TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING –
Jan. 10, 2024 – When Braxton Clark was in high school, he used marijuana to control his emotions. At 17, he used it every day.
When he was 18, he had a psychotic episode after using cannabis and was admitted to a hospital. He spent the next three years sober. Then one day he tried cannabis again. Before long, he was back in the hospital.
I had lost my faculties. I wasn’t making sense,” said Clark, now 24.
He has been sober a year and is thriving in college with the help of medication. Doctors have diagnosed him with a psychotic disorder, brought on by using cannabis.
Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research.
“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.
Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019.
