Experts Tell the Truth about Pot

Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.

Here's a specific warning:

For example, in a large-scale survey published in 1994 epidemiologist James Anthony, then at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and his colleagues asked more than 8,000 people between the ages of 15 and 64 about their use of marijuana and other drugs. The researchers found that of those who had tried marijuana at least once, about 9 percent eventually fit a diagnosis of cannabis dependence. The corresponding figure for alcohol was 15 percent; for cocaine, 17 percent; for heroin, 23 percent; and for nicotine, 32 percent. So although marijuana may be addictive for some, 91 percent of those who try it do not get hooked. Further, marijuana is less addictive than many other legal and illegal drugs.

Some people of course will only hear the last sentence:

marijuana is less addictive than many other legal and illegal drugs.

But for these people, it may be no laughing matter:

about 9 percent eventually fit a diagnosis of cannabis dependence.

This clearly biased study based on this information isn't worth much of anything in a factual sense.

Don't take this as a personal attack, because I don't mean it as such, but your Newsvine handle leads me to believe that you might be a biased consumer of information concerning marijuana.

They could have chosen something else to become slaves of their feelings.

That's a sort of deflective answer. That is like saying there is no reason to blame heroin for addiction when someone could just as easily chosen alcohol or Vicodin as their drug of choice. If it is possible to wind up with a dependence upon Marijuana, that is a piece of information that is valuable to know.

Not everyone who drinks winds up an alcoholic. What purpose would it serve to say that alcohol is not a (potentially) problematic substance because these acloholics would have simply found some other substance to abuse.

If 9% of chronic marijuana users are showing signs of dependence, then it would serve them and the people around them to know what those signs are and whether some sort of intervention is called for.

That was not a gradual switch it happened overnight.

Alice Cooper says he gave up drinking with a single decision. Went cold turkey and never touched the stuff again.

That is the difference, Heroin is bodily addictive and any other drug that fits the criteria, hence withdrawals and in some cases death from the shock.

That's only half the story of addictive substances. Some of them are highly toxic and your body chemistry gets bent out of shape to carry around loads of the addictive chemical. It doesn't seem that pot is toxic in that way. But it does seem that in a measurable segment of chronic users it causes behaviors consistent with addiction, like going to great lengths to get your next joint even if it is inconvenient for you to do so, or you can't afford it and causing depression and mood swings if you are deprived of the stuff. If you are preoccupied with getting high off of an expensive drug, it is going to make a mess of your life.

The data on the cognitive effects and its relationship to mental illness seems to diverge. This is because there are differences in people with regard to the receptors in the brain that marijuana acts upon. And, I suspect this is related. There are people at risk for developing schizophrenia out there and they should not be smoking pot at all. It seems to bring on schizophrenia pretty quickly in those people and is not the direction they need to be going.

So what are we to make of this information? Do we dismiss it? Do we overreact to it? (I think society has already overreacted - we've waged a war on marijuana.) But if we are going to legalize it, we need to be honest about it. If there are people who shouldn't be smoking pot - ever - we need to be able to empower those people with the information they need to make wise decisions with regard to marijuana. You wouldn't want to give diabetics candy bars, right? Until proven otherwise, I don't want to be in an airplane with a stoned pilot or on an operating table with a stoned surgeon.

Not every person who takes a drink now and then winds up an alcoholic or drunk behind the wheel of a car, but we would be foolish to act like we didn't need to control alcohol at all. It's the extreme examples of negative alcohol use that cause us to have to treat it like a controlled substance, not the majority who are no harm to anyone including themselves. I think marijuana is calling for a similar status to alcohol. It has its own peculiarities and will probably need to be treated a little differently than alcohol, but I don't see the difference being all that huge.

They drank. They didn't eat or drink anything else, all they did was drink booze.

Pretty scary.

Did the pot trigger schizophrenic outbursts or was it triggered by the illegality of having it in the first place?

I don't think the illegality of the drug is predisposing people to paranoia and that is what makes them schizophrenic. I think they have fragile minds which need a lot of things to go right in order to not slip into schizophrenia. This is why the topic gets muddied up with the observation that they were going to wind up schizophrenic anyway.

Wise decision for who? them or us? No I would not give a diabetic a candy bar but those same diabetics knowing they should not eat it still try to steal the candy from under you nose. :D

Knowledge is power. We have a lot of people saying a lot of extreme things about marijuana and nobody talking sensibly about it along the lines that it is a recreational drug probably on a par with alcohol and should be treated about the same.

People with an agenda either lie to have a reason to justify their war on drugs or to pretend that marijuana is no more dangerous than coffee. It seems more that it is dangerous for some people. (Schizophrenia is a hell of a hangover.)

