New research reaffirms that today’s high-potency marijuana is undermining the mental health of Coloradans and particularly of our youth. It helps make the case anew for exploring additional state and local safeguards against pot’s use by underage Colorado teens.

It’s also a reminder that Colorado’s ongoing mental health crisis, especially acute among our young people, is only made worse by our state’s experiment with legal recreational marijuana. The crisis is costing us dearly, not only in health-care dollars but also even in lives.

As reported this week in The Gazette, researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus point to two studies showing that highly potent marijuana is associated with psychosis in users. Acting under a directive from the state Legislature, the researchers turned up the data after an exhaustive review of research around the globe into the effects of pot’s psychoactive ingredient, THC, on mental health. The review screened about 66,000 studies and identified 452 that are relevant.

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The review by the school of public health was required in legislation passed in 2021 to regulate marijuana concentrates, which are used by the legal recreational pot industry in producing more potent products. They comprise an ever larger share of the marijuana market.

The legislative mandate aimed to ramp up policy makers’ knowledge about the effects of high potency marijuana, which, even though illegal to minors, remains easily accessible to them. 

One study cited by researchers in the review concluded that any cannabis use or daily consumption – or any initiation prior to age 15 – and “high potency” use are “all associated with earlier age of first onset of psychosis.” The study also found an association between high potency cannabis use – compared to no use – and first-episode psychosis, as well as everyday use and first-episode psychosis.

The researchers examined the potential tie between child abuse and high-concentration cannabis and its association with psychotic disorders, and concluded there is a link.

The second study found by researchers also had examined the relationship between cannabis use and psychotic symptoms and found an association between “premorbid cannabis” use and symptoms of psychosis. Daily cannabis use, that study concluded, is associated with increased likelihood of psychotic disorder.

Predictably, as noted in The Gazette’s news report, the marijuana lobby is pushing back at these latest findings. Big Marijuana’s lobbyists pointed out some potentially beneficial side-effects of pot use that the Colorado School of Public Health researchers also turned up. Among those is pot’s use in treating maladies like obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.

All of which renews the case for approaching marijuana regulation in a way that is more akin to the regulation of strictly controlled prescription drugs. Which is to say if in certain limited applications THC can help in treating disorders, licensed medical and mental health professionals can recommend it. That would be a dramatic improvement, of course, over the farcical way in which so-called “medicinal” marijuana has been regulated since it was legalized in Colorado in 2000.

But for the mental health of our state’s population at large and above all for Colorado’s youth, the broad availability and lack of adequate checks and balances on super-potent recreational marijuana only bodes ill. Our state’s elected lawmakers must do more to prevent it from falling into our children’s hands.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board