A man smokes marijuana in lower Manhattan outside the first legal dispensary for recreational marijuana in New York in December 2022. Daily and near daily marijuana use is now more common than high-frequency drinking. Ted Shaffrey/AP This will likely come as no surprise to most people, even if they didn’t see the recent news reports on the research: More people are using marijuana, more frequently than ever.
It’s an entirely predictable outcome of marijuana legalization, now in place in 24 states. Some 17.7 million people use marijuana daily or almost daily, which is more than the 14.7 million people who use alcohol daily or on a near-daily basis, according to an analysis of 2022 results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The survey has been in use since 1979, but these latest results mark the first time that more people reported daily pot use than daily drinking.
Advocates of marijuana legalization are quick to cite its benefits. Recreational cannabis sales bring much-needed tax revenue to cash-hungry state governments; Illinois raked in $417.6 million in cannabis sales tax revenue in 2023. Legalization also is a blow to the war on drugs and its disproportionate impact on impoverished Black and Latino communities. There’s no going back to prohibition, especially now that the Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed removing marijuana from its Schedule 1 classification of far more dangerous drugs, such as heroin and ecstasy.
Even so, there are obvious reasons to be concerned about the growing heavy use of marijuana. “Safer than alcohol” is the conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t mean “without risk.” Editorial
Daily marijuana use can increase the risk of developing cannabis-associated psychosis, according to Dr. David A. Gorelick of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Heavy marijuana use has also been linked to heart problems. In a study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers found that the more often someone smoked pot, the greater their risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke : Daily users had a 25% higher risk of having a heart attack and a 42% higher […]
Daily marijuana use is increasing. That’s cause for concern.
