From Demonization to Diagnosis: How Cannabis Got Caught in the Medical Machine

Hook

First it was a crime. Then it was a cure. Now it’s a “use disorder.”
Cannabis has traveled the full arc of modern medicine’s control loop — from demonization to diagnosis — and the irony is almost complete.

Context

When the United States formally defined Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) in the DSM-5, it wasn’t describing a new disease. It was describing behavior that already existed — using a plant, sometimes heavily, sometimes habitually.
The label was a bureaucratic bridge: a way to move cannabis from the world of vice to the world of clinics. But it also locked the plant inside the same medical machinery that pathologizes half of modern life.

Study at a Glance — UCSD × 23andMe

• Participants 131,895
• Associated Genes 44 (29 newly identified)
• Lead Genes CADM2, GRM3
• Published Oct 2025 — Molecular Psychiatry

Your Take

The trouble isn’t that cannabis can’t be harmful — it can be, especially with chronic high-THC use or adolescent exposure.
The trouble is that we’ve built a culture that can’t tolerate ordinary dependency.
If you rely on an SSRI to stay level, you’re “in treatment.”
If you rely on cannabis to sleep or think or feel less raw, you’re “disordered.”
Both involve chemical dependence. The difference is institutional approval.

The medicalization of cannabis may have been inevitable once legalization arrived. Doctors needed a gatekeeping role; regulators needed codes and categories.
But the shift comes with a cost: it reframes normal human struggle — pain, anxiety, boredom, grief — as symptoms to be medicated. What began as liberation risks ending as bureaucracy.

Implications

Cannabis is now a mirror for our larger unease with self-regulation. We no longer trust ourselves to decide what’s therapeutic, what’s escapist, and what’s simply human.
The danger isn’t addiction — it’s outsourcing our self-understanding to diagnostic manuals.
Medicalization tames stigma but also absorbs freedom; it trades one kind of control for another.

Further Reading

• Genome-wide association studies of lifetime and frequency of cannabis use in 131,895 individuals (Molecular Psychiatry, 2025)
• National Academies report: Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids (2017)

Closing

We wanted cannabis to be accepted. It was.
Now the question is whether we can keep it — and ourselves — from being over-diagnosed in the process.