Marijuana use and Depression

In the article “Marijuana use and depression”, by: Brian E. Green and Christian Ritter they wanted to look and see if the use of marijuana has anything to do with depression and mental health. In previous studies they looked at three different things on how to measure marijuana and depression. The first thing was the age in which people used marijuana and several studies have showed the early marijuana users achieve less in high school than non-users. Another studied showed that early marijuana use maybe associated with coping problems in adult hood, and also showed that marijuana users are less likely to be married than non-users. In this study that they did and conducted they measured the use of marijuana in three ways: one measure was age and marijuana initiation, second was the use of marijuana use in the past 30 days, and lastly they measured the reason for marijuana use. They broke the results down into models; the first model looked at the main effect of early marijuana use on depression, the second and third assess the indirect effect of early marijuana use on depression through educational attainment, employment status and marital status, the fourth model assess current marijuana use and its relationship on depression, lastly the fifth and sixth model looks at how other illicit and licit drugs with marijuana effect depression. Model 1 shoes that the early marijuana users are slightly more likely depressed than never users. In model 2 looks at educational attainment and shows that marijuana has no relationship between the two, in Model 3 it adds employment status and marital status it shows that married and employed are less stressed than unmarried and unemployed. In Model 4 shows that marijuana use is not significantly associated with depression. In the 5th model they found that the number of drugs besides marijuana is positively associated with depression. In the 6th model looked at all the drugs combined and shows that there is a significant association on depression also in the last model it shows that there is a significant association between using marijuana to cope and depression.

After reading this article it made me think about how marijuana can be good and bad for you and how people can take advantage of it and use it thinking that it is good for them when really in some cases it is actually hurting them in the long run. I know that before even reading this article that the more marijuana you smoke and use that it is actually replacing the dopamine in your brain which is the chemical balance in you that makes you happy and controls your emotions, so I can also see how marijuana can make you depressed and what not. I have one question to ask based on this article what if you use marijuana at the bare minimum and aren’t an avid user will it still affect your depression and cause problems as if someone were to smoke marijuana all the time?