Marijuana and Mental Illness
What the Weed Industry Isn't Telling us
A week or so back a post on Facebook linked to a story on the Unity Bill, the legislation passed in this legislative session designed to fix many of the problems with SQ 788. The story discussed the August 28th implementation of the law and what employers needed to know. STP looked into the issue, found it was indeed a good thing that employers were soon to get some relief to prevent worker injuries and law claims by being able to fire or simply not hire those with medical marijuana cards or those who couldn't pass a drug test. A story was written covering the benefits to employers and that set off many in the marijuana industry and the attacks on Facebook exploded.
Many issues can be controversial but to this date we have never seen the rancor and vicious attacks that the story on weed and employers rights generated. As the story was posted the weed addicts and marijuana industry folks poured out of the woodwork, making threats, threatening boycotts to businesses, spewing hatred and curse words that were far out of proportion to the normal reaction to even a controversial story. What was learned of it all was that marijuana addicts and users do have a solid connection with mental illness and any threat to the runaway weed legalization effort was going to cause the crazies to flood out of the cracks in society.
Like many we had swallowed the propaganda that weed was less harmful than booze, that it make addicts and users lose ambition and brain cells, creating slackers rather than madmen. The old movie “Reefer Madness” was thrown up more than once by the drug addicts, as an example of the government keeping weed illegal so as to line someone's pockets or placate industries that competed with weed or hemp. Little did we know that there is a whole bunch of science behind the idea that weed seriously messes with people's minds and that the weed industry and the politicians promoting legal weed were hell bent to suppress any debate or studies on the effect of marijuana on mental illness.
The evidence is out there in abundance. NAMI, the premier mental illness advocacy group had a blog posting that covered a speech on the opioid crisis and the risk of majrjuana consumption. The blog talked about the “elephant” in the room, risks to mental health from the use of marijuana. The author is a clinical psychiatrist that treats addiction and he believes that the legalization of weed is a huge negative and will have consequences. The risk of schizophrenia increases with the use of marijuana and especially with teenagers using weed. There is some discussion of whether the weed uses causes the psychosis or if it merely reveals the psychosis. Teens that used weed were six times more likely to develop mental illness than non addict teens.
The story goes on to ask that medical professionals share what the data says even if doing so is unpopular.
There have been studies showing that weed increases the risk for psychiatric illnesses including psychosis, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. The age at which the person begins to use weed, how much drug is used, and if the person has a genetic vulnerability are part of the relationship. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says that there is a strong link between weed and other drug addiction and between weed and psychiatric disorders for those with genetic or other vulnerabilities. They found that weed increased the use of alcohol, smoking, weed addiction, and other drug addictions. Specifically, those that carry certain specific variants of some genes are at a risk of developing mental illness due to the flood of dopamine in the brain caused by using weed. Up to seven times higher risk for those that used weed daily. Other studies showed that weed use by mentally ill patients made their schizophrenia worse, something that even casual weed smokers joke about as one of the common side effects of weed is heightened paranoia while stoned.
Some association between weed use and suicide attempts in teens have been shown as well as amotivational syndrome, the well known absence of drive and ambition among weed addicts.
Weed users have impaired short term memory, impaired attention, judgment, and cognitive skills while stoned. Their coordination and balance is impaired, their heart rate increases they are anxious, paranoid, and sometimes psychotic while stoned. The long term effects are impaired learning and coordination and sleep problems. With repeated use of weed you get the increase in addiction, long term learning and memory impairment, the loss of IQ, an increase of other drug and booze addictions, and of course the increased risk of schizophrenia in those with a genetic flaw.
Who is pushing the legalization of marijuana? It appears to be a combination of casual weed addicts and big pharma who have been leading the charge for marijuana legalization or for medical purposes. Hillsdale College has a good article on the unholy marriage of user and business interests and how weed is contributing to mental illness and violence in the states that have legalized weed. Their story claims that weed does work in a narrow few medical conditions including pain relief yet weed isn't commonly tested against simple things like over the counter pain relief remedies. In fact weed is a weak painkiller for those with a true need for strong pain killers like opioids and the weed advocates have long admitted that medical weed is just a ruse to advance weed legalization for recreational use.
