New research from Australia suggests that cannabis use as young adults can lead to poorer life outcomes than individuals of the same age who do not use it regularly.
This reinforces a raft of existing research showing that regular cannabis use among teenage children can lead to poor outcomes in life such as mental illness, low life achievement and lower IQ.
In this article we will look at the piece published in Drug and Alcohol Review in 2021 on young adult cannabis use, and reflect on a much larger piece of research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2020.
Finally we will look at the wider issues around poor life outcomes, as shown in a paper in The Lancet Psychiatry in 2018, to look at the wider issues that may lie behind these findings.
Young Adults in AustraliaResearch published in the Drug and Alcohol Review in January 2021 looked at 1,782 young adults and teens over 20 years of their lives between the ages of 15 and 35.
It showed that while just 7.7% of the individuals started regular cannabis use from the age of 15 or so, 13.6% of them began regularly using cannabis from young adulthood.
After 20 years, of those using cannabis regularly as young adults and teens:
Where this is different from other studies is that it showed that young adults who started using cannabis regularly were more likely to have poor life outcomes than those who began using as teenagers.
In 2020, the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry published a narrative review of research into the effects of regular cannabis use in children and young adults.
The paper showed that those who regularly used cannabis:
As well as this the research showed poor life outcomes for those who used cannabis regularly. These included poorer educational outcomes and higher school drop-out rates.
This suggests that cannabis can affect brain development and structure, something that cannabis researchers have been trying to prove for many years.
The authors said, however, that nothing hard and fast has yet been found.
Regarding alterations to the brain, research that this paper looked at tried to find reduced grey matter in different parts. They couldn’t find anything that is clinically significant.
The problem with such research is that research into living brains is costly and takes a lot of work, and as such the numbers involved in such studies are often very small.
That this research still couldn’t find anything statistically significant even in the small numbers involved suggests that as ever, there is nothing absolute that can be pointed to as an effect of cannabis use.
The paper also noted that while the research it looked at was of a high standard (using double-blind, randomised controlled trials for example), certain controls weren’t consistently applied. Amongst these controls the authors of the paper included:
In short, drug misuse could be as much a result of poor circumstances as causation of those circumstances.
The world in which we live our lives is tough, and there is ample evidence that parental wealth can lead to better outcomes in life for their children.
Could there be subtle changes to the brain that lead to poor choices in life and a lower success rate for those who were exposed to regular cannabis use? If there is, it isn’t glaringly obvious.
In the next section, we will look at those social factors that in combination can themselves lead to poor life outcomes and drug misuse.
In 2018, leading UK medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry published a piece called Preventative Strategies for Mental Health. This looked at all the factors behind mental illness – a major area for research into the outcomes of drug misuse.
The paper showed that the following factors can lead to mental illness:
Looking at these, one can see that where it comes to factors leading to poor outcomes in life, a research paper looking at purely drug misuse and those outcomes would have to control for things like:
It would be very hard to design a study to knock out the variables that in themselves can lead to risky alcohol use, self-medication with legal and illegal drugs , and other poor life outcomes. Does this mean that drug misuse in itself is not harmful?
Regular cannabis use can undoubtedly lead to poor life choices.
It is linked to poor decision making and things like psychosis, anxiety, and depression that in turn lead the substance user to less than perfect life outcomes.
Could the depression, anxiety , and psychosis lead to those life outcomes described in the Drug and Alcohol Review paper such as social isolation and the misuse of other drugs and alcohol?
Research has yet to find something solid such as major changes to the brain that can be directly linked to the outcomes in themselves.
Brain science using live subjects is a very young area of research on what amounts to be the most complicated computing system in the known world.
Looking at what has and has not been found in live brain science suggests that those looking at the outcomes of regular cannabis use may find small changes.
These small changes may lead to poor decisions and subsequent pitfalls that the individual encounters.
What is apparent is that everyone’s life is extremely complicated and it may well be that a series of poor decisions made by that cannabis user leads to things like poor education, poverty, social isolation, and so forth, as opposed to purely lighting up a joint every night.
Boris is our editor-in-chief at Rehab 4 Addiction. Boris is an addiction expert with more than 20 years in the field. His expertise covers a broad of topics relating to addiction, rehab and recovery. Boris is an addiction therapist and assists in the alcohol detox and rehab process. Boris has been featured on a variety of websites, including the BBC, Verywell Mind and Healthline. You can connect with Boris online at LinkedIn or X.com.
