Rebecca Craft
Rebecca Craft

After decades of researching gender differences in the effects of drugs, Rebecca Craft, professor and chair of psychology, has found that females using marijuana are likelier than men to become dependent on the drug and suffer more severe withdrawals.

At the same time, females seem to be more sensitive to the drug’s pain-relieving qualities.

Craft studies the effects of psychoactive drugs on rats and reported these findings most recently in journals such as Life Sciences and Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Her work, funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, focuses on the medical side of cannabinoids, the class of drugs found in marijuana.

Read more about this research in Washington State Magazine online