Medical Marijuana Use Is ‘Prevalent’ Among People With Disabilities—And It Helps Treat Pain, New Federally Funded Study Shows

What the numbers say

Medical marijuana disabilities research, stripped to the studs. A new government-funded study put hard edges on a story many people with disabilities already tell in quiet, exhausted tones: cannabis helps. The team, out of George Mason University and the University of Nevada, mined the National Survey on Health and Disability—nearly 2,000 adults who self-identify as living with a disability—and found that about one in five currently use cannabis. Pain relief was the headline, clocking in at over 70 percent of users. Another big slice—north of 60 percent—reported cannabis helps them relax or shed the day’s tension. The study, published in the November 2025 issue of the Disability and Health Journal and funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) within NIH, reads like field notes from the front: measured, careful, but unmistakably clear about therapeutic benefits. You can find the paper’s abstract on ScienceDirect.

How people actually use it

Strip away the politics, and the cannabis story here is stubbornly human. Respondents weren’t chasing novelty. They were addressing symptoms—daily, grinding, often invisible. Beyond pain and anxiety relief, the reasons stretched across the body’s fault lines and the mind’s late-night spirals. The study catalogs familiar, unglamorous terrain where medical cannabis often shows up as the only tool that works without breaking something else.

• Migraines that turn light into a weapon
• Nausea that starves appetite and spirit
• Muscle spasms that hijack movement
• Seizures that ambush routines
• Mental health concerns like anxiety and mood disorders
• Sleep disturbances that make tomorrow feel impossible

When an herb starts sounding like a Swiss Army knife, skeptics lean in. Fair. But the survey’s consistency across disability domains—cognition, hearing, independent living, mobility, self-care, vision—suggests this isn’t fad chasing. It’s a pragmatic response to chronic problems that modern medicine often treats with side effects worse than the disease.

The fine print (and the real world)

Every good study comes with a hangover of caveats, and this one is no different. The data are self-reported. The sample isn’t nationally representative—majority white, female, college-educated, and comparatively affluent—which blurs the edges of generalizability. And the reasons for cannabis use weren’t time-stamped to “current,” meaning some respondents may have reached back to earlier chapters of their lives. The authors don’t pretend otherwise; they circle the limits in red ink and move on to the part that matters: signal over noise. As they put it, We found that approximately one fifth of adults with disabilities had reported using cannabis currently. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a measurement—one that quietly challenges policymakers and clinicians to reconcile practice with lived experience. In other words: if cannabis is easing pain, easing tension, helping people sleep, the onus is on systems to catch up.

Policy wind at their backs

The study lands in an era where cannabis policy reform finally feels less like a bar fight and more like a slow, messy dinner service—inevitable, imperfect, always behind. Public sentiment has shifted, and it’s drifting toward medicine, not menace. For a snapshot of that political gravity, see the growing support documented in Bipartisan Majority Of Americans Support Rescheduling Marijuana And Say It Has Medical Value, New Poll Finds After Trump Takes Action. Statehouses are reading the room too. In the South, a region famous for slow pivots, you even see movement like Bipartisan Tennessee Lawmakers Push For State-Level Marijuana Reform Following Trump’s Federal Rescheduling Move. Meanwhile, voters keep acting as the rudder when lawmakers drift, as evidenced by pushes such as Ohio Activists Plan Referendum To Block New Law Rolling Back Marijuana Rights And Restricting Hemp Sales. Even the healthcare bureaucracy is testing the brakes and throttle at once, with hints of coverage for cannabinoid therapies surfacing in conversations like Federal Health Programs Will Cover Up To $500 Worth Of CBD For Certain Patients By April, Trump Official Dr. Oz Says. None of that changes the basic math for a person in pain tonight. But policy momentum matters. It determines who gets safe access, fair pricing, predictable supply, and protection from the bureaucratic shuffle that makes disability harder than it already is.

Follow the relief

Here’s the gritty, unglamorous truth: medical cannabis isn’t a miracle; it’s a tool. For many adults with disabilities, it’s the difference between shouting down nerves and being able to breathe, eat, sleep, and move. Health systems should meet them where they are—by funding rigorous clinical trials, training providers, and building coverage pathways that treat cannabinoid medicine like a legitimate option instead of a moral puzzle. States should keep earmarking legal cannabis revenue to support disability services, adaptive tech, and community health—because the point of legalization isn’t just market share; it’s outcomes. If you live with pain, you don’t care about a politician’s talking points. You care that something works and doesn’t wreck your life in the process. If you’re curious about compliant, high-quality options to explore your own path to relief, take a calm, unhurried look through our shop.