alt Hacker NewsStudy finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD
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Title says "helps" but the summary says "it doesn’t effectively treat anxiety, depression, or PTSD". Big difference between the two IMO.
Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely. Getting a good night's sleep or being without chronic pain for a few hours is often enough.
American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years. Really astounding to witness considering the well known downsides to human health and cognitive function. Main characters smoke weed as a cool disobedience, in sitcoms even.
Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.
I've always been suspicious of the claims THC helps anxiety. CBD may, but my experience is that high doses of THC without corresponding CBD tends to induce anxiety in many people. I also found the brief notes in the article about MMJ and autism intriguing. I'm diagnosed ASD. I would think the use of THC to manage overstimulation could be problematic, as it tends to make colors and sounds and flavours _more_ intense. Conversely, indica strains tend to slow you down.
DISCLOSURE: I use large amounts of high potency cannabis flower with CBD/CBG edibles for intractable neuropathic pain. I also smoked a hell of a lot of weed in my 20s and 30s. I've more experience of Pot than most. MMJ lowers my pain a bit, and reduces suffering a lot. Its the suffering that makes life difficult.
Still ok with it being legal but yeah that doesn't mean it's beneficial
As a middle aged guy who has used pot on and off for decades and no longer really enjoys the high, I'll say weed is good for two things:
Old man joint pains. Not headaches, broken bones, etc. But it nearly erases achy joint pain for me.
Being angry. I am much less angry in general when I'm smoking a bit every couple of days. That said, when I take a break I feel like my testosterone goes through the roof. I get more irritable and, TMI, I get a lot more spontaneous boners.
Not entirely on topic: If pot is illegal people will grow extremely potent variaties. If it's normal you get very tasty variaties that give a mild buzz even if you smoke pure joints all day.
It's like comparing a casual light beer with the 90% moonshine or 45% bathtub gin sold during prohibition.
This is not entirely surprising, as the evidence was always weakly correlated. I say this as a proponent of legalization, mind you.
Cannabis, like alcohol and tobacco, is a vice. It definitely helps with some physical ailments (like helping stimulate hunger in cancer patients), just like alcohol and tobacco can with other ailments, but it’s not a panacea for mental health disorders.
We need to stop marketing these things as curatives when they’re mostly just coping mechanisms or social lubricants. We’re doing more harm than good by leaning into the “legitimate pharmaceutical” angle.
I’m digging through the paper. It’s a meta analysis paper.. they have six studies they analyze on anxiety treatment and they (footnotes 40-46) have positive results in terms of cbd showing a significant effect on anxiety reduction. I’m not invested in figuring out exactly how this study came to represent what it claims but it seems like a joke
Edit:
Okay, I've read the meta-study now and I think the summary article isn't representing the picture very well. In particular they found for anxiety there actually seems to be evidence in this exact data set that does help.
What they are doing is saying "there isn't 95% evidence it reduces anxiety" therefore "no evidence" even though they mean "some evidence, just not at the statistical significance level" -- it's one of the biggest confusions (and sometimes it feels deliberate) you'll see people do.
Also when you have a confidence interval that big it's a red flag. They themselves admit the data is all over the place.
In summary, don't assume much from the title of the summary article.
From the paper itself: "54 trials were identified for inclusion (2477 participants...) ....24 (44%) of these trials had a high risk of bias, and the certainty of evidence for most outcomes was low."
I have been a smoker for more than a decade and I don't think it has any good impact on any of those.
In fact, it's quite the contrary.
The only times when it's really enjoyable is when you're with someone and you chill out and lightens the mood.
But overall it's a drug which I haven't seen bringing any good effect on people's mental health.
Reading that study sure didn't help with my anxiety, depression or PTSD either.
It certainly helps with boredom but quickly losses it's effect after repeated use.
I am calling it quits for now it's been making m a little crazy and I want to see what life is like without it for a while.
So, a meta study. While important, it assumes that the underlying studies are based on solid science.
So, why do people use cannabis then?
The studies cited by this metastudy all suffer from the same issue: They aren't studying the cannabis plant at all and even if they are, it's not in the chemovars (chemical makeups) that real consumers are actually consuming - due to cannabis sourcing issues stemming from cannabis's continued illegality.
For randomized controlled trials, even in "legal" states, university scientists can't just walk into a dispensary and buy cannabis to then administer to test subjects.
That's Post-Prohibition for you.
As far as I can tell, most (EDITED FROM ALL) of the studies utilize isolates - and not necessarily in conjunction.
For instance, none of the 6 anxiety studies included in this metastudy used THC and CBD together.
The headline could read instead: No evidence cannabinoid isolates help anxiety, depression, or PTSD.
Cannabis advocates are the first to mention the entourage effect. Cannabis prohibitionists on the other hand, love nothing more than to cite incomplete science.
Matthew Hill offers a great interview on Andrew Huberman's podcast - https://open.spotify.com/episode/26PR93gyNcs8YPlQ9dypW3?si=V...
