[Drugs] mar1juana may increase psychosis risk, analysis says

wouldnt people who are so dependant on a drug naturally have some natural lean to being psychotic?

 

nevermind...what i get for just skimming

 

"The researchers said they couldn't prove that mar1juana use itself increases the risk of psychosis, a category of several disorders with schizophrenia being the most commonly known."

I'm not sure they have proven anything at this point. They haven't proven cause-and-effect. Yet, their all ready to accept this as "the truth".

The only thing they seem to have proven, from what I can tell, is that people who smoke are in a category of people who also have more cases of mental disorder at some point in life.

So, people who have or do smoke are more likely to be mental. Okay.

Does it prove that this was the direct cause? No.

I'm not saying the study is purely coincidence or fiction. I do think it is a bit of a stretch at this point. Taken in proportion to the number of people who have or do smoke, that is a really large part of the population.

 

I'm not psychotic.

I just have a 6 inch tall friend named Gomer who lives on my right shoulder.

His hair is pink.

You got a problem wit dat?

 

Agree with surfguy all this says is that people who smoke mar1juana just happen to have an increase risk of psychosis. This doesn't necessarily mean they have an increase risk of psychosis because of mar1juana. The paragraphs above completely contradict themselves.

 

I think drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes are far more harmful then what's being reported here.

I mean, if we go from 5 in 1000 to 8 in 1000 for heavy smokers of pot....what about cigarettes generating lung cancer or alcohol causing heart problems later in life?

Personally, I think using drugs is something people do as an escape and describes an underlying problem. It's one thing for someone to try them for fun out of curiosity, but beyond that, you have to have some sort of issues to be using it. I don't like to be around people who are using drugs either.

That said, I think if people want to choose that experience for themselves, as long as it doesn't harm another person they should be allowed to. I mean, I am allowed to go kitesurfing or expose myself to the toxic city air.

Why shouldn't someone have the choice to increase their risk of mental illness by 40% for an experience they want. So long as you know the risks ya know.

 

seems flawed in terms of proving weed as being a 'cause'. The study will be more helpful for psychologists to learn more of the behaviour of psychotic people rather than as a deterrent to not smoke

 

Exactly, these conclusions do not really hold up well. they are not really based on fact. there are so many factors that can influence this. for example people who are unhappy, and tend toward psychosis could have a higher chance to start with mar1juana. if that is the case (which seems logical, since people close to psychose tend to used substances to reduce the stress/pain/ sad feelings etc.) this study is disproven.

I have many friends that have done mar1juana(or do it regularly) but none of them ever had a psychosis, so therefore mar1juana does not lead to psychosis. My little research proves just as much as their study.

also i think the researchers did not draw this conclusions but the journalist writing this article sort of twisted their conclusions. otherwise i seriously doubt the qualities of those researchers.

 

You mean I've been smoking weed to mellow out, but in actuality I'm going to be a psycho in the long run? I guess I better have some ganja ready to calm me down from my psychosis.

 

I think the only time a pot smoker will ever get psychotic is if he ran out of oatmeal cream pies...

 

Old, disproven "news"
_________________________________________________

Feature: Reefer Madness Strikes a Leading British Newspaper
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/478/reefer_madness_strikes_british_newspaper

Careful observers of the British press are accustomed to tabloid-style grotesqueries. Even a cursory review of stories about drugs in the British press reveals breathless headlines -- "Cannabis Boy in Drugs Shame," "Heroin Girl in Drugs Tragedy" -- and mind-boggling statements right out of Reefer Madness. Just this week, the tabloid Liverpool Echo warned that "SUPER-strength cannabis so potent that just one puff can cause schizophrenia is being grown by Merseyside drug gangs."


UK press: backsliding into reefer madness
Along with topless models, lottery appeals, and gossip, lurid drug stories are to be expected in the tabloid press. It's another thing when one of Britain's premier serious newspapers gets down in the muck with the tabloids, but that's just what happened Sunday when the Independent on Sunday reversed course on cannabis. A decade ago, the upstart newspaper launched a campaign to legalize the weed, but this week it said it was wrong. In a series of articles led by the editorial "Cannabis: An Apology," the newspaper said the emergence of powerful cannabis varieties like skunk and increasing evidence of mental health problems for smokers prompted its recantation.

"In 1997, this newspaper launched a campaign to decriminalize the drug," began the editorial penned by Jonathan Owen. "If only we had known then what we can reveal today... Record numbers of teenagers are requiring drug treatment as a result of smoking skunk, the highly potent cannabis strain that is 25 times stronger than resin sold a decade ago. More than 22,000 people were treated last year for cannabis addiction -- and almost half of those affected were under 18. With doctors and drugs experts warning that skunk can be as damaging as cocaine and heroin, leading to mental health problems and psychosis for thousands of teenagers, The Independent on Sunday has today reversed its landmark campaign for cannabis use to be decriminalized."

