Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Cannabis and Mental Illness





Here's some more information that I found on how marijuana destroys your mind.

The name of the article is called "Cannabis and Mental Illness." You can find it here ---> http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/325/7374/1183.pdf

Anyway here it goes:

"The link between cannabis and psychosis is well established, and
recent studies have found a link between use of marijuana and depression."
(1)

"A longer follow up and reanalysis of this cohort
published in this issue (p 1199) confirms the earlier
findings and clarifies that cannabis, and not other
drugs, is associated with later schizophrenia and that
this is not explained by prodromal symptoms.9 In a
similar vein, a three year follow up of a Dutch cohort of
4045 people free of psychosis and 59 with a baseline
diagnosis of psychotic disorder showed a strong
association between use of cannabis and psychosis."
(2)

(1) McKay DR, Tennant CC. Is the grass greener? The link between cannabis
and psychosis. Med J Aust 2000;172:284­6., Bovasso GB. Cannabis abuse as a risk factor for depressive symptoms. Am J Psychiatry 2001;158:2033­7.

(2) Zammit S, Allebeck P, Andreasson S, Lundberg I, Lewis G. Self reported
cannabis use as a risk factor for schizophrenia in Swedish conscripts of
1969: historical cohort study. BMJ 2002;325:1199­201., Van Os J, Bak M, Hanssen, M, Bijl RV, de Graaf R, Verdoux H. Cannabis
use and psychosis: A longitudinal population­based study. Am J Epidemiol
2002;156:319­27.

1 comment:

E. R. Johnson said...

Gotta be careful here.

The rate at which people suffer schizophrenia and its symptoms, the psychoses, has not changed in the past 30 years, even though the prevalence of cannabis use has increased greatly.

"links," and "associations" do not form "causes," which "destroy," the mind.

Even the Lancet, the UK prohibitionists' house organ of late, PREFACES its recent denouncement of cannabis by saying straight out that "cannabis does not cause schizophrenia."

It is at most an aggravating factor for a small group of people who are genetically predisposed to schizophrenia -if- they smoke too much cannabis in early teen years.

This is -far- from destroying the mind.

Sweden puts forth an extreme prohibitionist drug policy, including a hearty discord with the rest of Europe on Alcohol and tobacco use.

Research published out of Sweden is notoriously biased against cannabis, and all of it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Next, one should examine if obsession by some with other people's ingestion of a plant that grows wild and unassisted worldwide to the point of insistence on major local, state, national and international legislation, diplomatic agreements treaties, and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars over 70-odd years no matter the scale and consistency of failure, and that motives people to place quotes from seriously out-of-context, totally biased junk science, designed to secure further grants from prohibitionist governments, in their blogs, in service of their "opinion," that, "marijuana destroys your mind," is, in fact, a psychosis itself.