Substance Use
Marijuana addiction treatment in Colorado, where legal and harmless are not the same claim.
About 3 in 10 people who use cannabis develop a use disorder, and today’s products are several times stronger than the ones the reputation was built on. We treat marijuana use, and whatever is sitting under it, at all six Colorado offices and online.
Understanding Marijuana Addiction
The one nobody thinks they need help with.
Marijuana is the most commonly used federally illegal drug in the United States, and it is not close. In SAMHSA's 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 22.3 percent of people aged 12 or older, about 64.2 million people, reported using marijuana in the past year, up from 19.0 percent, or 53.2 million people, in 2021.
Most of them will never need us. But the CDC puts cannabis use disorder at approximately 3 in 10 people who use cannabis, with the risk higher for people who started young and for people who use frequently. That is not a rounding error. It is millions of people across every age group, every profession, and every income bracket, most of whom have never once used the word addiction about themselves.
That is the particular difficulty with this one. There is no rock bottom everyone agrees on and no single night that forces the issue. There is a habit that got slightly bigger every year until the days without it started to feel worse than the days with it.
If that is roughly the shape of it for you or someone you love, recovery is closer than you think. You can call The Redpoint Center and talk it through with someone today.
Legalization
Three beliefs that keep people from picking up the phone.
The push for legality brought real goods with it, and it brought a set of assumptions that do not survive contact with the clinical picture. None of these is a character flaw. They are simply wrong, and between them they cost people years.
Legality
It is legal here, so it is safe.
Colorado voters legalized adult use in 2012 and retail sales opened in 2014, and neither event changed the pharmacology by a single degree. Alcohol and tobacco are legal and well documented as harmful. Legality is a policy decision about how a substance is regulated and taxed, not a finding about what it does to you. The state built a licensed, age-restricted market precisely because it accepted the product carries risk.
Dependence
Marijuana is not addictive.
The CDC puts cannabis use disorder at roughly 3 in 10 people who use, and it has formal diagnostic criteria. NIDA describes a real withdrawal syndrome: anger, irritability, aggression, anxiety, restlessness, insomnia, strange or unsettling dreams, decreased appetite, depressed mood, headaches, sweating, abdominal pain, and tremor. Most people who hold this belief discover it is wrong on about day three of trying to stop.
Comparison
At least it is not a hard drug.
Ranking substances against each other is mostly a way of not looking at your own. Whether cannabis is safer than opioids has no bearing on whether your use is costing you sleep, money, work, or the people around you. The only comparison that decides anything clinically is between your life with it and your life without it.
While It Is Happening
What use looks like from the outside, and from the inside.
Cannabis affects each person differently and nobody shows all of these. These are the immediate effects, the ones that turn up during use rather than around it, and they are the easiest to recognise before anything else has become obvious.
Slowed reactions
Decreased reaction time and slower mental processing, which is why driving is a genuine risk rather than a technicality.
Compromised motor skills
Coordination and fine motor control drop off, sometimes noticeably to everyone except the person using.
Anxiety and panic
The effect people least expect. Higher-potency products in particular can produce sharp anxiety or outright panic rather than calm.
Paranoia
A persistent sense of being watched, judged, or talked about, which can outlast the high by hours.
Low mood
Depression during or straight after use, which tends to deepen rather than lift as tolerance builds.
Changes in appetite
Shifts in diet and appetite in either direction, and eating patterns that reorganise themselves around use.
Reddened eyes
One of the few reliably visible physical signs, caused by the blood vessels in the eye dilating.
Time and situation distorted
An altered perception of how long something has taken, or of what is actually going on in a room.
Heightened senses
Increased awareness of sound, touch, and smell, which is often the part people describe as the point of it.
Heart rate changes
Sudden shifts in heart rate, which matter more than they sound if there is any cardiac history.
Disconnection from reality
A sense of being at one remove from your surroundings or yourself, distinct from simply feeling relaxed.
Dry mouth
The most trivial item on the list and usually the first one anyone admits to.
Over Time
The high ends in hours. The reason people call us usually does not.
Almost nobody books an assessment because of a single evening. They book one because of what the last four years have quietly turned into, and how much room it now takes up.
Cannabis acts on the brain's own endocannabinoid system, and it reaches the reward circuitry that dopamine runs. That is the pleasant part. It is also what makes ordinary sources of pleasure feel thinner over time: the film that used to be enough, the run, the conversation, the evening with nothing planned in it. Almost nobody notices this while it is happening. What they notice, eventually, is that very little is enjoyable without it, and that the substance has quietly become a precondition for a good mood rather than an addition to one.
Regular use carries a measurable cognitive cost too. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that regular cannabis use is associated with negative effects on working memory, processing speed, verbal memory, and academic functioning, and that heavy use correlates with problems in learning and memory, attention, processing speed, perceptual motor function, and language. NIDA also notes that adolescence is an important period of brain development and that cannabis use may influence the brain in ways that could lead to long-term harmful effects, which is why use that starts at 15 is a different clinical problem from use that starts at 30.
Then there is what everyone else sees. Hobbies quietly dropped. Friendships that went from weekly to never. A slide in hygiene and in the small maintenance of a life. Responsibilities that keep getting pushed to tomorrow. Grades or work performance that slipped a notch and stayed there. None of it is dramatic on its own, which is precisely why it can accumulate for years without anyone naming it out loud.
