Are Women More Easily Addicted to Cannabis Than Men?

New studies from the Women’s Health Research at Yale (WHRY) is poised to study if women are more likely to become addicted to marijuana than males are. The research, which is just a part of an announcement of a project that will be observing ovarian cancer, obesity, heart attacks, and how marijuana affects both men and women. Kelly Cosgrove is leading the study and states that there is surely a difference between how males and females react to smoking marijuana. The main difference comes in addiction as well as withdrawals.

“Cannabis is generally thought of as a safe drug despite a substantial number of studies showing negative, potentially long‐term effects on the brain, including cognitive dysfunction and mental illness,” Cosgrove said in an interview. “Over the past 30 years, cannabis has become increasingly potent, with its major psychoactive ingredient content growing from an average of 1.5 percent before the 1980s to current strains that contain upwards of 25 percent.”

In their older projects, Cosgrove and her team made a sort of neurological scanner so that they may see the difference that goes on in the brains of men and women as they smoke a cigarette. The study is going to be repeated, except instead of smoking cigarettes, the males and females will be smoking cannabis.

“Neurochemical sex differences have been documented for tobacco smoking and alcohol dependence, and we need to find out if there are sex differences in the neurochemistry of cannabis use in humans,” Cosgrove stated. “We need to investigate these differences so people can understand what cannabis does to their brains and — for people who become addicted — allow for the development of gender-sensitive treatments.”

When the funding for this project was announced, a report in 2014 was referred to by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which says that 4.2 million Americans are addicted to cannabis. As a result, the cannabis “causes significant problems with health or the ability to meet responsibilities.”