Ryan Vandrey, Ph.D., of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins said in that people trying to stop using marijuana experienced the same symptoms that people trying to stop smoking cigarettes did. Specifically, people abstaining from either drug became irritable and angry and had trouble sleeping.
According to Newswise, Vandrey said in a statement released Thursday, "These results indicate that some marijuana users experience withdrawal effects when they try to quit, and that these effects should be considered by clinicians treating people with problems related to heavy marijuana use."
Vandrey was the lead investigator in the study.
He said that marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in country and that the number of people seeking treatment for substance abuse listing marijuana as the primary problem has more than doubled since the 1990s to rank similarly to cocaine and heroin as far as the total number of episodes yearly of people seeking help to kick that drug.
In California, the Supreme Court ruled that an employee who tests positive for marijuana use on a company drug test can be fired even if the employee had a medical reason to take the drug and had a doctor's prescription for marijuana.
A California man who took medicinal marijuana for pain from a back injury sued after he flunked a drug test and his employer fired him. In its ruling against the man on Thursday, the court ruled that even though California allowed medicinal marijuana that it was against federal laws and that employers had a right to fire workers with the drug in their system.