The story echos much of what the other articles discussed, an increase in other drug addiction after a history of marijuana use, three times more likely to become hooked on other drugs than those that never used weed. The story aslo discusses the danger of increased psychiatric issues when weed is used by those with depression or other mental illnesses. In fact, the higher the use of weed the higher the chances of the weed aggravating other mental issues.
Legalization is said to have not increased the number of people using weed. Around 15 percent of the populatin uses weed compared to 65 percent that use booze. But the number of heavy users is vastly more in weed than in booze. Weed users are three times more likely to be heavy users than alcoholics. The weed itself has changed since the late sixties from two percent to over 20 percent thanks to selective breeding of weed plants and a demand for more and more potent highs from the weed.
The Hillsdale College story goes on to reveal that about eleven percent of all psychosis cases in emergency rooms are weed related, 90,000 cases a year, 250 victims per day. Countries like Finland and Denmark that do track mental illnesses and drug use showed an increase of mental cases advancing right along with the increase in weed use. And that data shows that younger teens between 12 and 17 show no increase in serious mental illness while the 18 to 25 year old range showed double the rate of increase of mental illness, meaning the easier availability of weed to older users increases the rate of problems.
I have learned that if you really want to understand the criminal mind you talk to bondsmen who make a living or go broke based upon their ability to understand the criminal mind. The bondsmen will tell you that weed smokers graduate to enhanced or laced weed as the ability to get high diminishes with frequent exposure to weed. The mental ill advocates don't like the stigmatization that comes when a mentally ill person commits a crime. Indeed the mentally ill are generally not violent but the ones that are violent can be extremely so as the normal social norms do not inhibit the mentally ill. The mentally ill are five times more likely to commit an act of violence, meaning that the small number of mentally ill that are violent carry a huge share of the violence that is committed each year. The mentally ill are twenty times more likely to kill someone than the average person but again it is a small subset of mentally ill doing the killing.
In truth, psychosis is a shockingly high risk factor for violence. The best analysis came in a 2009 paper in PLOS Medicine by Dr. Seena Fazel, an Oxford University psychiatrist and epidemiologist. Drawing on earlier studies, the paper found that people with schizophrenia are five times as likely to commit violent crimes as healthy people, and almost 20 times as likely to commit homicide.
Yet the mental patients that take their anti psychotic drugs are only slightly more likely to be violent, as long as they refrain from using recreational drugs, and if they do use drugs, the risk of violence becomes huge. As many as 27% of mental patients use weed, double the rate of normal people, and the use of weed often causes these patients to become very violent. As much as 50% higher chances of psychosis violence, four times higher than mental patients that didn't' smoke weed. Other studies have found a ten times increase in violence if weed is mixed with anti psychotic drugs.
Weed causes an increase in paranoia, that is not disputed, and many of the defendants in criminal cases were the mentally ill have killed others the defendants claimed that the victim was a threat to them while admitting to have used weed on a regular basis. The simple fact is that even studies that weren't aimed at marijuana use have shown that domestic violence and other violent crimes is two to five times higher due to the widespread use of marijuana. The Hillsdale College article points out that the first four states to legalize weed, Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon have had a 37 percent increase in murders and a 25 percent increase in aggravated assaults, way above the national increase for such crimes. Child neglect is on the rise too along with child abuse from the abusers of weed, more than those cases caused by meth, booze, cocaine, or opioids combined.
The link between weed use and mental illness either increasing or coming on faster is well documented. Weed use has different effects on different people and unlike an FDA approved drug, weed has simply not been tested enough to know the entire effect upon a society. Once study has shown that weed causes a psychosis diagnoses 2.7 years earlier. We know that weed addicts or weed users have a 40% higher chance of psychosis than non weed users and that the chances increase with frequency of use and strength of the weed.
The marijuana activists are planning a 2020 state question on legalizing weed. Perhaps the citizens will rightfully reject straight out recreational use and prefer to keep the medical use legal till we learn more about the harm caused. Most people wouldn't begrudge a cancer patient using weed to ease out of life yet they are going to be a lot more skeptical at flat out legalizing a known health risk even before knowing about the effect on their children and the mentally ill.
