The federal Department of Justice (DOJ), while defending its Second Amendment restrictions for weed users, has characterized cannabis consumers as dangerous, drug-addled criminals. Anti-drug commercials from the 1990s depicted them as feckless losers, in a hazy state of apathetic numbness. Anti-marijuana rhetoric from the 1950s painted them as violently psychotic or worse.
A lot of those stigmas are long gone in the era of legalization. They’ve been replaced by re-imaginings of weed smokers as creative go-getters and trendsetting hipsters.
Now new research finds that weed might actually make people nicer, too.
According to a paper published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience Research by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, regular marijuana users seem to be better at spotting and understanding the emotions of other people compared to non-users. It used psychometric personality tests and brain imaging to come by its results.
The authors were interested in cannabis’ relationship with empathy because the drug affects the anterior cingulate, a part of the brain that is involved in complex cognitive functions like making decisions, experiencing emotions and empathizing. They define empathy as not only the ability to recognize the emotions of others but as the ability to experience those feelings, too. They also included the processes that promote prosocial behavior in their definition.
To better understand the relationship between weed and empathy, the researchers administered the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test to 85 regular cannabis users and 51 non-users, some of whom were also subjected to an fMRI exam.
The empathy test uses a five-option scale, where one is “strongly disagree” and five is “strongly agree,” and asks respondents to judge statements like: “I feel good if others are having fun,” and, “It barely affects me to hear about the misfortunes of strangers.”
According to the results, weed users were found to “have a greater understanding of the emotions of others.”
Some of the participants (46 users and 34 nonusers) were also given fMRI exams, which tracks blood flow in the brain. Images from the fMRI group showed that cannabis users had stronger connectivity between the anterior cingulate and other brain regions related to sensing others’ emotional states within one’s own body.
This supports survey results collected by University of New Mexico’s Jacob Vigil in 2022. According to his research, those who had recently used weed showed higher levels of pro-social behaviors and higher measurements of empathy.
It would be a leap to say that a wider adoption of marijuana use across the country would increase the baseline empathy of the population, but it could dampen some aggressive behaviors and attitudes—issues that appear to be worsening by the day.
At the very least, these studies have revealed that the literature claiming that cannabis leads to antisocial behavior and negative mental states may not be as final as it claims, and it might actually have positive effects—at both the personal mental level and the greater social level.