Bloody Media

[andrewducker]

Headline: Cannabis 'raises psychosis risk'
Content: Cannabis users are 40% more likely than non-users to suffer a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, say UK experts.
Rebuttal (right at the very end of the article): "Their prediction that 14% 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."
Article here.

Comments

[0olong.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen of it, the research only actually demonstrates a correlation - which is old news. Maybe there's a causal link there, but 100+ years of studies have generally failed to demonstrate one convincingly; the thing is, you can control for people with a history of psychiatric problems, but there is just no way to control directly for people predisposed to them, and it's eminently plausible that there could be strong confounding factors at work. A lot of people smoke weed partly to deal with stress, for example; the fact that many schizophrenics self-medicate with cannabis (which apparently works very well for some) obviously complicates matters; there is inevitably some correlation between a desire to use drugs and a dissatisfaction with life-as-it-is; and, of course, with a willingness to experiment with different states of mind and being, whether in the form of other drugs or just outlandish ideas about the world.

So, it is quite possible that cannabis does in fact cause psychotic illness in some cases; but it's bloody difficult to prove, and people have been trying to do so for literally a century or more, without any real success. Unless I'm missing some ingenious statistical methods and particularly convincing guesswork, this is yet another (quite interesting) study which doesn't really prove anything in particular.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think this is a plausible explanation of the correlation. My intuition from experience is that heavy cannabis use in particular is a symptom more than a cause of disengagement from society and life in general. On the other hand, you do see an acceleration of the problem as people withdraw into heavy constant stonedness. On the third hand, this could be caused by any obsessional pursuit, such as playing computer games every waking hour. So - complex - not sure what I think.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

On the premise that no link between cannibal use and psychotic illness is ever going to be proven on account of the various problems with method already mentioned, perhaps the more important thing is which studies get media attention and why, given the we want to reclassify cannabis back to a class B drug nonsense. I'm confident that you'd see a correlation there.