Waking up on an otherwise dreary Thursday, usually a horrendous chore, is made remarkably more tolerable whenever another marijuana myth is debunked thanks to some science. According to a study published earlier this week in JAMA Psychiatry and promptly excerpted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, using weed as a grown ass man or woman "is not associated" with mood and anxiety disorders.
Keith Humphreys, a mental health and addiction expert at Stanford University, describes the study's findings to the Post-Gazette as "a strike against the hypothesis that cannabis uses causes mood and anxiety disorders." To arrive at this conclusion, researchers closely examined the records of approximately 35,000 American adults who previously participated in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. After looking for marijuana use among study participants, the team then followed up with those users' mental health status three years later.
"I don’t know if we will ever know because it’s just hard to predict rare events, and schizophrenia is rare," Humphreys says of any possible relationship between "heavy" marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, a theoretical impact not addressed in the study due to schizophrenia's rareness. The importance of this study, which reaffirmed no connection between weed and mental health issues such as bipolar disorder, is profoundly essential given the fact that the bulk of legal decisions regarding weed's slowly crumbling prohibition relies on research of this nature.
Of course, this is also wonderful news for all twenty billion bucks the legal weed industry is expected to start bringing in annually by 2020.
