In perhaps one of the most blatantly obvious and useless pieces of research to ever emerge on the marijuana culture, pseudo-scientists from the Boston Children’s Hospital claim that the youth of America is using recreational marijuana to put them in a better mood after suffering the heinous wrath of a bad day. In other words, these hoodlums are smoking weed to forget about the dreaded events of the day rather than going on a violent rampage against everyone who even looked at them wrong.
How dare they!
Anti-pot researchers, whose latest efforts have been scribbled in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, believe that adolescents who consistently use cannabis to escape the less than desirable aspects of life run an accelerated risk of getting caught in a tailspin of mental instability.
“Young people who use marijuana frequently experience an increase in negative affect in the 24 hours leading up to a use event, which lends strong support to an affect-regulation model in this population,” said lead study author Lydia A. Shrier, M.D., M.P.H., of the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The study finds that regular pot smokers are more likely to develop the inability to cope with problems, which could essentially set them up to feel even more depressed and let down in the hours before using marijuana again. From the study:
“One of the challenges is that people often may use marijuana to feel better but may feel worse afterward. Marijuana use can be associated with anxiety and other negative states. People feel bad, they use, and they might momentarily feel better, but then they feel worse. They don’t necessarily link feeling bad after using with the use itself, so it can become a vicious circle.”
To make these claims, researchers set out to study 40 people between the ages of 15 and 24, who reportedly used marijuana on an average of 10 times per week. The participants were sent home with computers that randomly selected times throughout the day to inquire about their respective moods, companionship, drug use, and marijuana availability.
It was in the 3,600 responses that researchers claim to have discovered that the majority of regular marijuana users experienced worse moods 24 hours before they consumed marijuana as compared to other times. Other variables, including participants having plenty of weed and the company of friends did not lead to more uplifting responses.
“There are a host of limitations with retrospective assessments, such as asking people ‘the last time you used marijuana, why did you use it?'” said Shrier. “We weren’t asking people to predict anything or to recall anything-we were just asking them to give us reports about how they were feeling right now. We were able to put under a microscope the association between those feelings and subsequent marijuana use.”
This study really just outlines what most of us have known for a long time: being high just makes life easier to tolerate — it’s not supernatural. It makes sense that our mood appears to deteriorate in the hours leading up to our next chance to smoke weed. Most of us get a little cranky when we get hungry, too.
Mike Adams writes for stoners and smut enthusiasts in High Times, Playboy’s The Smoking Jacket and Hustler Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @adamssoup and on Facebook/mikeadams73.