The product has also changed underneath its own reputation. NIDA reports that between 1995 and 2022 the delta-9 THC potency of illegal cannabis products seized by law enforcement quadrupled, from 3.96 percent to 16.14 percent, and concentrates run far higher again. Anyone measuring today's use against what they remember from twenty years ago is not comparing the same drug.
Psychosis deserves the plainest language on this page. THC can produce short-term psychotic symptoms while it is still in the system, and NIDA notes that some evidence has linked cannabis use to earlier onset of psychosis in people with genetic risk factors for psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia. A Danish study of nearly seven million people, reported by NIDA in 2023, estimated that as many as 30 percent of schizophrenia cases among men aged 21 to 30 might have been prevented by averting cannabis use disorder. That is a population-level estimate rather than a prediction about any one person, and the large majority of people who use cannabis will never develop a psychotic disorder. It is still the strongest reason there is to take a young person's heavy daily use seriously now rather than wait it out, and continuing to use after a first episode makes the whole picture harder to treat.
Self-Assessment
Eight questions that tell you more than a definition will.
There is no blood test for this and no threshold you have to cross before you are allowed to ask for help. What clinicians listen for is the pattern across answers like these. A few yeses do not make you an addict. They do make the conversation worth having.
Do you think about it during other things?
Cannabis turning up in your head during work, a conversation, or a film you are supposedly watching is one of the earliest signals, and one of the easiest to explain away.
Have you stayed in, or ducked a plan, in order to use?
Arranging the day around when and where you can use, rather than fitting use around the day, is a reordering of priorities that happens without any decision being made.
Do you need more now for the same effect?
Tolerance is not a character flaw, it is a physiological adaptation, and it is one of the criteria clinicians actually score during an assessment.
Do you feel anxious when you are not using?
Anxiety, irritability and restlessness in the gaps between uses are withdrawal symptoms, even when they arrive without a label on them.
Have you dropped hobbies as your use went up?
The trade is rarely deliberate. Things simply stop happening, and something else expands to fill the hours they used to take.
Have you used more than you meant to?
Using more, or for longer, than you intended is among the most-cited criteria in the diagnostic manual, and most people can answer it instantly.
Have you questioned your own use?
Reading this page counts. People who are genuinely untroubled by their use do not spend much time auditing it.
Have you wanted to cut back and not managed it?
A failed attempt to cut down is not evidence that you cannot. It is evidence that doing it alone is harder than the reputation suggests, which is the entire reason programs exist.
How We Treat It
No prescription fixes this one, so the program is the treatment.
Worth saying up front, because it changes what to expect. NIDA states that there are currently no FDA-approved medications for the treatment of cannabis use disorder or for medically assisted withdrawal, but research is ongoing. That is where the science sits rather than a gap in what Redpoint offers, and it is a real difference from opioid use disorder, where buprenorphine and naltrexone are established, or alcohol use disorder, where naltrexone and acamprosate are.
What does work here is behavioral, and it is well evidenced. NIDA reports that behavioral interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational enhancement therapy, and contingency management can be effective in treating cannabis use disorder. Those are tools our clinicians already practice, alongside dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, EMDR where trauma is part of the picture, experiential work, group and individual therapy, and family systems therapy.
Medication still has a role, just not aimed at the cannabis itself. Sleep, anxiety, irritability, and low mood are what send most people back in the first fortnight, and our medical team evaluates and manages those as part of the same plan, under our medical director.
The rest of it is genuinely yours. Life skills, goals you actually chose, relapse prevention, and the interpersonal work of reconnecting with the people your use has been quietly crowding out. There are as many paths to sobriety as there are people, and the plan gets built around yours rather than around a template.
- Individual and group therapy
- Dual diagnosis care
- Medication management for co-occurring conditions
- Family involvement
- Relapse prevention planning
Levels of Care
How much structure this needs is a clinical question, not a willpower one.
Cannabis use disorder is treated across the same continuum as everything else we work with. An assessment sets the level and can move it later. Nobody is expected to arrive already knowing which one fits.
Clinical Approaches
What each therapy is actually doing here.
Motivational interviewing for the unsure part
Almost nobody arrives certain, least of all about a substance they still enjoy. This works with the ambivalence instead of arguing at it, which is why it holds up where confrontation does not.
What Else We Treat
Cannabis is rarely the only thing in the picture.
Most people put this off over a number they never actually checked.
We run your benefits before you commit to anything and tell you plainly what your plan covers, what it does not, and what the gap looks like. The check is free and takes a few minutes.
Accepted insurance
Employer and EAP partners
Don’t see your plan? Call us and we will check it, including out-of-network benefits.
Common Questions
Marijuana treatment questions, answered.
Is marijuana actually addictive?
Marijuana is legal in Colorado. Why would anyone need treatment for it?
What is withdrawal like when you stop using cannabis?
Is there a medication for marijuana addiction?
How does The Redpoint Center treat marijuana addiction?
Can cannabis cause anxiety, depression, or psychosis?
Does insurance cover marijuana addiction treatment in Colorado?
Not sure this counts as a problem?
That is the most common question we get about cannabis, and asking it is reason enough to call. Tell us what has been going on and we will tell you honestly whether we think treatment is the right call.