5 ways daily cannabis use can affect your body and mind
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... Monica Romano was 13 when she first tried cannabis in the 1980s. It started out as a social way to spend a Friday night behind the bleachers at football games, she said, but it soon became a daily habit.

"I was reaching for it to quell anxiety," said Romano, now 59, a health and lifestyle journalist and former nurse in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. "I was an uneasy teen, never feeling like I was good enough." Cannabis minimized her social anxiety and helped her process what she calls an "unstable home life."

She continued to smoke marijuana daily until she was 30. It didn't stop her from earning two college degrees and raising her son largely on her own, she said. "I started looking back and wondered: How did I do that? I worked, I studied, I showed up, I raised my son, but pot was always there."

Marijuana is a constant for a growing number of young and middle-aged adults, 8 to 11 percent of whom now use cannabis every day, according to Monitoring the Future, an ongoing research project from the University of Michigan. Daily use in older adults 55 and up has decreased.

Young adults 19 to 30 are nearly three times as likely to use cannabis daily than drink alcohol daily, while adults ages 35 to 50 use both about equally, per data in the journal Addiction in 2024. And as daily cannabis use becomes more common, it's natural to wonder what such frequent consumption may or may not be doing to our health.

Some people like to compare cannabis to other widely used substances, such as caffeine. ...