Newly published study concludes cannabis precipitates psychosis

I agree with you. I am always for more research and studies - but not to contest legality, just to make sure that when it is made legal it is done safely, correctly, and with plenty of honest information available to help people make the right decision.

Although, there is no such thing as a perfect world or perfect laws either.

 

Oh look, another study that says I'm going bonkers because I smoke trees. Guess I better quit now.

I would totally care, except that I'm quite sure that my current outlook on life would be considered quite deranged and psychotic by those running the study, and I'm quite sure there's nothing TOO wrong with my current outlook, other than the fact that the law happens to go against it.

Psychosis does not mean what most people think, just by the way. It's not the end of the world, or the end of your sanity, it just means things are too much and you have a few crazy ideas, and then go "oh, that's crazy".

Also, of course cannabis precipitating psychosis is something we've long known, and it's not really a point against cannabis in any way. It's not what it sounds like to people with small vocabularies.

 

So.. you're saying psychosis is not real? I can assure you it's more than a different outlook. If you doubt you have psychosis then i'm pretty sure you don't have it.

Also, it's not against the law to have any particular outlook. There are no thought crimes yet.

 

What gets me about this is that so-called human beings acting as scientists actually screened out anyone who smoked before, so they were in charge of making their guinea pigs suffer from psychosis (according to them).

I mean its like punching someone so they can get their views on what its like being punched.

I don't expect I'm the first one to notice this, but the world has gone mad, hasn't it? Long ago, in fact?

 

I edited my post to add a bit more.

That's not what I said. But the articles appear to be misleading. Do you have a link to the actual study? I get tired of reading that "this confirms what we knew all along, that super potent child raping skunk cannabis makes you go incurably fucking bonkers, with schizophrenic LIKE symptoms".

Yeah, and Salvinorin A has LSD like effects.

 

Nothing unethical about the procedure, in my opinion. They did not force or encourage anyone to smoke cannabis, and the screening was to ensure that they were starting from a clean slate.

I love how this thread has earned a one star rating. Yeah man all cannabis users are totally open-minded about everything! :banghead:

 

^^^ walsh I agree, I know some ppl with psychosis, its not just about being a bit crazy, its a big thing. A lot of well ppl think mental illness sufferers should just get over it like everyone else has to, but of course mh sufferers aren't like everyone else. However, a lot of normal, healthy dissent against social snobbery / governmental excess / the fact that spokeo can get all your details without you knowing etc. etc., that dissent is often dismissed as psychosis

 

Sure, here's the full text: http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d738.full

I can relate to that, and I'm no doctor, but I think rational paranoia of that kind isn't considered psychotic. Those people are usually in touch with reality, mostly. There are set physiological and psychological criteria for diagnosing this illness, and I'd like to think they make room for mild delusional thoughts. It's not normal to have hallucinations and incomprehensible speech in waking life.

 

nothing at all with getting ppl stoned, I just think, the establishment put out this thing that dope makes you crazy, and back it up by giving dope, which they believe to be harmful, to people. The only thing I don't like about dope is running out

 

....Kinda sounds like YOU already went bonkers off that skunk cannabis.

But I will say, "dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"

Thank you for the full link. I might not agree with their definitions of everything, or how they describe it, but it's much better to read the people I don't agree with than read OTHER people I don't agree with paraphrasing the first people I don't agree with.

 

What I find most interesting is how they define psychosis in this study.

There are strict guidelines for a psychosis diagosis. It seems like in this study they are leaving too much room for interpretation by studying subclinical psychosis rather than diagnosable, clinical psychosis. The incident rate of psychosis is shown to increase the longer one smokes cannabis, but what symptoms exactly are they looking for when determining subclinical psychosis? How are they defining it?

 

That was probably their point though, they're not looking for marijuana=psychosis, they look for correlation, not causation since drugs, along with food and everything else affects people differently. Looking for psychosis itself wasn't their goal, the goal is to see if consuming object X leads to symptoms of disease Z since people display symptoms more than often than actually being diagnosed with it. In fact that goes for almost anything, this is how doctors try to stop something bad from happening before it happens, you look for symptoms that when put together give a strong indication that the subject/group has a much larger chance of coming down with Z than the rest of the general public.

 

Meliai, that is confusing, because they go on to say they used the computerised version of the Munich composite international diagnostic interview DIA-X/M-CID, an updated version of the CIDI version 1.2 which can be used for clinical diagnosis.

TheMadcapSyd: I got the impression that they were looking for causation, because there have been many correlation studies before. They conclude that it may increase the risk. If cannabis use precedes symptoms where there has been no prior history, that's causal isn't it?

 

The thing about correlation/causation is you can't prove causation, unless you take people who would othewise not smoke marijuana, and force them to smoke marijuana. If they're smoking marijuana, there's a host of other possibilities, for all we know it could be the reverse of the causation they're looking for, those who are more prone to psychosis are thusly more prone to seek out marijuana.

Also, you're saying they used a clinical test to check for subclinical psychosis? How can we possibly trust what they found? Everyone's going to have SOME degree of irregular thought, we're all different, everyone will show up at a different place on the graph.

This said, I still haven't read the study, maybe later tonight.

 

You really can't prove causation with anything involving the human body's interaction with drugs. You can only prove correlation, even extreme correlation, i.e. excessive alcohol consumption leading to liver damage, tobacco smoking leading to lung problems, ect can't be placed under causation, since there are people who smoke like chimneys, drink like sailors, then die of natural causes at 89.

 

Even then the argument could be "would they have lived longer if said person did not drink like a sailor" or even "what is natural cause". Just being the devils advocate.

 

That's true. But from what I've read about this study so far, it still doesn't look like they've come close to making a good case for causation, or even properly defined what they're looking for.

"well it doesn't cause psychosis.... But we think it causes ALMOST psychosis, so we can totally put psychosis in the title"

 

It's looking for correlation, nothing else, this is essentially how all medical information is made. If someone(well generally a group) consuming X seems to show a statistically significant amount of more symptoms beyond that of the the general public of disease Y, and if the correlation still exists when control factors are taken into account, ladies and gentlemen you have correlation.

 

But this doesn't properly do that, it says "we think they might be closer to having a disease, even if they don't have this disease" and then try to make that look like it shows that they have this disease.

And all they're EVEN trying to show, from what I can see, is that it makes a-symptomatics slightly less a-symptomatic, even if they don't show proper symptoms. What if these guys are regular pot smokers, and just like any other day, woke up, took a toke, and then went and filled out a questionare? Sounds like they're measuring the fact that being high changes your thought processes....

That is to say, it sounds like the conclusion is that "marijuana smokers show a higher percentage of being stoned than non marijuana smokers". I mean, shit, let me smoke a research grade doobie and I could tell you that.

Again, from what i can see, still haven't read much of the full study.

 

Now, is this study different than those which showed a correlation with psychadelics (pot included) and the onset of schizophrenia in people with latent schizophrenia, or is this something more broad?