Your Mom Gets High
If you’ve ever wondered whether your parents smoke marijuana, there’s a really good chance the answer is yes.
In fact, a new survey has discovered that a surprisingly large proportion of all medical marijuana users in the U.S. are parents.
The study was conducted by HelloMD, a digital health platform that helps connect medicinal cannabis patients with doctors. In it, the company surveyed 1,400 medical marijuana patients between the ages of 18 and 80, making it one of the largest medical marijuana surveys ever completed.
After analyzing the data gathered by the survey, the folks at HelloMD have reported that 45% of all medical marijuana patients are parents. Almost 85% of medical marijuana users have completed some level of higher education, and nearly 15% have a postgraduate degree.
In addition to these numbers, the survey found that the largest age cohort currently using medicinal cannabis is the group of people between 25-34 years old.
By far the three most common reasons given for using medical marijuana are for relaxation, to sleep better, and for mood elevation.
Regardless of the specific reason a person chooses to use medical marijuana, 84% of survey respondents said that cannabis effectively helps treat their symptoms.
“I find that a combination of morning meditation, exercise, and evening cannabis use helps ease my anxiety dramatically throughout the week, and I prefer the results to that of prescription meds,” one survey respondent said.
“Also, I am a cancer survivor and had used cannabis throughout my treatment to help ease nausea, trouble sleeping, and general pain. I highly recommend marijuana as a safe treatment for many conditions to many people close to me.”
A great deal of the public debate regarding medical marijuana has come to center on whether or not it might be an effective tool against cancer, and if it could represent a safer alternative to prescription painkillers.
Toward the end of 2015, the National Institute on Drug Abuse updated its official fact sheet for cannabis, citing animal studies in which cannabis successfully shrunk killed certain types of cancer cells.
And alarmed by what many have perceived to be an epidemic of opioid addictions stemming from the heavy prescription of painkillers, many have begun looking to cannabis as a non-addictive alternative.
This is especially true among professional athletes and war veterans, many of whom have begun speaking out in favor of medical marijuana.
