Science & Health
A Lot More Older Americans Are Now Using Marijuana, Federally Funded Study Shows
A new federally funded report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that use of marijuana by U.S. adults 65 and older has increased considerably in recent years amid broader legal access for medical and recreational use.
Cannabis consumption had already been on the rise over the past couple of decades, the research letter says, with reported past-year consumption rising from 1.0 percent in 2005 to 4.2 percent in 2o18. The new findings, which draw on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, show that past-month use has now climbed to 4.8 percent in 2021 and to 7.0 percent in 2023.
The growth in prevalence over the past few years was seen among nearly all demographic subsets, but it was especially strong among people who listed their race as “other,” women, white people, people with college or post-college degrees, those with higher-income, married people and those living in states with legal medical marijuana, the report says.
Data also showed that people with multiple chronic diseases also reported a recent increase in prevalence of use.
Some trends reveal what authors called “shifts in cannabis use by older adults.”
“Adults with the highest incomes initially had the lowest prevalence of cannabis use vs other income levels,” they said, for example, “but by 2023, they had the highest prevalence, which may indicate better access to medical cannabis given its costs.”
The rise in cannabis use among adults 65 and older in legal jurisdictions “highlights the importance of structural educational support for patients and clinicians in those states,” the report notes, pointing to potential complications in treating chronic disease.
It also flags that tobacco and excess alcohol use “continues to be high among older adults who use cannabis. However, these results do not suggest that concurrent use is changing.”
The report concludes by advising that clinicians “consider screening and educating older patients about potential risks of cannabis use.”
The new findings, by researchers at University of California, San Diego and New York University medical schools, were published as a research letter on Monday.
Along with the report, JAMA also published an editor’s note asserting that “existing therapeutic evidence for medical cannabis in older adults has been inconsistent across several conditions, with many studies suggesting possible benefits, while others finding limited benefit.”
It also highlights “apparent” potential harms that marijuana might cause older adults, including “increased risks of cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal conditions, stroke, sedation, cognitive impairment, falls, motor vehicle injuries, drug-drug interactions, and psychiatric disorders.”
“Older adults require information on methods available for taking cannabis and age-specific dosing guidance,” the editor’s note says. “Health care professionals should recognize that older adults are increasingly using cannabis products and promote open and judgment-free conversations about its use.”
Overall, it says, the new research findings “underscore the need for more high-quality evidence evaluating the benefit to risk ratio of cannabis in older adults as well as the need for clinician support to prevent cannabis-related harm.”
A separate study recently published by the American Medical Association found that while the frequency of marijuana use among adults in Canada increased slightly in the years following nationwide legalization, problematic misuse of cannabis in fact saw modest decreases.
The report, published in JAMA Network Open and funded in part by the federal agency the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, looked at data from 1,428 adults aged 18 to 65, who completed assessments roughly every six months between September 2018 and October 2023.
Frequency of marijuana use overall increased slightly but significantly over the five-year period. Among all participants, the mean proportion of days using cannabis increased by 0.35 percent per year, or 1.75 percent over the five-year study period.
People who used cannabis most frequently before legalization saw the largest declines in use. People who consumed marijuana on a daily basis prior to legalization decreased their use frequency more than those who’d used marijuana on a weekly basis.
Those who used marijuana once a month or less before legalization, meanwhile, reported slight increases in use.
Governments and public health experts have been working to track consumer behavior as laws around marijuana continue to change. In the U.S., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report recently broke down federal data on cannabis use among thousands of U.S. adults, finding that while smoking marijuana remains the most common way to consume it, methods such as eating, vaping and dabbing are growing in popularity.
Overall in 2022, 15.3 percent of adults reported current marijuana use, while 7.9 percent reported daily use. Among users, most (79.4 percent) reported smoking, followed by eating (41.6 percent), vaping (30.3 percent) and dabbing (14.6 percent).
About half of all adults who used marijuana (46.7 percent) reported multiple methods of use—most typically smoking and eating or smoking and vaping.
Rates of both vaping and dabbing—as well as cannabis use in general—were higher in young adults than the general adult population.
An earlier analysis from CDC found that rates of current and lifetime cannabis use among high school students have continued to drop amid the legalization movement.
A separate poll recently found that that more Americans smoke marijuana on a daily basis than drink alcohol every day—and that alcohol drinkers are more likely to say they would benefit from limiting their use than cannabis consumers are.
U.S. adults who drink alcohol are nearly three times as likely to say they’d be better off reducing their intake of the drug compared to marijuana consumers who said they’d benefit from using their preferred substance less often, the survey found. Further, it found that while lifetime and monthly alcohol drinking among adults was far more common than cannabis use, daily marijuana consumption was slightly more popular than daily drinking.
An earlier report published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs that found that secondhand harm caused by marijuana use is far less prevalent than that of alcohol, with respondents reporting secondhand harm from drinking at nearly six times the rate they did for cannabis.
Yet another 2022 study from Michigan State University researchers, published in the journal PLOS One, found that “cannabis retail sales might be followed by the increased occurrence of cannabis onsets for older adults” in legal states, “but not for underage persons who cannot buy cannabis products in a retail outlet.”
The trends were observed despite adult use of marijuana and certain psychedelics reaching “historic highs” in 2022, according to separate data.
As for older consumers specifically, a study earlier this year on the use of medical marijuana by patients age 50 and above concluded that “cannabis seemed to be a safe and effective treatment” for pain and other conditions.
“Most patients experienced clinically significant improvements in pain, sleep, and quality of life and reductions in co-medication,” it found.
Nearly all patients used products consumed orally, such as edibles and extracts, as opposed to smoked or vaporized cannabis, and most preferred products high in CBD and relatively low in THC.
The study involved use of medical marijuana by patients under the care of a health care provider, with the treating physician reporting data around the use of cannabis and other medications as well as impacts on pain, sleep, quality of life and any adverse effects.
“Over the six-month study period, significant improvements were noted in pain, sleep, and quality of life measures,” the report says, “with 45% experiencing a clinically meaningful improvement in pain interference and in sleep quality scores.”
Last year, separate studies found that both older medical marijuana patients as well as people with fibromyalgia reported that cannabis improved their sleep.
A different study last year from the retirement group AARP found that marijuana use by older people in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the last three years, with better sleep as among the most frequently cited reasons.
