File Photo by PHILIP B. POSTON/Sentinel Colorado
This story was first published at KUNC News.
DENVER | Willie Nelson excepted, it’s probably not an old dude’s face that pops to mind when you’re thinking of a typical marijuana user.
But perhaps it should — older Americans have been getting into weed in record numbers in recent years.
“We know that cannabis use is increasing in most age groups. But interestingly not in adolescents. It’s pretty flat with adolescence, and that tracks (with usage rates among this cohort with) other substances” such as alcohol,” University of Colorado psychology and neuroscience professor Angela Bryan told BizWest. “… So use is increasing among adults — and it’s increasing fastest among adults over 60.”
Bryan and her colleagues recently published a study in JAMA Network Open, an open-access medical journal published by the American Medical Association, that found that senior citizens are increasingly open to trying marijuana as a salve for aging-related ailments such as aches and pains, trouble sleeping and mental-health challenges.
Older weed smokers — or, increasingly, gummies munchers — “still don’t make up the bulk of users. The bulk of users are still people in their early-to-mid-20s,” Bryan said. “But in terms of the growth in use, that seems to be highest in older adults.”
As recreational cannabis legalization — a trend that began in Colorado in 2014 — has swept the country, the prevalence of cannabis use among Americans 65 and older has skyrocketed more than 250% since 2003, according to the CU study. University researchers found that 19% of people 50 to 64 and 6% of folks 65 and older now use cannabis.
A major factor in that usage increase is the proliferation of dispensaries that’s occurred after states have legalized medical and/or recreational marijuana.
“For a lot of our participants, this is not the first time they’ve tried cannabis,” Bryan said. “But the first time they tried it, it was in the 1970s and it was illegal. They stopped using as they were going through early- and middle-adulthood, and then it became legal. I do think (legalization and access to pot shops) increased the feeling of safety, both in terms of their legal vulnerability and in terms of the products being regulated so you know what you’re getting.”
But even in Colorado, where dispensaries have been open for a dozen years, product testing and labeling is an inexact science. In fact, Bryan’s CU colleague, Cinnamon Bidwell, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, published a study last year that found that nearly half of cannabis flower products sold in the state are inaccurately labeled when it comes to potency, with most showing they contain more THC than they really do. Meanwhile, the researchers found, labels on cannabis concentrates tend to be more accurate, with 96% shown to match what’s inside.
Still, “it’s way better than the information you get about a black market product, which is to say: none,” Bryan said.
When older people start using cannabis, they often do so in hopes of achieving health benefits “that they were taking other medications for,” Bryan said, “as a way to maybe decrease the number of medications that they were taking or as a way to get off of medications that have a lot of side effects.”
She added: “There’s a lot of data in the literature that suggests some people might be able to use cannabis to reduce their reliance on opioid pain relief. That would be amazing, because it turns out that from a risk-benefit perspective, opioids have a lot of risk and not that many benefits for some people, and also some really terrible side effects. And cannabis doesn’t actually have a whole lot of side effects comparatively.”
CU researchers found that 57% of older people used cannabis for sleep, 50% for pain and 25% for mental-health issues.
“I guess (I used marijuana) because I don’t want to go on psychiatric medications. And I know that other things that have helped me with sleep before have a correlation with cognitive decline such as Benadryl. There’s some research that shows that that really can affect your brain and your cognitive functioning,” a study participant in their 70s told researchers. “So I think cannabis is probably a better choice.”
Older people who use marijuana “really are folks who are looking for more medicinal uses of cannabis than they are looking to get high,” Bryan said. “In fact that’s one of the things that they don’t particularly want. They just want to feel better, they don’t want to be high.”
Well, not so fast. Many of these older users might say they don’t want the intoxicating effects of cannabis, but their consumption habits might reveal something a bit more nuanced.
There are two main cannabinoids in marijuana products: CBD, a mellower compound that doesn’t have intoxicating effects but could have some anti-inflammatory properties; and THC, the compound in weed that gets you high.
“When we asked about product satisfaction — like, “How much did you like the product you took?” — they liked the THC product” or a combination of THC and CBD more than non-intoxicating CBD-only options, Bryan said. “So clearly they’re interested in that mind-altering effect, but I think maybe they didn’t know how they would respond to it.”
But some study participants openly embraced cannabis’ recreation-enhancement properties.
“Social, just social with friends, yeah, have fun. Enjoy music more … just getting together with friends, going to see music, hiking, I really enjoy it when I’m hiking, being out in the woods,” a participant in their 60s told researchers.
As marijuana use has become more mainstream alongside sweeping state-level legislation, “the stigma has started to become lifted,” said Max Vansluys, president of Colorado-based cannabis brand Dialed In Gummies. “You’re hearing about cannabis and all different forms of media, it’s not just like in hip-hop songs anymore.” One byproduct of that normalization is that older people are becoming more comfortable with experimenting with different types of cannabis products to achieve the effects they’re looking for.
“… I’ve read about it, and I have friends who are on medical cannabis who are getting relief, getting help with sleep and some relief from pain,” said a study participant in their 70s.
In order to improve their comfort trying new products, older folks must trust budtenders at their local dispensary to lead them in the right direction. This can be a challenge in an industry where a wide chasm of years, lifestyle and experience is likely to separate the expert salesperson at the neighborhood pot shop from the septuagenarian stoner.
“It’s very intimidating,” said Vansluys, who got his start in the cannabis industry as a budtender. “At most dispensaries, you walk into a bud room and you have this plethora of products, all this different packaging, all the different labels — it can be overwhelming.”
As a budtender, “when I would see someone 50-plus come in, I would change my whole approach to make them feel comfortable in the dispensary. It was my job to make sure that they came back. Customer retention is a huge metric that they track in dispensaries.”
