Respondents were asked to think about their mental health — including stress, depression and problems with emotion — and how many days during the past 30 was their mental health not good. Still, only some of the patients switched from smoking to non-smoking forms of weed over the course of COVID-19. A Canadian study published last December showed that cannabis use in the overall population remained stable last May and June. The increase suggests “a need for interventions to limit increased cannabis use, policy measures to address cannabis-attributable harms and continued monitoring of cannabis use during and after the pandemic,” the study notes. As the pandemic began, communities reporting a greater average number of mentally unhealthy days (aMUDs) showed more visits to cannabis retailers, Ashby notes in the study, published online in the Journal of Addictive Diseases.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have led to increased legal cannabis use in communities at risk for mental health issues, suggests a review of anonymized location data in the U.S.
Nathaniel Ashby, Ph.D., a researcher at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, considered location data from the devices of visitors to 3,335 cannabis retail locations — both medical and recreational — for each day running from Dec. 1, 2019 through Apr. 30, 2020.
As the pandemic began, communities reporting a greater average number of mentally unhealthy days (aMUDs) showed more visits to cannabis retailers, Ashby...
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