Will One Joint Really Make You Schizoid?

[Al B. Fuct]

Will One Joint Really Make You Schizoid?

Maia Szalavitz, July 30, 2007

Just what did a new study on marijuana and schizophrenia actually say – and what did the media leave out? Watching the media cover marijuana is fascinating, offering deep insight into conventional wisdom, bias and failure to properly place science in context. The coverage of a new study claiming that marijuana increases the risk of later psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia by 40% displays many of these flaws.

 

What are the key questions reporters writing about such a study needs to ask? First, can the research prove causality? Most of the reporting here, to its credit, establishes at some point that it cannot,though you have to read pretty far down in some of it to understand this.

 

Second – and this is where virtually all of the coverage falls flat –, if marijuana produces what seems like such a large jump in risk for schizophrenia, have schizophrenia rates increased in line with marijuana use rates? A quick search of Medline shows that this is not the case-- in fact, as I noted

here

earlier, some experts think they may actually have fallen. Around the world, roughly 1% of the population has schizophrenia (and another 2% or so have other psychotic disorders), and this proportion doesn’t seem to change much. It is not correlated with population use rates of marijuana.

 

Since marijuana use rates have skyrocketed since the 1940’s and 50’s, going from single digit percentages of the population trying it to a peak of some 60% of high school seniors trying it in 1979 (stabilizing

thereafter

at roughly 50% of each high school class), we would expect to see this trend have some visible effect on the prevalence of schizophrenia and other psychoses.

 

When cigarette smoking barreled through the population, lung cancer rose in parallel; when smoking rates fell, lung cancer rates

fell

. This is not the case with marijuana and psychotic disorders; if it were, we’d be seeing an epidemic of psychosis.

 

But readers of the

AP

,

Bloomberg

, The

Washington Post

, and

Reuters

were not presented with this information. While

CBS/WebMD

mentioned the absence of a surge in schizophrenia, it did so by quoting an advocate of marijuana policy reform, rather than citing a study or quoting a doctor. This slants the story by pitting an advocate with an agenda against a presumably neutral medical authority.

 

Furthermore, very little of the coverage put the risk in context. A 40% increase in risk sounds scary, and this was the risk linked to trying marijuana

once

, not to heavy use. To epidemiologists a 40% increase is not especially noteworthy-- they usually don’t find risk factors worth worrying about until the number hits at least 200% and some major journals won’t publish studies unless the risk is 300 or even 400%. The marijuana paper did find that heavy use increased risk by 200-300%, but that’s hardly as sexy as try marijuana once, increase your risk of schizophrenia by nearly half!

 

By contrast, one

study

found that alcohol has been found to increase the risk of psychosis by 800% for men and 300% for women. Although this study was not a meta-analysis (which looks at multiple studies, as the marijuana research did), it certainly is worth citing to help readers get a sense of the magnitude of the risk in comparison with other drugs linked to psychosis.

 

Of course, if journalists wanted to do that, they would also cite researchers who disagree with the notion that marijuana poses a large risk of inducing psychosis at all, such as Oxford’s Leslie Iversen, author of one of the key texts on psychopharmacology, who

told

the Times of London that

 

“Despite a thorough review the authors admit that there is no conclusive evidence that cannabis use causes psychotic illness. Their prediction that 14 per cent of psychotic outcomes in young adults in the UK may be due to cannabis use is not supported by the fact that the incidence of schizophrenia has not shown any significant change in the past 30 years.”

 

Such comments don’t help the media stir up reefer madness, which they’ve been doing, quite successfully, for the last few decades. Perhaps covering the marijuana beat makes you crazy.

[RobbieGanjaSeed]

What can ya do? I mean in Qld at least it's illegal to "promote drug use", promote or creature literature that promotes drugs", and telivision's code of ethics legal requires them to in all events never show drugs in a positive light.

 

Qld being Qld, I know that's extreme, but even posting on here, "take one seed, put in soil and stand back" is promoting drug use, or can be charged with crature literature that enables the procuring of drugs.

 

Fark me, basically, unless you come out and say pot makes you grow hair on the palms of ya hands, you're breaking the law.

How do we get around the BS?

 

I know I've spoken a lot lately about my father's fall in skitsophrenia, but I was riased from a young age for a lot of years now, and a total of three people I know have succumbed to hospitalisation, with some pot element in it. One was complicated by his wife screwing everyone in town, well suprise suprise he got better when he rid himself of the wife not the pot, and his wife was hospitalised at one stage, as she blamed too much marijauan as her reason for being oversexed. Last she was seen, was givinbg head for rides to Sydney.

Dad's been hiding his sickness al his life, and I'm sure he would have fallen apart anyway.

 

No doubt everyone here has similar experiences, years of use, years of sub-culture and no tales of woe that worth frightening anyone with.

But while the bastards can arrest us for suggesting it won't killyou, we're farked, and the pricks wil continue to finance anyone that says how danergous we all are playing, regardless of a compllete lack of evidence.

 

It's enough to give ya the shits. The yanks are fucked up, I admit that, but at least they have the legal right to write stuff under their freeedom of speach stuff. I wish we had that.