What I find harder to understand is the claims that marijuana doesn't impair people. I've been around stoned people who sure seemed impaired.

I'd like to see what %'s alcohol and nicotine carry.

Marijuana has a lower rate of dependence than alcohol and nicotine. They mention the numbers in this article.

So, yeah, I'd put it up there coffee and nowhere near alcohol or nicotine

Coffee doesn't push some people over the edge into schizophrenia. Marijuna does.

Marijuna does.

But it seems to present this danger to a small percentage of the population.

It comes down to protecting the rights of individuals to do something they fund pleasurable that isn't hurting anyone, including themselves, while managing the fact that marijuana has adverse effects on some people.

Probably, educating parents and teachers in recognizing children and adolescents who are at risk of becoming schizophrenic is more effective than waging a shooting war against marijuana cartels.

Like I keep saying, it pushes at risk people over the edge.

Not everyone who is at risk develops schizophrenia, but being at risk and smoking pot makes it a lot more probable.

You don't understand the point being made by the researchers.

There is often a point at which the course of a fragile mind could go either way. Keeping people who are at risk away from pot and getting them the help they need is the way to increase their chances of not becoming schizophrenic. Giving them pot to see if they become ill is, well, crazy.

One really has to wonder about a drug that has people friggin' worshiping it.

and, would have developed schizophrenia even if they had not been cannabis-induced in the first place.

Not everyone at risk for developing schizophrenia does. If you are a person at risk, then you should not smoke pot -- ever. You should not be listening to people who say smoking pot is a good idea. You should probably have access to a mental heath professional who is an expert on dodging the Donnie Darko bomb.

These people would have developed schizophrenia whether or not they used cannabis

Not every professional sums it up that way.

look up mj and parkinsons disease.

Look up red wine and heart disease.

This is how another source characterizes the issue:

Professor Castle, author of the book Marijuana and Madness, has said that those people with this "psychotic proneness" were those who had a family history of mental illness or who had had a bad response on their first use of cannabis or to a tiny amount. Others at risk included those who had experienced a psychotic episode where they had paranoid thinking or heard a voice calling their name. Professor Castle said experiencing such a one-off episode was far more common than people thought.

"People with such a vulnerability should avoid cannabis like the plague," he said.

Without the effects of the drug, such a person might live their whole life without ever experiencing mental health problems. It has been estimated, for example, that between 8% and 13% of people that have schizophrenia today would never have developed the illness without exposure to cannabis.

Which is what I keep saying.

Look, Scientific American is a venerable publication, but they sort of phoned this one in. It's more of a blog post than an article, and its real purpose was to direct attention to another article which is behind their pay-called "A Mind in Danger." (That's an article condensed from a book called "A Lethal Inheritance" written by the mother of a teenager struggling with schizophrenia. Marijuana figured into the equation of that kid's schizophrenia, but it wasn't the only factor. I haven't read the book, but I think it pulls together research and is meant as a self-help book for parents.)

The scientist who said "these people would have come down with Schizophrenia anyway" did the entire profession of mental health a disservice. It's about as ignorant as saying that everyone who comes down with type II diabetes would have come down with type II diabetes anyway, in an attempt to explain how a sugar tax on sodas and candies is misguided policy.

Admittedly, we are talking about a small percentage of the population here: chronic schizophrenia affects around one percent of the population. If around ten percent of those cases could have been avoided by not smoking pot, then we are talking about 1 tenth of one percent of the population suffering from chronic schizophrenia due to marijuana use.

So what is the appropriate response to this information? Do we wage a war against marijuana users and lock people up in jail and spend hundreds of millions on a shooting war with drug cartels at the border? No. That's a totally wrong-headed policy in light of the facts. Clearly, marijuana should not be criminalized in this fashion; it should probably be legalized.

But what then? Do we lie about the health risks it presents to some people? That's equally misguided.

No that is the crux of the problem in the first place. To much propaganda about the subject. Which of it is correct and which of it is fabricated/misdiagnosed.

And that is why it must remain illegal -- until we can sort it out.

As the article says:

The public needs to be aware of the facts about marijuana so that it can dismiss fictions about the drug's effects. Only by knowing when marijuana pre­sents a real threat and when the risk is minimal can people properly weigh its dangers and benefits in specific situations. Both our health and sound social policy depend on it.

It may have some therapeutic value for people with glaucoma, chronic pain and terminal cancer, but it also seems to be able to trigger mental illness in vulnerable people.

This is rhetoric and has not been proven.

Yeah, whatever you say.

Here's an article from Time, which makes the case that there is a complex link between schizophrenia and marijuana. It seems to bring it on earlier and make it more severe in people predisposed to it.

Which is the same point made in this Scientific American article.