Tell Your Children by Alex Berenson

Author:Alex Berenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

EIGHT

STUDY AFTER STUDY AFTER STUDY

As journalists spread the feel-good myth about cannabis as a cure for opiates, hard evidence linking the drug to psychosis kept coming, from all over the world:

• “Association Between Cannabis Use and Psychosis-Related Outcomes Using Sibling Pair Analysis in a Cohort of Young Adults,” Archives of General Psychiatry, May 2010: 3,801 participants in Australia: Using cannabis beginning at age 15 raised risk of hallucinations by almost 3 times at 21.

• “Linking Substance Use with Symptoms of Subclinical Psychosis in a Community Cohort over 30 Years,” Addiction, 2011: 591 participants in Switzerland: Using cannabis regularly in adolescence raised risk of paranoid ideas such as “Someone else can control my thoughts” by 2.6 times.

• “Substance-induced Psychoses Converting into Schizophrenia: A Register-based Study of 18,478 Finnish Inpatient Cases, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, January 2013: Almost half of patients hospitalized with cannabis psychosis were diagnosed with schizophrenia within eight years. Psychosis caused by other drugs had lower rates of conversion, with alcohol at 5 percent.

• “Association of Combined Patterns of Tobacco and Cannabis Use in Adolescence with Psychotic Experiences,” JAMA Psychiatry, January 2018: 5,300 participants in England: Teenage cannabis use roughly tripled the risk of psychotic symptoms; tobacco use did not show a risk after adjusting for cannabis use.

• “Adolescent Cannabis Use, Baseline Prodromal Syndromes, and the Risk of Psychosis,” British Journal of Psychiatry, March 2018: 6,534 participants in Finland: Using cannabis more than five times raised the risk of psychotic disorders almost sevenfold; after adjusting for parental psychosis and other variables, cannabis tripled the risk.

In all, the studies covered tens of thousands of people in a half-dozen countries, though not the United States, as if American researchers didn’t think the issue worthy of their attention.

Along the way, genetic studies progressed enough to enable scientists to rule out one possible explanation for the link. Skeptics had questioned if cannabis use and psychosis were both evidence of an underlying genetic disorder.

Researchers created a database of people who had schizophrenia and examined their genes to see how they differed from healthy people. The scientists found dozens of different genes carried small risks for the disease. But when they looked at whether people with those genes were more likely to smoke marijuana, researchers found a small effect—which extended past cannabis to other drugs, too. In other words, the genes linked to schizophrenia did not cause marijuana smoking, though they may generally contribute to risky behaviors such as drug use.

The reverse was also true. Cannabis raised the risk of schizophrenia both in people who already had higher than usual genetic odds of developing the disease, such as the siblings of people with schizophrenia, and those at normal risk.

In other words, THC was a risk independent of genetic factors.

Two final pieces of evidence on THC’s dangers came from unlikely sources: drug companies looking for weight-loss medicines and drug users trying to get high in a way toxicology screens wouldn’t detect.

In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies began studying ways to turn off the CB1 receptor. The companies knew that marijuana could increase appetite by activating the receptor.

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