Using cannabis for sleep isn’t harmless – a neurologist explains how it can trap people in a cycle of dependency

For millions of people, cannabis has become the unofficial prescription for lost sleep. But what feels like a solution may be quietly making the problem worse. Consider these two cases: She is 15 and has been lying in bed for the past hour. It is past midnight, and her brain will not quiet down. Her school bus comes at 6:20 a.m. She is getting anxious, knowing that she needs to wake up in six hours. She did all the right things: turned off her phone at 10 p.m., tried melatonin. So tonight she tries something a friend recommended: a cannabis gummy. Within 20 minutes, she’s asleep. He is 34, a veteran who did two tours and has struggled with sleep since coming home. It takes him two hours to fall asleep, and when he does, he is jolted awake by relentless nightmares. He hasn’t slept more than three hours a night in months, and it’s catching up with him. His buddy swears that cannabis helped him, and with a six-month waiting list for a sleep consultation at the Veteran’s Affairs medical center and a cannabis dispensary six blocks away that’s open until 10 p.m., the decision doesn’t feel complicated. Both…

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