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Daily Marijuana Use And Highly Potent Weed Linked To Psychosis
Weed use is taking off as more states move to legalize it. And with all the buzz over medical marijuana, it's starting to gain an aura of healthfulness. But there are some serious health risks associated with frequent use. One of the more troubling ones is the risk of having a psychotic episode.
Several past studies have found that more frequent use of pot is associated with a higher risk of psychosis, that is, when someone loses touch with reality. Now a new study published Tuesday [open, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30048-3] [DX] in the The Lancet Psychiatry shows that consuming pot on a daily basis and especially using high potency cannabis increases the odds of having a psychotic episode later.
[...] The study also shows that three European cities — London, Paris and Amsterdam — where high potency weed is most commonly available actually have higher rates of new cases of psychosis than the other cities in the study. [...] The researchers identified 901 people aged 18 to 64 who were diagnosed with their first episode of psychosis between May 2010 and April 2015, at a mental health facility anywhere in 11 cities, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, other cities across Europe, and one site in Brazil.
The researchers then asked these individuals and a control group of 1,200-plus other healthy people about their habits, including their use of weed. "We asked people if they used cannabis, when did they start using it and what kind of cannabis," explains study author Marta Di Forti, a psychiatrist and clinician scientist at King's College London. People reported the names of weed strains they used, like skunk in the U.K., or the Dutch Nederwiet, which allowed the researchers to identify the THC content in each product through data gathered by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and national data from the different countries.
The study found that those who used pot daily were three times more likely to have a psychotic episode compared to someone who never used the drug.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @06:46PM (2 children)
I use extremely high TCH cannabis oil to treat cancer, specifically colon cancer in my lungs. 3 years ago I was given 2-6 months to live max, with 2 being the more likely scenario. I quite chemo and went on Rick Simpson Oil (see phoenixtears.ca or Rick Simpson's FB page for more info). For 6 months I was off work, stoned out of my guard 20+ hours/day taking 1000 ml of RSO daily, and have been on a (smaller) maintenance dose ever since. I didn't expect it to work, but I did expect to die fairly quickly in far less pain than if I continued chemo. Instead, 6 months and 160 or so grams of RSO later I was in complete remission and returned to work, and have been productively working ever since.
I hate being high--I find it miserable, and while you're high you are arguably divorced from reality (just like someone blindingly drunk would be), but never was I anywhere near having a psychotic episode, nor have I ever been. It's a challenge to cope with, but compared to chemo, the after-effects of losing a chunk of your colon, rectum, liver, and lungs, it's a fucking cakewalk.
This is a ridiculous, manufactured result with a cherry-picked and highly-skewed sample base, designed to reach a particular solution. It is no coincidence that the FDA almost never allows marijuana studies designed to see if it has any benefits, but will throw their weight (and money) behind studies designed to reach these kinds of highly-questionable conclusion.
Cannabis saved my life, and continues to save my life. Should these evil pricks ever get their way and take it away from us, I will probably be dead within months.
Which I suspect suits their plans just fine. It's become quite clear than the American Plutocrats want everyone else to work for them for all of their lives, and the moment we are no longer productive in making them richer they'd like nothing more than for us to either (1) have become rich enough to be self-sustaining through retirement, including paying ever increasing medical costs, or (2) go away and die. (2) is probably preferable, as (1) implies we've managed to earn money they would like to have in their pockets instead.
Either way, their drive to cut and eventually eliminate Social Security and Medicare clearly points to an agenda along these lines. And their attitudes toward the poor and impoverished are even worse. Just wait until automation kicks in...it is not that far fetched that at that point they wouldn't mind depopulating the world of all the non-extremely-wealthy so they can have it all for themselves. Whether or not that's their actual intention or attitude (I believe it is, based on their policies, actions, and reading between the lines of their rhetoric), it is clearly in keeping with what they are doing to the rest of us. Marijuana prohibition is almost just a footnote, albeit a deadly one for those of us keeping our cancer at bay with RSO.
(Now queue the right-wing apologists accusing me of being "psychotic" for having suggested such a thing about their uber-rich heroes, whom they worship with far more fervor than they do their invisible friend in the sky in whose name they justify this crap. When the emprorer is naked, they sure don't like anyone pointing out the lack of clothing.)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 20 2019, @06:58PM
Uhhh, hold up a bit, please? Did you make a typo up there? Colon cancer in your lungs? I breezed past that, then a nice cruel joke started forming in my mind, so I had to look back. Fek - lemme try a search engine, see if I find something meaningful . . .
OK, minus the cruelty, it's still a pretty shitty situation. Sounds like you're talking about something like this: https://www.froedtert.com/colorectal-cancer/metastic-disease/lung-metastasis [froedtert.com]
Yeah, I realize it's just some doctor's advert, but it was the first hit I found that conveyed anything meaningful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @12:41AM
Thanks for an interesting rant. One of my best friends was given 6 weeks to live after diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, in his early 70s. Medical marijuana kept him going for over a year, and relatively pain free until the very end. Bonus was that he was able to see his first grandchild born.
> it is not that far fetched that at that point they wouldn't mind depopulating the world of all the non-extremely-wealthy so they can have it all for themselves.
I'm not that kind of wealthy, but I do enjoy living near one of the rust belt cities that lost a lot of population back in the 1970s. Around here, a traffic jam might be a 10 minute inconvenience. A lot of local infrastructure is sized for higher population, it's not cramped, real estate is reasonably priced. It's all low stress, people (even other drivers) are mostly friendly and helpful.