Skip to main content

Medical Weed Users At Risk for Addiction

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on Jan 24, 2025.

via HealthDay

FRIDAY, Jan. 24, 2025 -- 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:

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.

Sources

  • JAMA Psychiatry, Jan. 22, 2025

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Read this next

Drinking Coffee May Help You Live Longer — But Skip the Extra Sugar

THURSDAY, June 19, 2025 — Drinking a cup or two of coffee every day may help you live longer — but only if you skip the heavy cream and sugar, new research...

An ER Doctor's Guide to Staying Safe in Summer Heat

THURSDAY, June 19, 2025 — As summer temperatures rise, a Houston emergency room doctor is sharing important tips to help folks stay safe while outdoors. Dr. Neil Gandhi, an...

Braces Top Best Therapies For Knee Arthritis

WEDNESDAY, June 18, 2025 — Throbbing, swollen knees hobble many seniors, but there are many solid means of treating knee arthritis that don’t involve meds, a new...

More news resources

Subscribe to our newsletter

Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.