UK gov't claim: Smoking just one joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%

bullshit you can say that again man .........watched this on the news at 6.00 a.m this morning and then laughed out loud and built a j .

 

99.9% of the pot smokers i know are just swell dandy fine. but there is ONE, a friend of my husband. they were heavy pot smokers, but johnathon never smoked or drank anything. one night dave and rob got him totally blazed, and something happened. he just lost it, completely. he was never okay again. dave and rob blamed themselves for years, but they had no way of knowing his family had a history of mental illness. his brain just broke, but he was predisposed to pschyzophrenia. last summer, after years of misery, he finally hacked and slashed himself to death. i couldnt' say that he wouldn't have broken anyway, though. just maybe that was the one thing that sent him over the edge. it was pretty immediate and terrifying. one day he's normal, the next day he's insane.

 

meh... gordon brown needs to win points... and the smokers are an easy target, as ever....

I was a loon long before i smoked weed ... and i been smoking 17 (ish) yrs

 

Skip, I notice you keep posting articles from the Daily Mail, you may not be aware but this is one of the country's most conservative tabloids and has a reputation for alarmist right-wing reporting like this and its borderline racist anti-immigration stance. It's really not taken seriously other than by the ignorant idiots who buy it...

 

yeah. it was tragic, but odds are good he woulda gone crazy eventually anyway. i think it helped him along, but like i said, he was just waiting to go over the edge. i can't think of anyone i know who doesn't partake, or hasn't at least once. the physical reaction i have to even the best is uncomfortable, so it's not my thing. but alarmism about pot when there's food additives that can mess people up enough that they' start taking pharmaceuticals to combat it (which have to list those same food additives on the warning label) seems really stupid to me. what the hell?

 

I can see no basis for the "single joint" claim from the headline, in fact when it starts to quote the actual report there's a quoted paragraph which says that the risk of cannabis induced psychotic illness is very small and only measurable on a population basis.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,,2135996,00.html

Read the Guardian's treatment of the same Lancet study and you start to see what the report was really about - yes they claim a 40% increase in risk but the study references 1% likelihood in the general population of developing schizophrenia and 1.4% likelihood among those who have smoked cannabis. Indicating perhaps that for that small percentage who may have dormant mental health problems, cannabis use may be a trigger. It doesn't give sample sizes in these articles but given the relatively small number of cases of schizophrenia there's likely to be a large error margin anyway.

The Daily Mail report is an absolute travesty of the actual study published in the Lancet, the UKs leading medical academic journal, but they got their shock headlines, and that's all that counts I suppose.

Also it's not a "UK Government claim"...

 

Thanks for that Jon, trust your reviews.

 

The Daily Mail makes it sound like that if you smoke pot, you have absolutely no hope; all pot users will one day turn schitz and become a danger to society. Its really, really pathetic, they're just blowing it all out of proportion-mountain out of a molehill as you would, so when Brown actually reclassifies it to Class B again, everyones going to think he's doing the public a much bigger 'favour' and saving them all from evil, psycho pot smokers!!!

My parents are big Daily Mail believers. That doesn't bode well for me.

 

Smoking a lot of blow daily will make you ill long term, I believe; or at least my experience tells me so. But the current scare mongering is just the same old shite. Lets hope there's a news item, say interest rate increase to inflate mortage repayments, to take the focus away from this issue again.

It's funny how many of these policy makers have began to have their own skeletons revealed showing a past littered with parties and experiences that highlight the hypocracy of it all.

 

what a load of shit the goverment are just trying to scare people they no its not true what i say and this for video games its not the weed that makes the mental people they are born mental and then choose to smoke weed they were mental all along personaly the goverment can all burn in hell especially david cameron!!!

 

just imgine it a life without a goverment :drool:

 

everything is bullshit - goverment, gangs , newspapers , tv , everything except the people you care about ... and weed thats all that matters

 

dope does affect the brains of younger smokers more than older smokers purely down to the fact that a persons brain doesnt finish developing until their late teens/early twenties (forgive me i forget the age...though i think its around 24). so it is true that it is more harmful to younger smokers. i didnt read the article from the mail as its far too early in the morning to be wound up by ignorant arseholes
peace x

 

The main drift to me is the emphasis on skunk (new strains) being dangerous to mental health. There's no doubt that greedy producers are spraying it with chemicals for an instant-hit effect and that's bad news all round. If the Government did the decent thing and legalised all drugs then it could spend that futile policing money on environmental projects like more public transport, affordable housing and allotmemt provision.

 

i really don't get the illegality of pot, i never will. it just doesn't make any sense. i think my mom would absolutely love it. she's getting older, her body is giving her some trouble, not to mention low grade arthritis. there's no mental illness or dementia on her side of the family. i think she'd be an ideal candidate for the benefits of pot. and i wouldn't mind it if she chilled the hell out just a little bit.

 

In my opinion if you already have issues with yourself or are inhibited in any way then weed is just going to highten any bad vibes you may have, but to any self assured folk all smoking is going to to is open the mind to allsorts of beautifullness and chilled vibes, I don't think this 'super skunk' thats been chemicaly enhanced is such a good idea for young minds, lets get back to natural, unadulterated herb.

 

We're not in the realm of rational debate here. The UK government recently decided to re-classify cannabis as class B (carrying heavier sentences for possession) in the face of a report from their own Advisory Council which said it should remain as class C (possession not normally an arrestable offence).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7386889.stm

The trouble is that although, as lithium pointed out a while ago, tabloids like the Daily Mail are only taken seriously by a cranky minority, that minority appears to include our neo-Labour rulers.

Footnote: if "skunk" really does pose a new and serious threat to young peoples' mental health, it should be straightforward enough to amend the legislation to isolate it as a distinct category of drug, separate from common-or-garden weed.

 

Do they really have the timje for this kind of bull? When cigarettes are perfectly legal. A tad:toetap05:annoying, the figures obviously bollocks and there are far more pressing issues. Im personally not a fan of any drug i can think of really, but if someone wants to smoke a few joints it doesnt come up as a major concern for me, in comparison to other things were facing