Marijuana usage

Is anyone else suuuper concerned about increasing weed usage? More and more clients are using it to help with their anxiety and this week I had a client “discover” it with friends and decide they would like to use it regularly since it’s so safe. I think we’re going to discover in a decade or two how not safe such a concentrated product is. But clients often get very defensive at the slightest bit of questioning.

It’s not that I want to tell clients what to do with their lives, but I’m not loving the popular messaging about how safe it is. Any advice?

Edit to add: My experience and the experience of some clinicians I talk to is that clients with anxiety find weed to help them a lot. But over time, their baseline level of anxiety is increasing and they’re using weed more often and at higher concentrations. Most are unwilling to entertain the possibility that the weed is actually worsening their anxiety overall. It looks very much like an addiction.

I don’t personally care what someone does in their free time if it isn’t hurting someone else. I have tried weed and it didn’t do much for me, but the other clinicians I’ve talked to use it regularly occasionally. What they don’t do is start to rely on it regularly and need it to reduce their anxiety.

And to the people who are saying that this is not as big of an issue as fentanyl or racism or poverty: I agree, but this isn’t a discussion about those things. I can think racism is horrible but when I’m in a room with an anxious client who might be using weed to an extent that it hurts them and is not experiencing racism, I’m less concerned about fixing racism than helping them with the more immediate problem.

For what it’s worth, I support decriminalizing and legalizing weed. But what I have an issue with is people who say weed is amazing and great and there are no side effects, no one can get addicted, it will fix all your problems, etc. The amount of black-and-white thinking in some of these comments…