At dispensaries across Manhattan’s Upper West Side, budtenders say some of their most frequent customers are in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s — and they are not there for pain relief. One man in his 90s regularly buys about 10 of the strongest vapes available in a single visit, according to a budtender who works the counter. It is a snapshot of a broader shift: New York City seniors are using marijuana at record levels, and a new study says most of them are doing it simply to get high.
According to a New York Post report on the findings, roughly 60% of New York City residents aged 65 and older who use cannabis do so purely for recreational reasons rather than medical ones, per an NYU Langone study. The research, conducted by NYU Langone through a survey of 315 older adults in New York City, also found that 11% of NYC seniors had used cannabis within the past 24 hours, according to the study’s researchers. Dr. Joseph Palamar co-authored the NYU Langone cannabis-use report, which the Post cites as the basis for much of its reporting.
The numbers reflect a national trend that has been building for years. NYU researchers found that cannabis use among older Americans increased nearly 46% between 2021 and 2023, a jump corroborated by a separate June 2025 study from New York University published in JAMA Internal Medicine. That research found past-month cannabis use among adults 65 and older reached 7% in 2023, with the sharpest growth among affluent seniors earning over $75,000 a year, college graduates, women, and married individuals. The trajectory is stark: Americans 65 and older reported marijuana use in the past year at just 0.4% in 2007, a figure that climbed to about 8% by 2022, per the same body of research.
Woodstock Generation Returns to the Dispensary Counter
Budtenders on the ground describe a clientele shaped by history as much as by health trends. Skye, who works at Flower Power Dispensers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said many older customers reported attending the Woodstock music festival decades ago, according to the Post’s reporting. People who grew up in the late 1960s helped popularize marijuana in the first place, and that generation is now returning to it in retirement — a pattern that lines up with federal survey data showing about 93% of cannabis users aged 50 to 64 first tried the drug before age 21, according to a 2018 study in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Many baby boomers appear to have paused use during careers and child-rearing before picking it back up as legal barriers fell away…