HEALTH
Pete Davidson Quit the Herb, but Sparked Up Again for His Health
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The SNL cast member and walking meme says that daily cannabis consumption has been a life changer in treating his publicized struggles with Crohn’s disease and borderline personality disorder.
Published on September 26, 2018

For Saturday Night Live comedian and paparazzi favorite Pete Davidson, health has always been a struggle. But as the 24-year-old actor has grown older, Davidson has never shied away from publicly discussing his bouts with Crohn’s disease and borderline personality disorder, or his experience with his favorite all-natural treatment — cannabis. 

As reported by People, in an interview with Howard Stern on Monday, Davidson told the legendary radio host that he checked himself into rehab and quit all drugs, including weed, for a three month period in 2016. The comedian then returned to daily cannabis consumption after realizing the good it had been doing for both his mental and physical health.

“It wasn’t the weed,” Davidson told Stern about his 2016 experience in detox, which he said was instrumental in uncovering his borderline personality disorder diagnosis. “I was sober for three months at one point and was like, ‘This fucking sucks, I don’t want to feel like this.’”

In an interview on Peter Rosenberg’s internet talk show “Open Late” this past May, Davidson said that reintroducing weed to his daily routine helped treat his depression in ways that total sobriety and pharmaceutical prescriptions were unable to. During his short stint in rehab, Davidson said that he and his doctors agreed that underlying borderline personality disorder, and not cannabis, had been at the root of his mental health struggles.

“I got sober for three months and I was just like never sadder and everything was just way worse,” Davidson told Rosenberg. “I just rolled a joint and I was back immediately.”

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 Thanks to federal prohibition’s institutional barriers on comprehensive cannabis research, the scientific community is still reluctant to make any concrete claims about marijuana’s effect on depression, bipolar, and borderline personality disorder, but anecdotal evidence from both patients and mental health professionals have indicated that cannabis can be a successful treatment method. Regardless, mental health disorders are often missing from state-specific medical marijuana programs, including New York, where Davidson films SNL and lives for at least a portion of the year.

"I certainly have patients with depression, anxiety, insomnia, and PMS — patients who use cannabis for all kinds of reasons — and I discuss it with them, but in New York, those are not [state-legal] indications for medical cannabis," Julie Holland, a New York-based psychiatrist and author of The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis, told MERRY JANE earlier this year.

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Zach Harris
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Zach Harris is a writer based in Philadelphia whose work has appeared on Noisey, First We Feast, and Jenkem Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @10000youtubes complaining about NBA referees.
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