People Over 50 Are the Fastest-Growing Group of Cannabis Users

Illustration: George Wylesol for the Guardian.

The push to decriminalize marijuana and expand its medical uses is sweeping the country - even in Virginia.  I support decriminalization since, having been a teen in the 1960's, I am no stranger to marijuana and, in my view, the claim that it is a "gateway drug" is bullshit (pardon my "French"). If someone is trying to lose themselves in drugs, the real solution is decent mental health care that addresses the underlying issues.  Moreover, in my experience, the marijuana laws (especially in Virginia) seem to be aimed at criminalizing blacks with a goal of disenfranchising them.  Hence why the Virginia Republican Party is killing decriminalization efforts in this year's session of the Virginia General Assembly. With the Virginia GOP not being able to win a statewide election in a decade, the desperation to minimize "those people" on the voter rolls has reached new levels of desperation. As a piece in The Guardian indirectly notes, however, the GOP may be about to hit a brick fall in its efforts to retain this tool for criminalizing blacks.  The fastest growing cohort of marijuana users is the older 50 crowd, a key GOP demographic.  Here are article highlights (note the drop in opioid usage where marijuana has been decriminalized): 

As attitudes towards cannabis shift, the fastest-growing group of users is over 50 – and marijuana’s popularity among seniors is beginning to change the American experience of old age.

Why are more seniors getting high? It might make more sense to ask: “Why not?” As adults reach retirement, they age out of drug tests and have far more time on their hands. Some feel liberated to abandon long-held proprieties.

Elegant vape pens and other attractive, discreet products have helped de stigmatize the drug among older Americans. “Legalization seems to make non-users seem a little less scared of it, and perhaps less judgmental,” says Jo, a 56-year-old cannabis user who preferred not to use her real name.

The seniors using cannabis today aren’t your parents’ grandparents. The generation that camped out at Woodstock is now in its seventies. They’ve been around grass long enough to realize it’s not going to kill them, and are more open to the possibility it will come with health benefits.

Seniors’ affinity for weed is beginning to ripple across the US healthcare system. A 2016 study found that in states with access to medical marijuana, those using Medicare part D – a benefit primarily for seniors – received fewer prescriptions for other drugs to treat depression, anxiety, pain, and other chronic issues.

[P]roven or not, a number of seniors evidently prefer it to the medications they would otherwise be taking. A study published last year in in the Journal of the American Medical Association found opioid prescriptions for Medicare part D recipients dropped 14% after a state legalized medical marijuana – a hopeful sign amid the opioids crisis.

While some doctors have expressed concerns about seniors self-medicating with weed, virtually everyone agrees the public health consequences of opioids are far worse. And the most serious health concerns associated with marijuana, such as impaired brain development, tend to affect younger people.

For the industry, seniors’ newfound interest in cannabis is a business opportunity. The Colorado edibles company Wana Brands, among many others, sells cannabis products reminiscent of medicines familiar to seniors. Wana sells extended release capsules as well as products with different ratios of THC and CBD, which intoxicate users to different degrees and can have a variety of effects on ailments.

For someone who hasn’t seen a joint in 40 years, the modern dispensary can be a dizzying experience replete with dozens of products – topicals (lotions), tinctures, sprays – all promising to help you feel better, but also to get you stoned. Whether or not marijuana helps seniors to alleviate their conditions, many may enjoy a sense of control over their own wellbeing. Meanwhile, dispensaries in California and elsewhere cater to older clientele with discounts and shuttle busses.

It hasn’t escaped the pharmaceutical industry that marijuana could soon be seen as a viable replacement for many of its products. Perhaps someday soon it will be normal for seniors to pass their last decades in a cannabis-induced haze.

For those who support decriminalization, there's an easy step to take: vote Democrat in every race possible in November 2019 and flip control of the General Assembly from the GOP. 

