The ZGens are the most anxious and depressed generation in history. In 2016, a Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teens said that anxiety and depression are a major problem among their peers, and another 26 percent said they’re a minor problem. (See “The Epidemic of Anxiety Among Today’s Students” by Mary Ellen Flannery.) The reasons are complex, from social media, to fear of being shot in school, to academic pressure. But what are the solutions? Now that marijuana is legalized in many states, studies are showing that it relieves anxiety. Most doctors remain loath to prescribe weed for anxiety citing studies that it harms the developing brain. Regardless, the information is out there that it helps.
A research paper by Susan A. Stoner from the University of Washington, published in 2017 concludes that THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, decreases anxiety at lower doses, but increases it at higher doses. Further, she found that CBD, another component found in marijuana, decreases anxiety at all dosages. She found a “low dose of THC (7.5 mg) reduced the duration of negative emotional responses to the task and post-task appraisals of how threatening and challenging the stressor was. In contrast, a higher dose of THC (12.5 mg) produced small but significant increases in anxiety, negative mood and subjective distress at baseline before and during the psychosocial stress task.”
She writes in her research paper that in “a study of a sample of 1,746 patients from a network of nine medical marijuana evaluation clinics in California, 37.8% of patients reported that they used marijuana to relieve anxiety, 16.9% to relieve panic attacks, and 55.1% to improve relaxation.” So regardless of what the scientific evidence proves, and there is a real dearth of it, nearly 40% of the people studied used weed to reduce anxiety and it seemed to work for them.
The science has not caught up to the anectodal evidence that marijuana reduces anxiety. Go into any marijuana shop in Colorado and the “bud tender” will point out which strains of weed reduce anxiety. It’s common knowledge among marijuana users that it reduces anxiety and depression. Weed must be working for some people. More research needs to be done, and it needs to happen quickly. The ZGens are the most anxious and depressed generation in history. They also have the highest suicide rate of any generation, ever. We need to find something to reduce their anxiety.