Debunking the Latest Pathetic Fear Smear Campaign Against Marijuana

No, smoking pot likely will not make you psychotic.

By Paul Armentano / AlterNet February 22, 2015


Photo Credit: Stanimir G.Stoev/Shutterstock.com

The mainstream media was abuzz this week promoting an age-old claim: Smoking marijuana makes you crazy.

“Psychosis five times more likely for cannabis users: study,” a wire story from Agence France-Presse declared. The UK Mail on Sunday expressed similar alarm, declaring, “Scientists show cannabis TRIPLES psychosis risk.” Somewhat surprisingly, it was Fox News that took the most reserved approach, announcing “Smoking high-potency marijuana may cause psychiatric disorders.”

So what was the source of this latest round of sensational headlines? Writing in the February 18 edition of the British journal The Lancet Psychiatry, investigators assessed rates of cannabis use in a cohort of South London first-episode psychosis patients versus pot use frequency in a similar group selected from the general population. Authors reported that subjects with psychosis were more likely to recall having used “skunk-like cannabis” daily as compared to controls, whereas those participants who reported primarily consuming hashish possessed no elevated risk of having such a diagnosis. (Researchers defined so-called skunk marijuana as cannabis possessing THC concentrations above 15 percent. Of course, since cannabis is illegal in Britain and the weed obtained on the black market is not subject to analytical potency testing, it is unclear how subjects in the study—or its authors—knew whether participants were consuming supposed "high-potency" herb or just regular, plain old weed.)

.......The Bottom Line? Mental Health Concerns Don’t Justify Criminalization

Is it possible that the habitual use of high-potency cannabis may potentially aggravate or even trigger psychiatric episodes in subjects predisposed to certain mental illnesses? Yes. However, such concerns are not persuasive justifications for continuing cannabis criminalization. Just the opposite holds true. There are numerous adverse health consequences associated with alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs, all of which are far more dangerous and costlier to society than cannabis. It is precisely because of these consequences that these products are legally regulated and their consumption is restricted to specified setting and to certain consumers (the most vulnerable of which, such as pregnant women, are often explicitly warned of the drug’s potential adverse effects in this population). It is time to once and for all ended society’s nearly century-long love affair with reefer madness and applied these same common sense principles to cannabis.