The adaptive significance of chronic marijuana use for adolescents and adults.

To the degree that the adults were aware of their difficulties, they saw marijuana as an escape from them, or as providing relief or enhancing their ability to cope with them. Neither they nor we saw marijuana as the cause of their problems. Rather, it served for most to help maintain them in a troubled adaptation, reenforcing their tendency not to look at, understand, or attempt to master their difficulties. It served to detach them from their problems, and helped them to regard even serious difficulties as unimportant. Marijuana provided a buffer zone of sensation that functioned as a barrier against self-awareness and closeness to others. Marijuana enabled the adolescents to avoid choices and challenges associated with growing up. The adults we studied appeared to have been obliged by time to make choices for which they were not prepared, and with which they were not satisfied. To the extent that their futures had caught up with them, they used marijuana in an attempt to diminish awareness of their limitations and convince themselves their problems were insignificant. If the adolescents used marijuana to detach themselves from troubled relationships with their families and to avoid planning for the future, what we have learned from the adult marijuana users provides a perspective on what these young persons' lives are likely to become.