According to a study published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine, marijuana use among the baby boomer population in the U.S. is on the rise, especially in men.
The study looked at of three years of survey data, collected from 2016 to 2018, on cannabis use in 171,507 adults ages 55 and up from 19 states and two territories.
According to the findings, men ages 60 to 64 reported the highest rates of marijuana use, with 12.6 percent of those surveyed saying they used the drug in the past 30 days in 2018, up from 8.9 percent in 2016. Over the same time period, the use also nearly doubled among men ages 65 to 69 (rising from 4.3 percent in 2016 to 8.2 percent in 2018) and among men ages 70 to 74 (from 3.2 percent to 6 percent). There was less change in the use among women.
The study’s co-author Bill Jesdale, an assistant professor of population and quantitative health science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worchester has indicated that the findings reflect changing attitudes toward cannabis across the nation.
According to Jesdale, the use of the drug increased in older adults in both the states where marijuana has been legalized for recreational use and in the states where it has not. “It seems that something has happened to the country as a whole,” he said.
“Our colleague from Canada was thinking about the use of cannabis in nursing homes, as that has gone up,” Jesdale said. “There is very little evidence base on how marijuana interacts with a lot of the medications used in that population.”
