According to new research, you don’t sit around in sweatpants and smoke pot simply because you’re lazy. Such a habit could be the result of a genetic inheritance. It’s your biology.
This is the finding from a recent Yale study, which may have identified the specific genes involved in cannabis dependence (CAD). “We showed that risk for cannabis dependence is affected specifically by certain risk alleles and these risk alleles fit biologically with some of our existing ideas of the nature of cannabis dependence,” Dr. Joel Gelernter, senior author of the study and a Yale psychiatrist, told The Daily Beast.
For their study, which was published in JAMA Psychiatry, Dr. Gelernter and his team analyzed the genes of nearly 15,000 people sampled from three independent substance dependence cohorts. The participants were being followed for several years in order to try and understand the genetics of various types of addiction.