Trump’s Know-Nothing Science Budget

The GOP and evangelical Christians have a common requirement to further their toxic agendas: ignorant, objective truth denying followers. A heavy dose of racially and homophobic bigotry and a belief in conspiracy theories, of course are similarly helpful ingredients.  Hence why knowledge and scientific knowledge of almost any sort is the enemy of fundamentalists and evangelicals and the political party that they now largely control.  Evolution is denied, climate change is denied, objective facts and figures are replaced with untrue "alternate facts," etc.   Indeed, anything that challenges the political and religious orthodoxy of these people is denied and attacked.  Donald Trump, the leading purveyor of alternate facts - read lies - is aiding in the effort by proposing dangerous and potentially deadly cuts i, science funding.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Donald Trump's dangerous budget cuts to science and medical research.  Here are excerpts: 

Donald Trump’s disregard for science has never been much of a secret. Well before he became President, he tweeted that light bulbs can cause cancer, that wind farms are unhealthy, that fracking “poses ZERO health risks,” and that Ebola “is much easier to transmit” than the government lets on. As a candidate, he regularly called global warming a hoax, repeated the false notion that vaccines can cause autism, and stated confidently that spraying hair spray in one’s apartment does not harm the ozone layer. . . . He avoids exercise, proudly fears germs, and, in Mike Pence, has chosen a Vice-President who, when pointedly asked, won’t say whether he believes in evolution.

It’s been downhill ever since. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and the phrases “climate change” and “evidence-based” have been scrubbed from federal Web sites—in the very same year that three once-in-a-century hurricanes and two major drought-fuelled wildfires ravaged parts of the nation. . . . . the Environmental Protection Agency has banned E.P.A.-funded scientists, but not industry representatives, from serving on its advisory boards; and the Centers for Disease Control, facing steep budget cuts, will soon all but shut down a vital program that helps more than three dozen developing countries detect and control the spread of infectious diseases.

Trump’s newly proposed federal budget for 2019 continues the assault on knowledge and reason. Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the E.P.A. would each be cut by eighteen per cent or more, compared with the final 2017 budget, which was drafted by the Obama Administration and amended by Trump.

The National Institute of Mental Health would see its budget slashed by thirty per cent, despite Trump’s recent avowals that better mental-health treatment is the solution to gun violence. NASA’s budget would stay roughly the same, but a number of important Earth-science missions would be eliminated, and Trump would attempt to defund and privatize the International Space Station by 2025.

 

The few increases, to the budgets of the Energy and Interior Departments, are designed to fund fossil-fuel research, offshore drilling, and surface mining. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management and the Oil Spill Research Program would be cut by at least fifteen per cent; Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses earnings from offshore oil and gas drilling to protect and restore federal public lands, would be cut by two-thirds; and research on clean energy would be cut by more than seventy per cent.

 

Other cuts would simply obfuscate. The 2019 proposal, like the 2018 budget, eliminates five satellite missions that study aspects of Earth’s surface and atmosphere—carbon-dioxide levels, the reflectivity of clouds and snow—specifically in order to monitor the dynamics of climate. According to Trump’s moral calculus, it is better to know nothing than to learn something that may conflict with what you think you know. Even the education departments of NASA and NOAA would be cut; should those agencies actually learn something, they’ll have a harder time sharing the information.

 

Thirteen months into his first term, key posts at numerous federal agencies remain unfilled, including the administrator positions for NASA and NOAA. The Department of the Interior lacks eleven of its seventeen senior officials, and Trump has yet to propose nominees for six of them, including the directors of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Needless to say, it’s easier to ransack a store when no one is officially minding it.

 

And many of the candidates whom Trump has nominated for science-oriented roles are woefully underqualified.

 

It feels almost quaint to talk of “truth” and “facts” anymore, but, as an endeavor, science at least strives to honestly approach them. Which is why it’s all the more dispiriting that, for a full year now, Trump has operated without a Presidential science adviser—the longest the Oval Office has gone without one since the position was created, decades ago.onald 

 

[Trump] trusts no one; he can’t abide to read even his intelligence reports. Science thrives on curiosity, investigation, vigorous discourse, and flexibility of thought. Donald Trump is a party of one, interested solely in hearing the sound of his own voice, regardless of the veracity of what it has to say. For now, the interim science adviser is Michael Kratsios, the deputy assistant in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios, who is thirty-one, worked previously as chief of staff to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter, and has a bachelor’s degree in political science—the only kind of science, perhaps, that Trump can understand.