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Gotham granny’s on grass!
Senior citizens in the Big Apple are using marijuana at record levels, with the vast majority doing it simply “to get high” rather than for medical reasons, according to a new study.
Roughly 60% of people ages 65 and older in the city admitted they get stoned just for fun — outnumbering those who partake to treat chronic pain, relieve tension or sleep, said the study by NYU Langone, which surveyed hundreds of older adults in New York City.
Many of the local geezers are even going for the especially potent green stuff in their golden years, pot purveyors told The Post.
Younger generations, by contrast, prefer vaping and taking edibles.
Stoner seniors have stunned cannabis-shop workers by often requesting the strongest strains in the Big Apple.
“There’s a guy next door in his 90s who comes in, gets like 10 vapes at a time, the strongest vapes we have,” said Skye, a 27-year-old worker at Flower Power Dispensers on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
“You get a higher tolerance sometimes when you get older, when you’ve been smoking for a long time.”
Other weed-loving oldies are former hippies who are back to the bong now that marijuana is legal, he said.
“We get a surprising number of people who tell us they were at the actual Woodstock [music festival],” Skye said.
“They’re the ones who paved the way. They’re the ones who were doing this when it was fully illegal, when they could go to jail for many, many years.”
Stephanie Staten, 40, a manager at The Flowery on the Upper West Side, said some of her elderly clients ask for “classic” bud such as Acapulco Gold and Sour Diesel.
“We’ll have conversations where people will be like, ‘I’ve been smoking since before you were even born. I know all about this,’ ” Staten said.
But “a lot of older clientele, they want the strongest THC. …They want potency,” she said.
The study’s researchers, who surveyed 315 elderly folks for their survey, found that 11 percent of seniors had used cannabis in the past 24 hours.
They said more seniors reported toking marijuana more than smoking cigarettes in the past year.
“I think that the stigma has decreased quite a bit across the board. Also among older people,” said Dr. Jeremy Palamar from NYU Langone Health, who co-authored the report, of cannabis use.
“People who grew up in the late 60s, it was their generation that essentially popularized marijuana,” he told The Post.
The study comes on the heels of research that last year showed more seniors were using cannabis than ever.
Weed use among Americans ages 65 and older increased by nearly 46% from 2021 to 2023, NYU researchers found last year.
In 2022, about 8% of seniors 65 and older copped to marijuana use in the past year, showed a 2022 federal survey — far more than the 0.4% reported in 2007.
— Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton
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