With recreational marijuana now legal in 24 stateswhere the US Drug Enforcement Administration is going reclassify the drug to a less dangerous category under the Controlled Substances Act.
This is because for the first time in history, the number of daily marijuana users exceeds the number of daily drinkers, according to a new report from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
The change in preference is largely caused by young people. Among people ages 18 to 24, 69% prefer marijuana to alcohol, according to a 2022 survey by New Frontier Data, a cannabis research firm.
Work ‘N’ Roll, a shared workspace in downtown New York City, is among the organizations hoping to capitalize on the trend among young workers. For just $15, guests can smoke while they type.
“Here we smoke because it helps our work. That’s our secret sauce,” says Matthew Everett, a Work ‘N’ Roll patron.
“I turned to cannabis because I saw that there are limitless possibilities with the flavors,” he added. “And I noticed: hey, I don’t have a hangover the next day either.”
According to Headset, a cannabis analytics company, marijuana sales among Gen Z women in particular have more than doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Alcohol is prohibited at Work ‘N’ Roll, but it’s fine to bring your own cannabis or have it delivered to your door.
But not everyone sees the increase in marijuana use as a positive thing, including addiction psychiatrist Colin Reiff.
Reiff points to a recent National Institute of Health study that associates schizophrenia with excessive cannabis use among some young people, especially young men, at an age when their brains are still maturing.
“The legalized age for cannabis should be about 33, when people are outside the window of developing schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and a lot of other things,” Reiff said. “Or it should definitely be after 26, once the prefrontal cortex has finished developing.”
Cannabis has also become more potent over the years. The average level of THC, the main compound in marijuana that produces its psychoactive effects, has risen from 4% in 1995 to more than 15% in 2021, a fourfold increase, according to the latest figures from the University of Mississippi’s potency monitoring project. .
But for Everett, those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“Over time, as I started educating my parents more, they began to understand that cannabis was less destructive to my lifestyle than alcohol, and I even got them to try cannabis,” Everett said.
When asked how that went, Everett said, “They enjoyed it. My mother had cancer and it helped relieve some of her symptoms, and my father quite liked it.”
For Golda Moldavsky and Ellis Sudak, two other Work ‘N’ Roll customers in their twenties, alcohol is a must.
“Honestly, I never thought about it not being here,” Moldavsky said.
“I don’t miss it,” Sudak said.
