Dude, where's my anxiety?

Elle magazine recently ran a piece called "Pot Stirring", by Patsy K. Eagan, about the writer's personal use of marijuana to treat her anxiety disorder:

I had a writer’s dream job, reviewing manuscripts and researching productions for a prominent Bay Area theater. But some mornings, I couldn’t step outside. I’d call in sick, often days in a row. Or if I showed up, I’d avoid contact with my boss any way I could. Eventually I had to leave that job, for reasons including my inability to concentrate. I sought out a new job and a new psychiatrist, who rediagnosed me with GAD and panic disorder and put me on Paxil. It did its job and kept me in mine, at a Berkeley bookstore, for a while.

The downside came a year later, when surges of elation or rage would seize me at work while I was doing mundane tasks, like shelving. Once, I almost threw a punch at one of the regular, but by no means normal, customers: a squat man who’d tell the female clerks not to touch the (typically women’s) magazines he was buying. After a few of these episodes, it became clear that there was no peace for me in Paxil. Calm came, I found, only from pot.

The article notes that there is no consensus as to the effectiveness of pot in treating anxiety, but points to some compellingly promising research:

Researchers are all over the map as to whether marijuana causes or reduces anxiety. One study published in a 1982 issue of Psychopharmacology found that the marijuana compound cannabidiol (CBD) muted the anxiety produced by THC—marijuana’s main psychoactive cannabinoid. In 1999, the U.S. Institute of Medicine, an outgrowth of the National Academies, which make public-policy recommendations, issued an ambiguous report stating that “the psychological effects of cannabinoids, such as anxiety reduction…can influence their potential therapeutic value,” and also that its “effects are potentially undesirable for certain patients and situations and beneficial in others.” Cannabinoids, for example, reduce nausea. But they also impair short-term memory (hence the Dude, Where’s My Car? stereotype).

Also in the past decade, scientists discovered that the brain produces its own endocannabinoid compounds, which mimic plant-made cannabinoids and transmit their chemical messages through the same neural receptors. High numbers of the receptors were also found to occur in the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of the brain that play the biggest role in anxiety. Also significant for anxiety sufferers, scientists concluded that endocannabinoids—and arguably cannabinoids—may serve in the forgetting of fear.

Finally, here's how the writer describes, and justifies, her use of her drug of choice:

A thimbleful is all it takes. After a day’s work, I pinch off a small amount of marijuana and put it in a steel-tooth grinder. The flowers, covered in tiny white diamonds of THC, release a piney scent when crushed. I turn on the TV, and instead of taking a glass of wine with my evening news, I take out my vaporizer and set it on the coffee table.

Outside the walls of my bungalow in Oakland, California, I can hear the rush-hour traffic, but I’ve already changed into my Big Lebowski–style robe and slippers. I tap the ground flakes into a canister that I attach to another piece, this one with a bag on the end, and set both on the vaporizer. I flip the switch, and the bag slowly inflates with plumes of white smoke. Once it’s fully clouded, I attach a mouthpiece to the canister, put this to my lips, and press. On the inhale, the cannabinoids taste like sunned grass. My prescription for anxiety disorder didn’t always begin and end with an herb. But I’ve run through enough pharmaceutical drugs to know that pot dulls my panic better than any pill.