The newspaper also cited "growing proof that that skunk causes mental illness and psychosis" and statistics showing "that the number of young people in treatment almost doubled" between 2005 and 2006. And again with the skunk: "The skunk smoked by the majority of young Britons bears no relation to traditional cannabis resin -- with a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), typically found in the early 1990s."

The newspaper cited several academic specialists who have been at the forefront of the campaign to prove that cannabis has serious mental health consequences. According to Professor Robin Murray of the London Institute for Psychiatry, cannabis use accounts for fully 10% of all schizophrenics in the UK. "The number of people taking cannabis may not be rising, but what people are taking is much more powerful, so there is a question of whether a few years on we may see more people getting ill as a consequence of that."

The Independent also cited veteran anti-drug campaigner Professor Neil McKeganey from Glasgow University's Centre for Drug Misuse Research. "We could well see over the next 10 years increasing numbers of young people in serious difficulties," he said.

But proponents of drug law reform and academic mar1juana experts were shocked and dismayed by the Independent's new stance and its seeming fall into tabloid-style reporting. "This is very reminiscent of the potency panics in the US a few years ago," said Steve Rolles of the London-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation, who earlier this week wrote a highly critical blog post about the Independent's change of course. "If you take the weakest cannabis from one era and compare it to the strongest from the current era, you can make that 25:1 argument, but that just doesn't represent reality. It is fair to say there has been an increasing prevalence of more potent indoor grown cannabis, but the Independent was just cherry-picking the data. What they did was to grossly overstate it to make it seem a bigger issue than it is, and that's both bad science and lazy journalism."

"This is one of the most ridiculous and flaccid attempts to justify prohibition I have ever seen," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of mar1juana Laws (NORML). "The UK media is ensconced in incredible reefer madness that even the US can't match at this point. I keep a file called bad journalism. It's a fairly large dossier, but I never added so much material to it as I did last Sunday. That skunk they keep talking about must be extremely strong; look at the incredibly deleterious effect just writing about it has on people's ability to think rationally," he told Drug War Chronicle.

Dr. Mitchell Earleywine, professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany and author of "Understanding mar1juana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence," scoffed at the Independent's claims about potency and the link between mar1juana and schizophrenia. "There has probably been a two- or three-fold increase in potency on average," he told Drug War Chronicle. "Estimates from the 1970s are likely underestimates because we didn't understand how storage in hot police evidence lockers degraded THC. Most of the estimates from back then were around 1% THC. When we give folks mar1juana that's 1% THC in the laboratory today, it's so weak that they get a headache and think they've received a placebo. Obviously, the plant wouldn't have become popular if it just gave people headaches."

Even if cannabis is stronger today, it does not follow that it is more hazardous, and stronger may even be better, Earleywine added. "The tacit assumption that stronger equals more dangerous is also wrong. Data on the subjective high that people obtain suggest that folks don't get any higher than they used to," he pointed out. "They may end up smoking less, using less total cannabis as a result, and therefore limiting the chances of developing any respiratory symptoms. Although cannabis use doesn't increase lung cancer risk, it can increase cases of cough, wheezing, et cetera. Those who smoke stronger cannabis tend to take smaller hits and deposit less gunk in their lungs."

Earleywine also raised questions about the science behind the claimed link between mar1juana and schizophrenia. "The obvious stuff, that pot doesn't cause schizophrenia but schizophrenics like pot, tends to apply here," he said. "The longitudinal studies often do a great job of assessing psychosis at the end of the period but a poor job of assessing symptoms at the beginning of the study. There are now about five longitudinal studies suggesting increases in 'psychotic disorders' or 'schizophrenic spectrum disorders' in folks who are heavy users of cannabis very early in life. There are also six studies to show more symptoms of schizo-typal personality disorder in cannabis users. Note that none of these are full-blown schizophrenia, the rare, disabling disorder that affects about 1% of the population," he said.

"The best argument against this idea comes from work showing that schizophrenia affects 1% of the population in every country and across every era, regardless of how much cannabis was used at the time or up to ten years before," Earleywine added.

The alleged schizophrenia connection is more hype, said Rolles. "Nothing has really changed. The dangers associated with cannabis have been documented for years. Certain groups, particularly teenagers and people with preexisting mental health problems, can have problems if they use cannabis," he conceded. "But again, this is more cherry-picking of the statistics, the Reefer Madness thing used to justify prohibition. You hype the dangers. We see this over and over again with all drugs."