 

rob

[mullray]

Yup, the key research (cannabis causes madness) that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with came out of NZ, supporting earlier Swiss claims - which needed support. The NZ research seemed impressive as it was a longitudinal study over many years involving many participants (I think 1000 - C cannabis causes gum disease ). I myself read the research and the Swiss paper and to be fair I think that the findings did indicate that cannabis use could cause schizophrenia - as opposed to the long argued belief that it could trigger mental illness in some people who were predisposed to a condition that's onset may have happened anyway at some later point. The head researcher of the NZ research also made a statement to the effect that the findings should not support prohibition and that similar findings could be traced to the abuse of many things including milk. None of this was ever reported in the media. There are long lists of such insights that have been left out of the Reefer Madness crap that has been perpetuated through news outlets around the world. Fuck em - let's pull a cone Edited February 7, 2008 by mullray

[mullray]

PS. Superskunk..... One cone and you're gone

[freddie]

Wow. A proper journalist, not just your average cut and paste type. Thanks for posting this Al.B. Despite a lot of negative pot stories lately i am glad I don't use many prescription drugs which kill (Heath R.I.P.). Oh, and I'm going to have to watch my alcohol use as it kills 20 000 Aussies per year according the the science geek show I watched last night.

 

Heres another gem from Miai Szalavitz (a science journalist). Note the last 2 paragraphs.

 

HOME > STATS > ARTICLES

ARTICLES

 

Breaking News: Marijuana Gets You High!

Maia Szalavitz, 1 May, 2007

Totally awesome brain scans freak reporters out. Does sex "damage" the brain too?

 

While brain scans can contribute a great deal to our understanding of mental illness, addiction and how the brain works ordinarily, their effects on journalists are not so positive. Take the lead of this story by the AP, covering a study of marijuana:

 

“New findings on marijuana's damaging effect on the brain show the drug triggers temporary psychotic symptoms in some people, including hallucinations and paranoid delusions, doctors say.”

 

As anyone who has ever smoked marijuana or watched a Cheech and Chong movie could tell you: “Duh!” The fact that marijuana produces paranoia and hallucinations temporarily is not exactly headline-making. And calling this a “damaging effect on the brain” is misleading: damage implies permanent, detrimental changes; the brain scans in question show only a moment in time when the subjects were high, not what happened afterwards. By the same token, eating chocolate, having sex, or going for a run could all be classified as having a “damaging” effect on the brain.

 

Which is why it’s important to note when covering brain scan-based research that a “change” in the brain isn’t necessarily a bad thing: learning, falling in love, seeing, hearing and virtually any other experience can be expected to cause changes in the brain. If something doesn’t cause a change, it hasn’t been remembered or experienced. The tricky part is determining what brain changes mean.

 

The study in question did find interesting things about the areas of the brain affected by marijuana. But the AP claimed that it “provides physical evidence of the drug's damaging influence on the human brain,” which is simply not a conclusion that can be drawn from this data. Scanning someone’s brain while they are under the influence of a drug tells us nothing about what that brain is like when they are not under the influence.

 

This study looked at users while they were high, so it cannot offer any information about after-effects. Only a study that scanned the same people repeatedly over a long period of time could do that. Journalists need to understand what brain scans can and cannot prove, especially as such data moves from the lab into the courtroom and legal system.

http://stats.org/stories/2007/breaking_mari_high_may1_07.htm

 

What we see in the Australian media lately is a lazy journalists propaganda war which is virtually one sided. Its only rarely you see another side to the story.

[Frazz]

Well praise the Ganja Gods ... at long last some truth has 'leaked' out ... many thanks for this article Al B. ..

 

and well pointed out Freddie regarding the sad loss of such a talented fellow aussie (Heath L.) to the evil, wicked pharmacetical agents of death and despair ..

 

[WantDaChronic]

thanks for the good stories guys, they have already made my day

[RobbieGanjaSeed]

Prescription drugs? Bad for ya? Yeah?

 

I've smoked pot al my life and so far so good. I started taking presciption drugs for my back some years ago now and to be modest, it's more than fair to say my lif eis fucked up by it. Totally addicted and sick to the core, that's the "medicicne".

 

I like ya point Mullray, about skunk hey.

 

I got locked into some dumb arse debate with two youth workers, while we were planning somthing that never got off the ground. In fact it was the last I had to do with it all, BECAUSE I felt they just couldn't be reached withthe truth. They were ranting about the power of marinjuana among the kids they wanted to reach, the damage in their lives (this was news at the time).

I made the observation that for years we'd been around skate parks and so forth at night with these kids, and not once, never ever did we see them busted with grass, in spite of regularly seeing the police go through the crowds of kids for warrants etc, and busting them for booze. I pointed out the kids we'd seen were perpetually blotto on booze, and grass was so out of their price range it was something they couldn't afford.

 

The reply was "Rob we're glad to have your experience of past marijauan use (of course I keep contempary matters private), but you just don't understand like we do (they go to loads of lectures and so forth on drugs and kids), there's this new marijauna, especially designed, and sends kids mad with just a few uses...it's called skunk". They went on to tell me it was 17 times stronger than anything ever seen before, that it turns kids into skitophrenia patients within months, even weeks of regulalry using it. This skunk is so new, and so dangerous it's frightening they told me..

 

The first I ever heard of seed banks was in th eback of a Rosenthal book "the closet gardener". I spent a small fortune in 1995 calling Dutch exchanges driving them mad with enquiries to find a dope seed bank. it was all rather funny in hindsight. Anyway I finally got them after a long line of attempts, (they were next to the hash mueseum whoever they were), and knowing the name of only one varriety of exotic dutch dope, asked for "skunk" mysefl.

Man was he unimpressed, like "I'm sick of endless calls from drop kicks around the world asking for skunk", because his un-impressed reply was "you want skunk#1, skunk#2, this skunk, that skunk...or...(then listed loads of stuff I never had heard of)..

 

But here we are, 2007 and these guys are telling me that skunk has hit the streets..These "researchers" are so bad at "reasearching", if they were in any other trade they'd go broke.

 

 

rob