As more dispensaries open around the country, there are increasing numbers of Baby Boomers taking budtender positions, Vansluys noted.
“You don’t see it as much in Colorado, unfortunately, which is a shame,” he said. “But I am seeing it in markets like Missouri, Ohio, Massachusetts. They’re either retirees that just want to come in for some part-time work and get out of the house, or you have people that left behind a career outside of cannabis to come into cannabis looking to start a new career around a product they love.”
Customers “feel way more comfortable off the rip being able to talk to somebody who’s close to them in age and has probably gone through a lot of things that they have — it just offers an opportunity for a relatable moment.”
Similarly, cannabis brands are embracing strategies to tailor their product lines to better appeal to this growing demographic of aging consumers.
“You remember the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams,” where he built the baseball field in the cornfield? They said, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Well, lots of folks build products that way, with ‘Field of Dreams’ in mind. They think, well, this is a great product, and if I build it, people are going to love it,” said Ryan Hunter, chief revenue officer at Colorado cannabis brand Spherex Labs. “That mostly doesn’t work. Instead, you should identify a broad need that people have” and work backward to develop a product that meets that need.
To address a need for many older cannabis users — help falling and staying asleep — Spherex recently developed and released a cannabis gummy product with THC, CBD, CBN (a cannabinoid known for its sedative and relaxation effects) and functional (non-psychedelic) reishi mushrooms.
“Some of the concerns that were raised in the CU research study with seniors were really intentionally addressed with this product,” Hunter said. “… The sleep experience is very high quality, and it touches on a lot of the attributes that respondents mentioned in their survey (that they took as part of the CU study). Not so much of a focus on THC and feeling intoxicated or groggy.”
For its part, Dialed In recently developed a rosin-drops product made by incorporating cannabis extract into flavored simple syrups. This allows users to apply a measured and consistent dose — consistency and the ability to ingest the precise desired amount of cannabis are very important to older customers — to beverages and food.
Catering to stoney Boomers is just good business, cannabis industry experts say. It’s simple math: There are a lot of them, and they have a lot of disposable income.
“They have one of the largest basket sizes in terms of products that they purchase” from dispensaries, Vansluys said.
Hunter said that Spherex has been “very focused in our marketing efforts. We’ve done direct mail campaigns that are targeted at people in that age group. We’re starting to do education programs where we’ll be visiting senior-living centers and other communities focused on folks in that age group to try to educate them on this product.”
Of course, when it comes to educating people on products that impact their health, ideally that information would be coming not from marketers but from medical professionals. And cannabis industry representatives acknowledge this.
“Always start with talking with physicians,” Hunter advised older folks considering using marijuana. “Now, that being said, unfortunately, because cannabis has been miscategorized as a Schedule I substance for multiple generations now, most of those physicians are under-educated about the effects of cannabis.”
Cannabis researchers like Bryan and University of Utah assistant professor Rebecca Delaney, who co-authored the recently published study, hope that their research filters into the medical community and helps clinicians better understand the risks and benefits of cannabis use.
“We would love to see more conversations happening about this in the healthcare system, where physicians can help guide things,” Delaney said in a prepared statement.
But even as marijuana moves from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of Schedule I drugs (substances with no medical use and high potential for abuse) to a less-restrictive Schedule III categorization, significant challenges remain for scientists who study the plant.
“For the past decade or so, my lab’s been pretty focused on thinking about the public health implications of cannabis legalization,” Bryan said. “That’s everything from the potential harms of high-THC potency concentrates, particularly for young adults … and on the other end of the spectrum, we think about potential benefits. For example, I’ve done a couple of studies that look at the use of cannabis for palliative care in cancer patients.”
But there are institutional roadblocks to researching cannabis, even in places like Colorado, where marijuana is not only perfectly legal but a big part of the state’s cultural identity.
As a result of marijuana’s federal prohibition, “there just hasn’t been the opportunity to study these products. … It is very strange, because although cannabis is legal for recreational and medical use in the state of Colorado, it’s still illegal at the federal level,” Bryan said. “So what that means for us as researchers is that we need to adhere to both the federal legal guidelines around the scheduling of various drugs, but also the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, which is really what limits a lot of our abilities to do things. That act says that any institution that receives federal funding — and right now all the grants that we have are funded by (the National Institutes of Health), so that’s federal funding — cannot have illegal drugs on campus, we can’t give them to people, we can’t have them in our labs, we can’t have people take them in our labs.”
CU’s clever workaround for this problem? The CannaVan. (Think Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine or Kelso’s ride in “That 70s Show,” only way more science-y).
“We had to figure out a way to study these products without having the products on our campus,” Bryan said, “so we developed the CannaVan technology,” which involves tricking out modified Sprinter van with assessment and phlebotomy equipment and comfy chairs.
Researchers, who sometimes work with dispensary partners to supply participants with cannabis products, drive the van to study subject’s homes, ask some pre-session questions, take vitals and draw blood. Then they hang out for a little while while the subjects “go into their house, use as much or as little of their product as they want, and come out to the van, and we do all of those assessments again,” Bryan said.
While the topics and applications of Bryan’s research are quite serious, vibes in the CannaVan can be pretty silly.
“Basically, it’s as you might expect, right? People are high when they’re in the van, so some of the conversations have gotten pretty entertaining,” Bryan said. “… With older adults or people who are less experienced (with marijuana), you get a little more of the giggles and amazement to be like in a van doing research while they’re high.”
But “it’s not all fun and games,” she added, since some subjects experience the “negative effects, like anxiety or paranoia, that sometimes happen” when folks smoke weed.