"Police chiefs are accusing parents of showing ignorance and complacency in the face of widespread cannabis use among teenage children" says the article ... blah blah ... yadda yadda ... ah, what's this ..."What is largely unseen are our psychiatric hospitals full of people whose illnesses have been triggered by cannabis"
Wot? Can't we just look at the f***ing facts, please? Pretty f***ing please?
1) According to the NHS, "The rate of detentions in NHS hospitals under the [Mental Health Act1983] (including detentions after admission) in 2005-06 in England was 87 per 100,000 population".
2) Around one-in-three teenagers smoke cannabis more than once a year. Let's take a wild guess and say that one-in-ten of overall population smokes cannabis regularly.
3) How many of those detentions from (1) were because of cannabis? No idea. Let's go with one-in-seven (see final quote below). So even among regular cannabis users, there is only a one-in-eight-hundred chance that it'll drive you mad. Seeing as there is a one per cent chance that you'll die in any year anyway, those aren't bad odds at all.
4) As to the link between smoking cannabis and mental illness, The Times claims that heavy use doubles risk of psychosis. This statistic is meaningless - for example, going out into your back garden increases the risk of being hit by a meteorite from outer space tenfold - the important question is, what is the risk of being hit by a meteorite, or in this case, becoming psychotic?
Further down, there's this ... "Leslie Iverson, of the University of Oxford, a member of the advisory council, said: “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”
A grim document
16 hours ago
12 comments:
Alcoholics always started on milk, you know.
Help us dissolve the lies which are published about cannabis, join us at the Legalise Cannabis Alliance.
Alcohol would be banned if it was discovered now, as would tobacco.
Alcohol causes more psychiatric morbidity anyway, but you don't see figures for that.
Cannabis well its not the ordinary cannabis that causes the problems its the skunk and highly concentrated versions.
No wonder whole houses are turned over to cannabis farms.
Henry, recent research has prooved that cannabis is no more stronger now that in the 60s. Skunk is just 1 variety of many different strains of cannabis.
The real danger is not that cannabis is stronger today than in the 60's unless they used the cannabis leaf back then instead of the flowers (bud). But the majority of cannabis resin/bud sold on the street by dealers has been adulterated with toxic chemicals.
There is no scientific evidence that cannabis causes mental health problems, only meta analysis e.g. "higher rates of mental health problems amongst cannabis users." No one has proved the direction of causality.
Also, many of the supposed health problems related to cannabis are only related to smoking it. Eating it is much healthier and in fact has no proven health problems associated with it.
The dangers though, are beside the point. No one seems to be suggesting that maybe, just maybe, if people want to fuck with their heads and fill their lungs with rar, then maybe that's their choice. How can it be legal to strangle yourself and read the Guardian but not to smoke pot or scoff some shrooms?
Well put Simon.
I can't understand how we are allowed to visit numerous chemists supermarkets to buy over the counter medicines and a couple of bottles of vodka to wash them all down.
Yet a god given plant is illegal to grow or use.
It's OK to "do ourselves in" as long as it's with legal drugs.
What sense is in that?
Thanks for all your comments!
Don't forget to comment on the government's own drugs consultation:
http://drugs.homeoffice.gov.uk/publication-search/drug-strategy/drug-strategy-consultation.pdf
Spread the word!
You should probably bear in mind the fact that most psychiatric patients are voluntary, and are therefore not counted in the figure you quote, which is only about patients compulsorily detained under the Mental Health Act 1983.
More generally, assuming as you appear to in (3) that "the number of patients who have been sectioned" is in any way equivalent to "the number of people who are mad" is just ludicrous.
Tom, valid points, but what are the actual figures?
Mark: I don't know, and I don't know if they even exist.
One big issue in all this is that young black men are, for a range of reasons, massively overrepresented in the psychiatric system - black men are ten times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. We can argue about whether that's due to racism, misunderstanding of cultural issues, a genuinely higher predisposition towards mental health problems among young black men than among the general population, or whatever.
Young black men are also more likely than the general population to use cannabis.
If you have a group which is (1) more likely than the general population to get diagnosed with schizophrenia; and (2) more likely than the general population to smoke cannabis, then you'll get what looks like a significant correlation between using cannabis and severe mental illness. It may reflect a causal relationship. But the problem is that the correlation may well be due to independent factors which have nothing at all to do with cannabis use causing mental health problems.
Tom, exactly. You have just provided an object lesson in proving that you can't prove anything with whatever vague statistics we have.
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