Is the following statement FACT or CRAP?
13. Marijuana lowers your anxiety.
Answer: CRAP
Those who start using marijuana frequently at a young age are more likely to have anxiety disorder in early adulthood. Cannabis and anxiety and depression in young adults: a large prospective study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17314727/
Many marijuana users justify its use to self-medicate for anxiety. As it happens, they’re more likely to create anxiety or make it worse than avoid it.
While marijuana helps a user briefly stop caring about their problems, everything comes rushing back when the high wears off. Worse, numerous medical studies have demonstrated that marijuana can actually cause or increase anxiety, especially at higher doses, especially in frequent users who began using in adolescence.
We know marijuana damages the adolescent brain. But most users either don’t care, ignore it, or prefer Big Marijuana’s hype. Modern marijuana isn’t the milder herb of the ’60s, and careful breeding and processed preparations have raised the THC content to nearly pure levels.
A study published in 2007 followed 3,239 Australian youths from birth to age 21. The researchers measured confounding factors that might affect the data at birth and age 14 for each youth. They later collected data on the presence of anxiety disorder (AD), cannabis use, and other factors at age 21. The researchers found that those who started using cannabis before age 15 and used it frequently were 3.4 times more likely to report anxiety symptoms in early adulthood than their peers. The statistics were pretty much the same whether they’d used cannabis alone or had also used other illicit drugs.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Simple takeaway here: marijuana can hurt you emotionally, and significantly reduce your quality of life. Make sure you don’t fall for the marijuana industry’s ruse and give your children marijuana to help their anxiety—it will not help—it will actually make it worse and could harm them in many other ways. Remember, there is NO safe level of THC in the developing brain!