Marijuana Could Break Your Heart—Literally | Opinion

Love smoking weed? Prepare to get your heart broken—literally.

A flood of recent studies have detailed the damage marijuana does to your mental health, bringing the risks a renewed level of media attention. Weed’s linked to everything from psychosis to violent behavior to dementia.

But 2025 has been dominated by another piece of bad news about marijuana: that it’s just as bad for your cardiac health as it is for your mental health.

Consider a meta-analysis from BMJ Heart which appeared just last month.

The authors examined dozens of studies on marijuana users and found a two-fold—yes, you read that right—risk of cardiovascular death corresponding to weed use, as well as a 29 percent higher risk of major cardiac events.

Many of America’s policymakers and all its addiction profiteers keep insisting weed is safe, healthy, and natural. But the BMJ data are just the tip of the iceberg.

A May study from the University of California San Francisco found that marijuana was associated with vascular dysfunction in chronic users—regardless of whether they were smoking it or using edibles.

There’s no cheat code, in other words, to get around the cardiac damage marijuana does. Gummies and candies won’t save you.

March saw a meta-analysis come out from the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) on 12 studies examining more than 75 million cases to investigate heart attack risk in weed users.

The results? Users are 51 percent more likely than nonusers to have had a heart attack.

The bad news hasn’t just been hitting in 2025, of course.

A 2024 American Heart Association study found that daily users had a 25 percent higher risk of heart attack and 42 percent higher risk of stroke compared to non-users and that more frequent use led to higher risk. Another JACC study, this one from 2023, showed users had a 34 percent greater risk of developing coronary artery disease.

And on and on and on.

It’s great that all this information is increasingly breaking through into the mainstream. The more people who are aware of it, the better the public health outcomes will be for every American. That goes double given that the U.S. is facing a crisis of marijuana use among both the young and the old (for whom cardiac worries should be paramount).

But people who actually pay attention to the public-health dangers marijuana presents have been shouting about this from the rooftops for decades.

A 2001 study published in the American Heart Association journal found that in the hour after marijuana use, the risk of a myocardial infarction jumps by almost 400 percent.

Those data appeared almost a quarter-century ago.

How did this aspect of weed’s general public-health effect ever pass under the radar at all—especially since American culture has become laser-focused on wellness in the interim?

How many lives have been lost, people injured, families sundered?

The fact that weed’s heart dangers have ever been anything less than a national story is a testament to how successful the marijuana industry, its advocates in the media, and the politicians it’s coopted have been at reputation management.

Luckily, the word now seems to be out. But we need to get louder. It’s time for everyone to reckon with this reality.

That means a renewed and urgent focus on prevention from our policymakers—and remember, prevention needs to target both young and old.

It means energetic callouts from journalists whenever “weed equals wellness” claims start to bubble up.

It means parents letting their kids know that yes, marijuana can be deadly.

Everyone invested in promoting sane policy and saving public health needs to take this to heart.

Dr. Kevin Sabet is the president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.