As for the Independent's claims that strong cannabis is driving record numbers of young Britons into drug treatment, Rolles was equally skeptical. "The experience in America is instructive," he said. "There, your drug czar talks about huge numbers of young people in treatment for cannabis-related problems, but if you look at the numbers, most of them are referred by the courts. The same is true here."

"This schizophrenia thing is unique to England and, to a lesser degree, Australia," NORML's St. Pierre said. "The principle advocate of this thesis, researcher Robin Murray, is literally trying to create a new myth around cannabis. It seems like we have a new myth every decade or so. In the '30s, pot made you crazy; in the '40s, it made you a criminal; in the '50s, it made you want to use hard drugs; in the '60s; it made you a hippie or radical communist; in the '70s, it made you apathetic and unmotivated. Now we have this latest version -- that cannabis is a source of psychoses. The way the British media has bought into this is a disgrace," he said.

"Empirically, this is one of the easiest mar1juana myths to shoot down," St. Pierre said. "From London, you can practically see the Netherlands, a country where cannabis is readily available and fairly potent. If one one-hundredth of what they claim were true, you would be walking over bodies in Amsterdam."

St. Pierre noted that the mar1juana-schizophrenia connection has not migrated to the United States. "Where is the American Psychological Association, where is the American Psychiatric Association?" he asked. "They should be the natural allies of the Brits on this, but they're not because this is absolutely bonkers."

Like NORML, Transform is an advocacy group working to end mar1juana prohibition. British mental health organizations have a different take. "We now know that cannabis can be a trigger for mental health problems and smoking it under the age of 18 can double people's chances of developing psychoses," a spokesman for the mental health group Rethink told Drug War Chronicle. "The government must invest in a wide-scale public health campaign so that young people know cannabis is not risk-free."

While Rethink has led the charge for higher awareness of the dangers of cannabis through its Cannabis and Mental Illness Campaign, the group is not advocating for a reclassification of the drug. Instead, it believes its current classification as a Class C drug is appropriate.

That's not what Member of Parliament Paul Flynn thinks. Evidence of possible harms doesn't change the underlying dynamic of his anti-prohibitionist position. "My view is exactly the same. Prohibition doesn't work," he said. "It's much worse to have the market controlled by dangerous criminals than for it to be properly controlled."

And so the debate over cannabis in Britain roils.

 

What exactly does it contradict? They consistently say they believe it does but are unsure. The title is:

mar1juana may increase psychosis risk, analysis says

The first chunk of the article is:

Using mar1juana seems to increase the chance of becoming psychotic, researchers report in an analysis of past research that reignites the issue of whether pot is dangerous.

The new review suggests that even infrequent use could raise the small but real risk of this serious mental illness by 40 percent.

Doctors have long suspected a connection and say the latest findings underline the need to highlight mar1juana's long-term risks. The research, paid for by the British Health Department, is being published Friday in medical journal The Lancet.

"The available evidence now suggests that cannabis is not as harmless as many people think," said Dr. Stanley Zammit, one of the study's authors and a lecturer in the department of psychological medicine at Cardiff University.

It then goes on to lay out why they think it would be the mar1juana and not the pre-existing factors:

"The strongest case is that there are consistencies across all of the studies," and that the link was seen only with psychoses -- not anxiety, depression or other mental health problems, he said.

Scientists cannot rule out that pre-existing conditions could have led to both mar1juana use and later psychoses, he added.

Scientists think it is biologically possible that mar1juana could cause psychoses because it interrupts important neurotransmitters such as dopamine. That can interfere with the brain's communication systems.

At no point do they claim a perfect link. They just say the evidence points to it, but they can't rule out other possibilities with the data they have. Where is the huge contradiction?

 

I'd rather not intentionally inhale smoke of any kind, so I don't. There is a reason why you cough when first smoking, your body doesn't want it. That's enough for me. Carry on.
Now, let's see how many of you never coughed.

 

trying to convince drug users that using drugs is bad is a losing battle..they have an excuse for it all!

 

I am so freaking psychotic right now....I think I'm going to munch on some potato chips!

 

Trying to convince some people that "using drugs is bad" is a simplistic generalization is a losing battle. They have anecdotal evidence after all.

 

I'm saying the "evidence" doesn't really "point to it" -- "it" being the assertion that mar1juana causes Psychosis.

Let's use an analogy: Say a researcher does a study of depressed people and finds that many of them eat a lot of chocolate. He releases the data, and a writer picks it up and releases an article that says "Chocolate May Cause Depression" which, while careful to use non-committal words, still tries to suggest that the scenario described in the headline is backed by a legitimate scientific study.

 

This is why so many smokers discontinue use as they get older because they start feeling paranoid after using instead of happy and relaxed as they did when they were young.

 

I have to say, I haven't seen a happy pot-smoker in my lifetime.