A new study, published in the journal Substance Abuse, Treatment, Prevention and Policy, shows that one-third of teens use marijuana to treat health problems rather than recreationally, when conventional medicine fails, or access to healthcare is limited.
Researchers from University of British Columbia interviewed 63 adolescents who used marijuana. Twenty said they used marijuana to for treatment of behavioral health problems, pain, sleep difficulty, and problems with concentration.
Rather than rely on ineffective prescriptions with unwanted side effects, the teens said they used marijuana, not to get high, but to treat their health problems.
The authors write, Youth who reported they had been prescribed drugs such as Ritalin, Prozac or sleeping pills, stopped using them because they did not like how these drugs made them feel or found them ineffective. For these kids, the purpose of smoking marijuana was not specifically about getting high or stoned”.
Teenagers, then, seem to use marijuana much the way adults do. Most use “recreationally”, some use “medicinally”. For those medicinal users, it is not a surprise to me that they prefer the natural and mild marijuana to the harsh and addictive pharmaceuticals. Not a single interview with a patient goes by where they fail to tell me how much they prefer cannabis to handfuls of pills.
We’re a nation that addicts our children to high fructose corn syrup, trans-fats, and caffeine even at pre-school ages. If a child is slightly rambunctious or drivingly inquisitive we have some sort of pill to bring them back into “the norm” of child behavior. Nine million of these kids don’t have any sort of health insurance to get those pills in the first place. We think nothing of giving our kids all sorts of over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. Are we surprised some reject it all for a natural remedy?
