Pete Davidson Discusses Using Marijuana for Crohn’s Disease and BPD

Pete Davidson, the 24-year-year old Saturday Night Live comic famously engaged to Ariana Grande, has not been especially private about his love of marijuana, even admitting that he proposed to his fiancée while smoking weed in bed. But in an interview Monday, Davidson revealed his habit is not all recreational. Diagnosed with both borderline personality disorder and Crohn’s disease, Davidson says marijuana helps ease the symptoms of both illnesses, which research on the drug supports to varying degrees.

“I have Crohn’s disease, so it helps more than you can imagine,” he said in the SiriusXM interview with Howard Stern on Monday. Though he entered rehab in 2016 to wean himself off drugs and stabilize his mental health, he told Stern that he realized in treatment that “it wasn’t the weed.” He continued: “I was sober for three months at one point and was like this fucking sucks.”

Marijuana’s role in both illnesses is the subject of much research, but it seems to have far more beneficial effects in Crohn’s disease than in borderline personality disorder.

Crohn’s Disease

Crohn’s is a chronic disease that causes the digestive tract to become inflamed and irritated. The symptoms, which include diarrhea, abdominal cramping and pain, and weight loss, can be severe. “I got Crohn’s disease when I was 17 or 18,” Davidson told High Times in 2016. “Weed would be the only thing that would help me eat.”

Medical marijuana is now commonly used to help increase appetite in people whose conditions or medications make it difficult to eat, like chemotherapy patients. Its role in easing the pain experienced by people with intestinal issues like Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is still being investigated, though anecdotal evidence suggests it can be very helpful.

In August, researchers at the University of Bath showed that marijuana might exert its beneficial effects by adjusting the microbial balance in the guts of people with these diseases, thereby reducing inflammation and pain.

Borderline Personality Disorder

Marijuana’s role in borderline personality disorder, a mental illness marked by “ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior,” according to the NIH, is a little more complicated.

In a study published in the journal Addiction in March, researchers used genetic analysis on 1,419 Norwegian adult twins to find a correlation between borderline personality disorder and cannabis use, concluding: “Individual differences in the liability to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder appear to be linked to genetic risks correlated with antisocial and borderline personality disorder traits.” It didn’t say anything about using cannabis to treat the symptoms of borderline personality disorder, though; so far, there haven’t been any studies on that link.

For his part, Davidson seems to have found that smoking weed has not made his condition any worse. “I also just love smoking weed,” he told Stern.