Nov. 6 will mark 12 years since voters approved recreational cannabis in Colorado, planting the seed for what grew into a major commercialized market that has exceeded $16 billion in sales, dotted the landscape with over 1,000 dispensaries and earned the state a reputation for more than its Rocky Mountain high.
Since then, 23 other states have followed suit, dedicated cannabis research centers have been formed (including at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus) and healthcare providers have scrambled to learn how to treat patients in the new liberal law environment.
“Folks got here and realized how expensive Colorado was,” Thida Thant, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry in the CU School of Medicine, said of the flock of pot users who migrated West in the months after legalization. “I remember having people admitted to our inpatient psych units suicidal, depressed, homeless.”
That initial system shock, along with the many changes that unraveled in her profession afterward, inspired Thant’s book Cannabis in Psychiatric Practice: A Practical Guide released in 2022. Colleague Paula Riggs, MD, a professor of psychiatry and associate director of the Rocky Mountain Cannabis Research Center (RM-CRC) funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), co-edited the book with Thant.
In the Q&A below, Thant, director of the Psychiatric Consultation for the Medically Complex (PCMC) Program, and Riggs, who is part of the Cannabis Research & Policy Project, offer a snapshot of what they have learned during the past decade.