came with “rapid onset and increased incidence and severity.”
Researchers found the only benefit from medical marijuana came not for those major medical problems mentioned above but for insomnia — something plenty of other medicines can treat without causing addiction or other major difficulties.
Researchers divided a statistically significant 269 adults into a control group and a test group, with samples that were “relatively homogenous in race and ethnicity and educational attainment.” The study was conducted under the auspices of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Mass General is a tremendously respected research institution that last August was named No. 5 on the U.S. News & World Report’s list of America’s best hospitals.
Importantly, the results were in no way a result of confirmation bias. Researchers actually entered the study hypothesizing that there would be “modest improvements in pain and insomnia symptoms,” but instead, they found that there were no analgesic benefits at all. And for people with affective disorders such as depression, the study found that medical marijuana use actually should be contraindicated, meaning that it actually carries a “high risk” of exacerbating rather than helping the problem, per the study.
Lead researcher Jodi Gilman recommended far more stringent regulation of medical marijuana and significantly less use of it. For example, even if a licensed physician prescribed marijuana as a treatment, the researcher said there should be requirements, now lacking, for “professional follow-up.”
All of this argues against the current spirit of the age that fetishizes marijuana use as relatively harmless in any circumstances, positively helpful in some, and almost always a mark of elevated cultural “cool.” Instead, marijuana is a quite dangerous drug with utterly unproven benefits — even under most medical guidance. Medical use ought to be strictly limited by law, and recreational distribution should be illegal.
