Examining links between cannabis potency and mental and physical health outcomes

Abstract

Cannabis use is associated with unwanted health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, poor sleep hygiene, and disrupted cognitive functioning. However, research to date has not been able to disentangle the complexities of these relations, leaving behavioral health service providers lacking clear direction for treatment. A limiting factor may be the common practices for cannabis use assessment. Cannabis use is typically assessed by frequency, even though to estimate the amount of psychoactive compounds ingested potency, quantity, and route of administration should also be assessed. This study, one of the first of its kind, takes an important step in assessing cannabis use by studying the link between cannabis potency and behavioral health (i.e., physical and mental health) outcomes. Self-reported data were analyzed using the New Statistics, which focuses on effect sizes and confidence intervals, rather than null hypothesis significance testing. Findings were inconsistent, with some positive, some negative, and some trivial associations across four domains (i.e., demographic variables, cannabis use variables, mental health, and physical health). The most valuable discovery was the importance of method of administration in understanding the link between potency and health. We observed a “potency valley” (i.e., a range of potencies for which products were not available) between flower potencies and concentrate potencies. Further, collapsing potency data across flower and concentrated cannabis obscured important relations between cannabis potency and behavioral health outcomes. Findings suggest that to more fully understand the relation between cannabis potency and behavioral health outcomes, researchers should examine potency separately across routes of administration.