Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Cannabis doesn't cure loneliness, it exploits it.
May 3, 2026.
On March 20 of this year, the largest review of medicinal cannabis ever conducted concluded that the drug is ineffective for treating anxiety, depression or ptsd, despite millions of people using it for exactly those reasons.
I know from personal experience and from watching friends, family and clients suffer.
When Covid hit, many people I knew fell apart. They complained about the isolation, the loneliness.
Having lived for 19 years in the Swiss Alps, essentially like a monk, it felt familiar. I have since realized that I had been living in that kind of isolation my entire life.
The loneliness began in a castle. We moved there when I was 2.
My earliest memories are roaming the halls, the towers and then the forest outside where I napped on warm pine needles.
When I was five, my father died in an avalanche. At seven, I roamed the streets of Monaco and gatecrashed churches. At 9, I started stealing cigarettes and smoking them in the treehouse.
At 10, lying in a Swiss intensive care unit, I stared at a crucifix on the wall and asked God why I was so alone.
I had nearly died of a burst appendix.
After we secretly moved to the US without having a chance to say goodbye to my friends, I turned to food to cope with the bullying and the isolation.
Romance novels, piano practice, running and focusing on academic performance helped. By the time I was 18, I had discovered wine, whiskey and men.
The whiskey made me gregarious and social. It took away my shyness and self consciousness.
The men made me feel accepted.
Cannabis was never my drug. It made me paranoid. So I stuck to alcohol.
I have been sober from alcohol and other mind altering substances for more than 20 years.
My first sober relationship was with a man I loved deeply. He told me I was too needy.
I had just wanted connection. He wasn't sober.
He was smoking cannabis all the time. He couldn't sleep without it. The nightmares kept him awake.
Solitude is a virtue if you agree with Thoreau. But there's a difference between solitude and isolation.
Isolation made me vulnerable to falling into unhealthy substances and behaviors.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: I know a young woman.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: She grew up isolated and anxious.
She lived in a foreign country, even though she belonged to that community. On paper, kids bullied her because she was different.
Her mother, raising her alone, worked three jobs and had little time for her. At the same time, the mother was going through a divorce and a family court battle. While trying to create a new family with a man struggling with addiction.
The young woman became so anxious and depressed she was sent away to boarding school, where she started self harming her Mother moved to a city to bring her home. But the daughter had already fallen into anorexia. Cannabis and psychedelics and toxic boyfriends. The mother tried to reason with her daughter, trying to tell her that the new cannabis strains on the market were addictive and causing psychosis in young people. She had friends who were clinicians seeing this in their emergency rooms. The train had left the station. The cucumber had turned into a pickle.
The daughter ended up with a drug induced psychosis and in the grip of a coercive and abusive relationship.
Despite nearly 90 days in a very expensive treatment center, the lure of the boyfriend and weed pulled her back into an unhealthy lifestyle. The damage was compounded by friends who joked, you went to rehab for weed?
[00:03:49] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: I feel deeply for that young woman. She's battling two fronts, substance dependence and toxic attachment.
The combination is deadly.
And he's also being pulled under by an undertow of stigma.
Too few take this seriously.
This new study has finally caught up with what I already knew. Cannabis doesn't work. It delays the real treatment and makes everything worse.
The cannabis industry is using the 1950s Big Tobacco playbook. They are demonizing anyone who speaks ill of the substance, which is no longer the weed of the 1980s.
Many are engineered to deliver THC concentrations far beyond what earlier generations encountered.
At an addiction conference, I heard a physician explain that high potency THC stimulates opioid receptors in the brain, making cannabis physically addictive.
The argument is that it helps some people, incurable cancer patients and patients with dementia who need calming.
Fine. Cannabis is palliative care. It's not medicine for young people who need their brains and energy to lead a thriving life.
The answer is connection.
That is the real medicine. We need actual human presence rooms where you are not judged for the car you drive or the house you live in.
I'm glad that science is finally catching up to what my colleagues and I have already witnessed firsthand.
We need more education and warning labels and social media. Companies need to be held accountable not only for subjecting young people to dangerous material, but for allowing cannabis companies to market to them so aggressively.
New Mexico is already holding Meta accountable for marketing to minors. More states should follow.
When Covid hit, the world discovered what I already knew. The worst epidemic was already there.
Loneliness.
It had been lurking beneath the surface, creating the perfect environment for addiction, divisiveness, and the fractured world we now inhabit.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. But here's the real thing. I want you to know if your kids carrying something you can't talk about if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com. thanks for listening.