As someone who's used cannabis regularly for over a decade, I tried to start to explain in this body my experience but every sentence written ends with me deciding, "that's too circumstantial to my lifestyle-physiology to include."
I think at the end of the day, empirical research's purpose is to get us closer to being able to just make our own decisions surrounding mind-altering drugs. Beyond that, cannabis affects a great deal of systems in our body concurrent to the rest of our environment's effects. Use your autonomy to determine if it's a positive or a negative for you. Don't drive fucked up, please.
”The findings are based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of 54 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted worldwide over a 45 year period (1980-2025).”
This review seems dubious considering the huge gap in motivations and scientific rigor between 1980 and 2025.
I see problems with this meta-analysis.
- Not adjusted for strain, dose or delivery method across all studies.
- Not adjusted for receptor downregulation, for which rotation and/or drug holidays would be appropriate strategies.
- Not adjusted across all studies for time effect, e.g. 6 hours of relief, 1 hour, etc.
I can tell you from personal experience with a related disorder that disciplined rotation of 10mg edible cannabis provides 90% relief, 90% of the time, with far fewer side effects than alternative medications for the same disorder.
Correct.
It’s a nervous adaptogen.
Not the fix.
> “Though our paper didn’t specifically look at this, the routine use of medicinal cannabis could be doing more harm than good by worsening mental health outcomes, for example a greater risk of psychotic symptoms and developing cannabis use disorder, and delaying the use of more effective treatments,” he said.
I like how confident the author is to just say stuff that’s not covered by his study while promoting his study.
“I didn’t look into this but I bet pot is bad!” doesn’t solicit a lot of confidence in the neutrality of the guy who previously brought us hits like “Does smoking weed lead to doing heroin?” and “Is ChatGPT good for doing medical research?”
There seems to be more information out there about the effect on the brain with cannabis and it doesn't always seem great long term.
Might be different for THC/CBD in different ways.
Isn't the lancet the same journal that has published the vax-autism and hydroxychloroquine studies?
But it can cause memory loss, impaired motor coordination, and food craving. Also memory loss.
Working with ayahuasca for several years in a traditional (Shipibo) context has showed me just how bad cannabis can be- it is more difficult to clean out of the body (energetically/spiritually) than any other drug. It creates so many associations in our mind- memories, relationships, pains, emotions, etc.. When "on the path" (meaning, apprenticing and learning how to work with ayahuasca), it really needs to be cleaned out for useful visions to open up (to work on other people) and to be able to cleanly connect to and call in the medicinal spirits/doctors (through the icaros/songs). It can really blunt dreams, intuition and senses.
(Yah this probably sounded woo-woo, but I am speaking from a different, non-western context/lens that views this as a spiritual malady. So take that as you will)
Studying the effects of recreational drugs is similar to studying diet in terms of the level of complication. The headline "No evidence" is a good example of the discourse about this subject. There absolutely is such evidence, but this new analysis comes to different, potentially more robust, conclusions from the same data. As long as results are presented in this way a meaningful shared comprehension of the situation is likely to remain out of reach.
My initial take from reading the headline was: no shit this is what mdma is for…
Tangentially, The etymology nerd in me has been taunted by the current article thats been on the front page for the as of now last 19 hours[1] which conveniently has the origin of the term linked to in the first sentence! [2]… which @suprisetalk also links to in the article description!…
So now I’m wondering why mdma has got the street name molly… and if they're not perhaps related?
As in molly (aka mdma) has got the name as its used as a guard against these ailments specifically…
me n my quarter brick beg to disagree
Millions of people use it because it helps them, but trust some edgy scientists who say nope it doesn't.
These gaslighting studies are unhelpful. For me cannabis has been life changing, no more pain killers and I live very much pain free. But I read studies claiming cannabis doesn't help with pain.
Then you'll have anti-drug crusaders taking these headlines and abuse people for whom cannabis made massive positive difference.
To those scientists: Go fuck yourself.
The entire point of the drug research is to make them palatable to authorities through plausible lies. American culture does not permit enjoyment for the sake of it. So you have to make up some stories and say “there is some evidence that psilocybin helps depression” or whatever and then slowly leak it towards legality.
I mean if I told you I wanted to have fun you’d lose your mind. But if I told you I needed to heal you’re fine with it. So I make it so I’m always ill and needing pharmacological therapy.
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If anything, I think most people discover anxiety with cannabis.
It's a shame that first experiences with stress also coincide with that phase of life, so the debate never ends.
It's good to see science confirm what anybody who has accidentally taken too large of edibles dose understands.
This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition.
There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, but opioids were more casually prescribed a few decades ago. I recall some discussion where one of them said they were seeing good initial results but the effects faded, and then it was hard to get the patients off of the opioids when they were no longer helping. Not surprising to anyone now, but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
I feel like I've seen a weaker version of this in some friends who turned to THC to "treat" their depression: Initial mood boost, followed by dependency, then eventually into a protracted period where they know it's not helping but they don't want to stop because they feel worse when they discontinue. This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems.