Marijuana could actually be bad for you
Living here in Mendocino County, I am much more familiar with the marijuana industry than I would care to be. Not only do we live with the consequences of our state’s effort to allow the medicinal use of pot, but our own county government has long taken a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach since it represents a significant portion of our rural county’s economy.
Many in my town favor legalization and argue that recreational use of marijuana is safer than alcohol.
It was nice to see this Pajama’s Media column providing another view on the impact of marijuana use.
There’s no question that making drugs illegal creates serious problems for our criminal justice system. It clogs the courts, it corrupts police officers and government officials, and it funds some really sleazy people. All of this is true — but it turns out that there are some substantial social costs on the other side that simply don’t get any attention. While it may sound like I have been watching Reefer Madness (1936) – a tragically overwrought portrayal of the dangers of marijuana — it turns out that mental illness is one of those social costs.
A surprising number of scholarly studies in the last 25 years have demonstrated that marijuana use seems to cause an increase in psychoses such as schizophrenia, and somewhat less dramatic mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder.
Let me emphasize: This isn’t just correlation analysis — finding that people with a current mental illness are disproportionately potheads. I am well aware that people with significant mental illness problems tend to “self-medicate” using various psychoactive drugs (including alcohol). No, these are longitudinal studies that show the marijuana use comes first, with the mental illness later in life.
The first of these, involving Swedish conscripts, was published in the Lancet in 1987. Those who had used marijuana heavily by age 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia. A British medical journal paper published in 2002 performed a longitudinal study in New Zealand and found that:
Firstly, cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of experiencing schizophrenia symptoms, even after psychotic symptoms preceding the onset of cannabis use are controlled for. … Secondly, early cannabis use (by age 15) confers greater risk for schizophrenia outcomes than later cannabis use (by age 18). The youngest cannabis users may be most at risk because their cannabis use becomes longstanding.
This paper, from the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2004, should also make you a bit concerned. From the abstract:
On an individual level, cannabis use confers an overall twofold increase in the relative risk for later schizophrenia. At the population level, elimination of cannabis use would reduce the incidence of schizophrenia by approximately 8%, assuming a causal relationship. Cannabis use appears to be neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause for psychosis. It is a component cause, part of a complex constellation of factors leading to psychosis.
There’s unquestionably a genetic component. This Schizophrenia Bulletin (2008) paper tells us:
Cannabis use is considered a contributory cause of schizophrenia and psychotic illness. However, only a small proportion of cannabis users develop psychosis. This can partly be explained by the amount and duration of the consumption of cannabis and by its strength, but also by the age at which individuals are first exposed to cannabis. Genetic factors, in particular, are likely to play a role in the short- and the long-term effects cannabis may have on psychosis outcome. … Evidence suggests that mechanisms of gene-environment interaction are likely to underlie the association between cannabis and psychosis.
Obviously, only a fraction of pot smokers are going to go crazy and join the 1-3% of Americans who are psychotic. Think of smoking marijuana on a regular basis as playing Russian roulette once with a 50-shot cylinder, one of which has a live round. (Of course, now that you know that, maybe you do have to be crazy to smoke marijuana.)
Personally, I believe that marijuana, like other legal and illegal drugs has positive and negative aspects for each user, depending on how they use it. Unfortunately, for our county, the pot industry causes many negative impacts every day. Because of the large amounts of money which can be made growing and selling marijuana, it has dramatically increased the level of criminal activity in our county. I believe it has caused otherwise intelligent people to put themselves at risk of jail time or worse, simply for a quick dollar. There have been cases in our area of teachers, firemen, lawyers and other professionals who have been arrested as a result of large, commercial growing operations. This quasi-legalization of pot hasn’t done our rural community any favors. Add to that, some of the research from this article and it just makes me more certain that our state is moving in the wrong direction regarding marijuana.
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