Who here enjoys a bit off weed here. I do, but there is still a lot of stigma with it causing mental health problems. What do you think about this? 
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bambie Wrote:Who here enjoys a bit off weed here. I do, but there is still a lot of stigma with it causing mental health problems. What do you think about this? Obviously nobody here smokes weed... except me of course...
And weed does NOT cause mental health problem.
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There is no evidence that weed causes mental health problems and weed has got a bad rap in general, perpetuated by the powers that be of course. The War On Drugs benefits the U.S industrial prison complex (1 out of every 99 U.S citizens is in jail, the majority for non-violent charges), it benefits Big Pharma (weed is a better treatment for some conditions than over-the-counter treatments), and it opens peoples minds (making them harder to control).
I don't smoke it myself, but am aware of the biased and corporate led opinions that lawmakers and the state have towards it.
The serious: Google "American Drug War: The Last White Hope"
The fun: Google "Stoned in Suburbia"
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Quote:Mental health problems
There is growing evidence that people with serious mental illness, including depression and psychosis, are more likely to use cannabis or have used it for long periods of time in the past. Regular use of the drug has appeared to double the risk of developing a psychotic episode or long-term schizophrenia. However, does cannabis cause depression and schizophrenia or do people with these disorders use it as a medication?
Over the past few years, research has strongly suggested that there is a clear link between early cannabis use and later mental health problems in those with a genetic vulnerability - and that there is a particular issue with the use of cannabis by adolescents.
Depression
A study following 1600 Australian school-children, aged 14 to 15 for seven years, found that while children who use cannabis regularly have a significantly higher risk of depression, the opposite was not the case - children who already suffered from depression were not more likely than anyone else to use cannabis. However, adolescents who used cannabis daily were five times more likely to develop depression and anxiety in later life.
Schizophrenia
Three major studies followed large numbers of people over several years, and showed that those people who use cannabis have a higher than average risk of developing schizophrenia. If you start smoking it before the age of 15, you are 4 times more likely to develop a psychotic disorder by the time you are 26. They found no evidence of self-medication. It seemed that, the more cannabis someone used, the more likely they were to develop symptoms.
Why should teenagers be particularly vulnerable to the use of cannabis? No one knows for certain, but it may be something to do with brain development. The brain is still developing in the teenage years – up to the age of around 20, in fact. A massive process of ‘neural pruning’ is going on. This is rather like streamlining a tangled jumble of circuits so they can work more effectively. Any experience, or substance, that affects this process has the potential to produce long-term psychological effects.
Recent research in Europe, and in the UK, has suggested that people who have a family background of mental illness – and so probably have a genetic vulnerability anyway - are more likely to develop schizophrenia if they use cannabis as well.
from the website of the Royal College of Psychiatrists .
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HankyPanky Wrote:There is no evidence that weed causes mental health problems and weed has got a bad rap in general
Try working in mental health for a while, you will see the evidence
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I enjoy weed purely recreationally, perhaps once every six months. I try not to get particularly into it, it does indeed expand my mind in a unique way, but I'm perfectly capable of expanding my mind by myself, and alcohol too, even in mere moderation can help me do that.
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Ive personally never taken any drugs, my parents have always said "David...If the drugs dont kill you, i will!" However i dont see it as a problem for people who do it socially, as long as they don't try to force other to take it.
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I would be very interested to see the research which actually identifies the mechanism whereby weed causes mental health problems. I'm sure that kids who smoke weed before the age of 15 are more likely to develop mental health problems but nobody has shown that the weed causes those problems. Kids who smoke weed before 15 probably had a shitload of problems before they ever smoked anything.
Identifying the causal mechanism would be hard work. Anyone can feed numbers into a computer and I'm sure there's any number of organisations that will fund the number-crunching research, if it seems to prove what they want to believe anyway.
I am quite cynical about research undertaken for "medical" purposes. They proved that Prozac was not addictive, didn't they? They conned us into buying Tamiflu last winter and that apparently does no good at all except to Ronald Rumpsfeld who had invested heavily in it. (Not sure if I got his name right!)
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peterinmalaga Wrote:I would be very interested to see the research which actually identifies the mechanism whereby weed causes mental health problems. I'm sure that kids who smoke weed before the age of 15 are more likely to develop mental health problems but nobody has shown that the weed causes those problems. Kids who smoke weed before 15 probably had a shitload of problems before they ever smoked anything.
Identifying the causal mechanism would be hard work. Anyone can feed numbers into a computer and I'm sure there's any number of organisations that will fund the number-crunching research, if it seems to prove what they want to believe anyway.
I am quite cynical about research undertaken for "medical" purposes. They proved that Prozac was not addictive, didn't they? They conned us into buying Tamiflu last winter and that apparently does no good at all except to Ronald Rumpsfeld who had invested heavily in it. (Not sure if I got his name right!)
In my experience working with teens in the mental health field, it seems that your statement is very true. Teens who smoke marijuana tend to have other, more severe problems which they use weed to get away from or forget about . . . typically, PTSD from physical and/or sexual violence. Unfortunately, when the weed stops working for them, those traumatic experiences linger and the problems remain unsolved. From there, they tend to delve deeper into drug use.
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"...They proved that Prozac was not addictive, didn't they?"
I dunno about that, I have a friend who is addicted to it... Maybe a certain type. I dunno.
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