For years, 75-year-old Miguel Laboy has started his mornings the same way: coffee in one hand, a joint in the other. Almost every night he insists he’ll skip it tomorrow. Almost every morning, he lights up anyway.
“You know what bothers me? To have cannabis on my mind the first thing in the morning,” he said in his Brookline, Massachusetts, apartment. “I’d like to get up one day and not smoke. But you see how that’s going.”
Since legalization and commercialization, daily cannabis use has quietly become central to many people’s routines. High-potency vapes and concentrates now dominate the market, and doctors say they can gradually blur the line between relief and dependence, making it hard for users to notice when things change. Across the country, people who once turned to marijuana for comfort or healing are finding it difficult to step away.
Alcohol is still more widely used overall. But beginning in 2022, the number of people in the U.S. who use cannabis every day surpassed the number of daily drinkers — a significant shift in how Americans consume intoxicating substances.
Researchers say this shift has unfolded alongside products that contain far more THC than marijuana of past decades, including vape oils and concentrates that can reach 80% to 95% THC. In Massachusetts, as in most states, there is no cap on how strong these products can be.
Doctors warn that using high-THC products every day can disrupt sleep, cloud memory, worsen anxiety or depression, and trigger addiction in ways earlier generations didn’t encounter. Many people who develop cannabis use disorder say it’s hard to recognize what’s happening because of the widespread belief that marijuana isn’t addictive. And because the consequences seep in slowly — brain fog, irritability, dependence — users often miss when therapeutic use tips into compulsion.
When a Habit Crosses Into Addiction
Laboy, a retired chef, began seeing a substance-use counselor after telling his doctor he felt depressed, unmotivated and increasingly isolated while his drinking and cannabis use escalated.
Naltrexone helped him quit alcohol, but he hasn’t found a way to walk away from marijuana. Unlike alcohol and opioids, there is no FDA-approved medication to treat cannabis addiction, though researchers are studying potential options.
Laboy, who first smoked at 18, says marijuana has long soothed symptoms tied to undiagnosed ADHD, childhood trauma and painful experiences including cancer treatment and the death of his son. Through decades working in restaurant kitchens, he considered himself a “functional pothead.”
More recently, his relationship with cannabis has shifted. After retiring, he began using vape cartridges with THC levels around 85%.
“These days, I carry two things in my hands: my vape and my cellular — that’s it,” he said. “I’m not proud of it, but it’s the reality.”
Cannabis calms him and “settles his spirit,” but he’s noticed it’s harder to concentrate. He wants to learn to read music, yet staying focused at the piano has become a struggle.
He has been seeing an addiction psychiatrist for six months, but cutting back has proven difficult. The medical system, he feels, hasn’t caught up.
“They’re not ready yet,” Laboy said. “I go to them for help, but all they say is, ‘Try to smoke less.’ I already know that — that’s why I’m there.”
Younger users describe a similar slide — starting with relief and landing somewhere much more complicated.
When Brain Fog Becomes ‘Your New Normal’
Kyle, a 20-year-old Boston University student, says cannabis helps him manage panic attacks he’s had since high school. He agreed to talk only if his first name was used because he buys marijuana illegally.
In the Allston apartment he shares with fraternity brothers, there’s a shared bong everyone uses.
When he’s high, Kyle feels calmer and better able to process his anxious thoughts, even feeling moments of gratitude. Increasingly, though, he finds that sense of clarity only when he’s using cannabis.
“I think I was able to do that better a year ago,” he said. “Now I can only do it when I’m high, which is scary.”
The mental fog and sense of detachment, he said, creep in so slowly that they start to feel normal. Some mornings, he wakes up feeling like an observer in his own life, struggling to remember what he did the day before. “It can be tough to wake up and go, ‘Oh my God, who am I?’” he said.
Even so, he doesn’t plan to stop.
Kyle believes cannabis helps him function — more effectively, he thinks, than seeking professional treatment would. Doctors say this ambivalence is common: many people see cannabis as both the problem and the solution.
When a Dream Job Turns Into a Trap
Anne Hassel spent a month in jail and a year on probation for growing cannabis in the 1980s. When Massachusetts’ first dispensaries opened, she cried with joy — and left her career as a physical therapist to work in one.
Within a year, she said, “my dream job turned into a nightmare.”
Hassel, now 58, recalls some consultants encouraging staff to promote high-potency concentrates as “more medicinal,” while minimizing their risks. After she tried her first dab — an almost instantaneous, “stupefying” high — she began using 90% THC concentrates several times a day.
Her use quickly became overwhelming, she said. She lost interest in activities she once loved, like mountain biking. One fall afternoon, she drove to the woods and then turned back without getting out of the car. “I just wanted to go to my friend’s house and dab,” she said. “I hated myself.”
Hassel didn’t seek formal treatment but eventually stopped with the help of a friend. Riding her green motorcycle — once nicknamed “Sativa” after her favorite strain — has helped her reconnect with her body and sense of self.
“People don’t want to acknowledge what’s going on because legalization was tied to social justice,” she said. “You get swept up in it and don’t recognize the harm until it’s too late.”
Finding Community for Those Who Want to Quit
Online, that realization plays out every day on r/leaves, a Reddit community of more than 380,000 people trying to cut back or quit cannabis.
Users describe the same push and pull — craving the calm marijuana brings, then feeling trapped by the fog that follows. Some write about loneliness and regret, saying years of smoking blunted their ambition and made them less present with friends and family. Others post desperate messages from work or doctors’ offices asking how to stop.
Together, their stories reveal a version of dependence that is quiet, ordinary — and very hard to escape.
“When people talk about legalizing a drug, they’re really talking about commercializing it,” said Dave Bushnell, who founded the Reddit group. “We’ve built an industry optimized to sell as much as possible.”
What Doctors Wish Users Knew
Dr. Jordan Tishler, a former emergency physician who now treats medical cannabis patients in Massachusetts, says that for some people with anxiety, low doses of THC paired with high doses of CBD can be helpful. Many commercial products, however, contain high levels of THC that can actually worsen anxiety and other symptoms, he said.
“It’s a medicine,” Tishler said. “It can be useful, but it can also be dangerous — and access without guidance is dangerous.”
Dr. Kevin Hill, an addiction specialist at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who focuses on cannabis use disorder, said both consumers and clinicians often lack basic information about the risks.
“I think adults should be allowed to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else,” he said. “But many users don’t understand the risks.”
For Hill, the conversation shouldn’t be about returning to prohibition, but about balance, education and honest risk assessment.
“For most people,” he said, “the risks outweigh the benefits.”
