Marijuana addiction is seen as taboo, Hazelden summit will examine its real risks

CATHY WURZER: Recreational cannabis will be available to folks ages 21 and over to buy legally around the state sometime next year if regulators stay on schedule. As more and more states have legalized cannabis, a wide variety of products have entered the market, some with high levels of THC. Some public health experts are raising worries about the potential risks of heavy cannabis use that includes addiction as well as other mental and physical health issues.

There is a meeting dedicated to this very topic happening tomorrow at Hazelden Betty Ford Treatment Center in St. Paul. Hamline University psychology professor Serena King is the organizer. She's on the line right now. Professor, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

SERENA KING: Thank you for having me.

CATHY WURZER: Gosh, you talk to folks, and so many people think that marijuana is not dangerous. You can't get addicted. What does the research show?

SERENA KING: Right. So there is a variety of research on this topic in the field, and it really varies greatly in terms of individual risk for addiction. We know that younger people, based on the data, have a slightly greater, if not more substantially greater, risk of addiction to marijuana and cannabis. And I think we recognize that there's a variety of products that have various potencies that may place individuals at different risk.

So the combination between biological factors, psychological factors, and a variety of other factors related to potency and product can kind of put people on a pathway that's quite diverse in terms of their risk profile. So I think that there's a lot of question around cannabis and its addictive qualities. However, we do know that many people are addicted to cannabis, and we know that young people also have risk for cannabis addiction.

CATHY WURZER: And why do we think that's true about young folks? I'm curious about that.

SERENA KING: Right. So younger people are typically more vulnerable from a neurobiological perspective to having addictive propensities. We also know that the developing brain is a very susceptible system, and so younger folks also have the addictive pathways that are sensitized in the teenage brain, and that places individuals at greater risk.

And we also know that cannabis can be very psychologically addictive, particularly in regards to medicating depression, anxieties, other types of stressors. And so these are factors related to youth's risk for cannabis addiction. We also see that higher potency products potentially have a greater risk for addiction.

CATHY WURZER: Let me ask you about higher potency products. To be frank with you, I was talking to an emergency room physician who says he's seeing more and more older people coming in, folks who may have used marijuana when they were younger, thinking, "I can do it now, I did it before," but coming in with strange symptoms of heart problems and some psychoses. He says it's a mess. What are you hearing about older people who might be a bit caught off guard by the high potency of things?

SERENA KING: Right. So that, I think, is an emerging area of research. I myself am more familiar with the youth data. However, we know that across the life course, there's a lot of developmental shifts and changes in the brain, and then how our bodies may respond to those sort of developmentally expected changes neurobiologically and interact with a product, this can be really an open question.

So each person's individual biology, if they're new to using that product, if it's a product that's edible versus is smoke or otherwise, the pharmacology of the cannabis in the body metabolically can change over the life course.

So it's really an open question, and actually it's something-- you bring this up-- could be something studied as a public health question and a medical question. And I think that's an area that could be really important for the future.

CATHY WURZER: I was reading some research, some literature about cannabis use on the heart and other organs. Do we know the effect on, say, someone's heart?

SERENA KING: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that the data suggest that there can be a variety of effects based on the product itself. So my background not being in medical-- without a medical background, I couldn't tell you a lot about that. But I can tell you that product metabolic aspects, how individual differences in how we metabolize and process these throughout our organs can be different.

We know, for example, with alcohol and tobacco, men and women can process these chemicals differently in their body and have different psychological effects and also different risks for addiction. So I think that there are a lot of open health questions around these issues.

CATHY WURZER: I wonder if health care professionals and psychologists are ready to deal with potential issues. I wonder how busy they'll be. What do you think?

SERENA KING: I think that they're going to get even busier. We're hearing from medical professionals, mental health professionals, individuals who work with youth, ER physicians have noted in other states that we have intoxications among children. Even poisons. Poison control is up in other states with edibles and other products. I think that our health care professionals are going to be extra busy.

I think they're already seeing the effects in their clinics and hospitals and emergency rooms. And because everybody is so different in how they respond to various types of products, this can be a major challenge for health care professionals to even identify what a person might have been using.

There's the delta series. There's the edibles. There's the vape products. Some vape products are very high concentration, maybe even up to 90%. We also have the cartridges or the carts that a lot of young people might be exposed to, and those could be potentially high potency products with a potentially greater risk for addiction.

So a lot of, I think, health care is moving at the speed of light, trying to keep up with this. And one of the challenges is understanding what the product is and then trying to backtrack and figure out how to address it.

CATHY WURZER: It sounds maybe lawmakers got out ahead of this a little too soon, because it sounds like our health care professionals need to catch up to some of this. Or am I wrong about that?

SERENA KING: I mean, I think you're probably accurate around this. Sometimes, we put the cart before the horse at times and maybe don't necessarily have all of the needs met. But I think we have a great medical care environment in Minnesota, and I think many physicians, mental health professionals, et cetera, are ready to pivot.

But when you're dealing with a product that's so diverse in nature, it can be very challenging for people and putting all of our heads together-- that was part of the impetus for the summit is, can we put our heads together and come to a better place, share information, understand how we define what cannabis is, what the different ways in which we take this into our body, the different mechanisms that are involved metabolically what the public health attitudes are?

All of these things need to come together, but we need to upscale, like you said, the workforce, the health care workforce, to get ahead of things.

CATHY WURZER: Sounds like the summit tomorrow will be quite interesting. I see it sold out, which should say something, I guess. So, professor, I wish I had more time with you, but I have to go to the news. Thank you so much for being with us, and good luck tomorrow.

SERENA KING: Really appreciate your time. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Likewise. Serena King is a professor of psychology at Hamline University in St. Paul talking about tomorrow's cannabis use summit.