Few, if any, doctors out there will recommend it, but plenty of people use marijuana in some form or another to help them get to sleep. Especially if they suffer from insomnia. But is there even any hard scientific evidence to suggest that weed can help you knock out when you’re physically unable to? Or is everyone just firing up a blunt or downing an edible on a hope and a prayer?
A newly released Cochrane Library review on medical marijuana’s use for insomnia reveals that… nope. It doesn’t actually do a whole lot to help you put to sleep or stay asleep.
Scientists at the University of Manitoba and the Universidad Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires reviewed nine randomized clinical trials involving 537 participants. They found zero reliable evidence that medical-grade weed produces clinically meaningful improvements in total sleep time, sleep quality, or daytime functioning compared to a placebo.
Weed Might Make You Sleepy. Does It Actually Help With Insomnia?
Instead, users mostly gained mild side effects like dry mouth and dizziness, aka common weed side effects, and the kind of stuff you probably don’t want to be experiencing when you just want to fall asleep.
Speaking with Gizmodo, lead author Dr. Lucia Varela points out this doesn’t necessarily prove cannabis is useless for sleep, but rather, the existing pool of research is kind of a mess of small sample size studies that are rarely long-term looks at marijuana use for insomnia and are studies in which the type of weed product being used (joints, tinctures, edibles, etc.) varies wildly.
There’s a lot more work to be done, more studies to be conducted before the broader scientific community can make a judgment call on marijuana as a sleep aid, particularly as a magic bullet for insomnia.
If you’re smoking it or eating it to help you catch some Z’s, you are essentially running your own unsupervised scientific experiment, and probably one that is longer-running than some of the actual studies that have been conducted.
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