A story in
World Science may give some perspective for those of us who’ve gotten a bit too happy about the health benefits of marijuana as reported on these pages and elsewhere. It reports on a Yale study that says pot can create abnormal brain activation patterns more than a month after you smoke it. Pot-haters are going to pick up on this with enthusiasm — I think they’ve gotten tired of trying to explain away a slew of older studies indicating that pot really isn’t that bad for you. It’s probably not to be taken too seriously, since it’s considered too small a sample size to be a definitive study – but probably something to think about anyway.
"One of the first studies to use brain scans to examine marijuana’s effects has found that smoking it may be associated with changed brain activation patterns more than a month afterward. The study may come as a surprise to proponents of marijuana legalization, as it contradicts several previous results showing that there are no significant long-term effects of marijuana use. Normally human memory formation is associated with a specific pattern in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The pattern is abnormal in teenagers with a history of marijuana use, Yale University researchers found based on the study. The marijuana users in the study also performed worse on a simple working-memory tests in which the participants heard a list of words and periodically were asked to repeat a word that was one or two words back on the list. The marijuana users had stopped taking the drug for more than one month before the tests."
The claim that this new study may be surprising as it contradicts several earlier studies might be correct, but only if you are not aware of other evidence.
There’s serious evidence that marijuana usage is linked to schizophrenia in certain individuals. In recent years this evidence has been mounting fast.
The article in New Scientist is from 2002, but there are many later studies all of them pointing the same way.
Its a little off topic but you mentioned other test that had been conducted. As i understand the test you mentioned they are just indications that more scientific studies are needed. I condsider this to be a good idea. My question is why isn;t the same standard applied to drugs the FDA has approved. For example SSRI’s (anti depressents) are great profit makers for the drug companies and are certainly better then putting a bullet in your head. BUT there are indiations that there may be long term problems with them and there are also indications that the effects may be different for different populations of people. The drug companies seem to consider this a non issue and react much the way the tobacco companies act (denial). Shouldn’t we be putting other medications under the same scrutiny as grass
The article’s thesis is that there’s a “link between regular cannabis use and later depression and schizophrenia” and there is “‘little support’ for an alternative explanation – that people with mental illnesses self-medicate with marijuana.” Three studies are presented as proof.
The first study linked daily pot smoking by teens with later diagnosis of depression. By the author’s own admission, it was impossible to rule out social stigmatization of pot smokers as a cause of the depression.
The second study “revealed a dose-dependant relationship between the frequency of cannabis use and schizophrenia. This held true in men with no psychotic symptoms before they started using cannabis, suggesting they were not self-medicating.” Or it suggests that people start self-medicating before they present clinically significant symptoms. I don’t know why it’s such a novel concept that people may be influenced by subtle changes in their brains long before psychologists’ crude tests detect anything.
The third study: “But when the number of psychotic symptoms at age 11 was controlled for, this increased risk dropped to become non-significant. This suggests that people already at greater risk of later developing mental health problems are also more likely to smoke cannabis.” This sounds like a text-book definition of self-medication. This directly contradicts the author’s own thesis and confirms my suspicions about the second study.
Perhaps Harold should provide links to the later studies, because these just don’t cut it.
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…doctors can stop the person who does self-medicate is in a hospital.
Self-medicating includes taking the wrong dosage of prescribed drugs, not taking them, taking drugs from friends or unused or unfinished prescriptions, or using something like alcohol (or “illegal” drugs) to self-medicate — that is, try and feel better. The latter is by far the biggest problem. I guess mind-altering substances mess up common sense, too.
I find it hard to believe that a self-medicating person thinks they have more expertise than a trained doctor, but perhaps I’m using the wrong definition of “person”. Let’s use idiot, ignoramus, and moron instead. No, I’m not a fan of self-medicating because I’ve seen literally hundreds of examples of what NOT to do in the veterans’ community.
You are right to say that I should provide more links to support my argument, however when I posted my comment I could not find them. I still cannot find the particular Dutch studies I was looking for so I can’t present them, but a search on pubmed shows quite a lot of articles supporting at least the notion of a link between the use of cannabis and schizophrenia.
Vivisimo search in pubmed on cannabis + schizophrenia.
I agree that the studies all seem to point to the need for more research in that none is definitively conclusive and some are contradictory but I never claimed there was a definite link, merely strong evidence. If I find more I will post the links here.