I'm not really surprised by this finding. My anecdotal experience has been that pretty much everyone knows a friend or a friend of a friend who smoked too much pot and had their life go off the rails. It is pretty clear to me that it is not a harmless herb despite that being the commonly held belief on places like Reddit.
According to what i remember reading in 2010 (maybe the science has changed in the last fifteen years but I doubt it)
People with the Val158Met COMT polymorphism are more susceptible to develop schizophrenia sooner if they are exposed to cannabis. And that genetic mutation make them more successible to have cannabis use disorder. Knowing that I don't understand the question that this study is attempting to answer.
A lot of people like to pretend that smoking weed is harmless.
I support legalization but from my personal experience, I’ve suffered psychosis twice after smoking weed, and that’s enough for me.
Schizophrenia symptoms:
Hallucinations (e.g., hearing voices), delusions (e.g., believing one has special powers), disorganized speech and behavior, reduced emotional expression, lack of motivation, withdrawal from social interactions, problems with attention, memory, and decision-making
I highly recommend r/leaves to read other people's stories trying or wanting to quit weed.
Edit: For those wondering, after being sober for 1.5 years, I'm pretty much back to my old self. My memory took a while to come back but it's drastically better than it was when I first quit. I feel much more motivated in life. My relationships with family and friends are better and so is my physical health. I was smoking about 0.5g - 2g/day for 1.5 years.
I have used weed a number of times. I also consider myself a schizoid personality disorder person. Supposedly that is on the very mild end of Schizophrenia. I have never found it to lead to psychosis or anxiety in myself.
All it does for me is make me feel relaxed and euphoric. If I use a lot I feel more relaxed and euphoric.
I am normally a person who is very detached from what people call a sense of self.
I believe this immunizes me from the anxiety many feel when losing self control under substances.
I do find annoying how many "pot heads" seem to think that weed is a panacea rather than a pacifier with some risks for some people.
Although the effects are different I would very much consider it akin to alcohol or an opiate.
If you have problems it will likely make them harder to deal with.
If you are just looking to relax or escape and are not prone to anxiety then it is effective but in my experience not much different from alcohol or opiates except less physical harms or potential for physical addiction.
I agree with the posters that for many if not most people, including myself, weed can give the illusion of some special insights or special connections to others but it is important to recognize just that, that this is an illusion, that our subjective feelings at any given time do not necessarily correspond to objective reality.
It is shocking to me how many people in all kinds of areas of life think that because they feel something is true it must be true or important or relevant.
Weed evidently makes many weed users feel it is a wonder drug, thus propagating and sustaining the mind virus.
I think it should be legal.
I also think if you want to be successful in life habitual use is ill-advised.
I can certainly see how for anxious, over thinking, controlling types it could lead to psychosis, like any number of other things, even including ideas. However I believe this effect is more due to a pre-existing neurotic psychology of the specific user rather than an intrinsic property of the drug.
But regardless it's not harmless.
Additionally the long term effects are not well known.
I've tried cannabis a few times but I couldn't get it to do nearly anything at all. I've tried a few different kinds and also tried THC tincture, but could never get anything to happen other than some slight dissociation. Is that "stoned"? Is my brain just not receptive to it or something?
As a population based study, how did they control for other substances? Acid in particular is notorious for flashbacks years later that can be psychotic. I also note that the period in question is also associated with massive increase in methamphetamine abuse. Greater access to THC being associated with an increase in crazy people using it makes complete sense, but is a causal link between legislation and schizophrenia really demonstrated amongst chronic potheads (the study is about psychosis in people with CAD), that being the subject of the paper?
I was diagnosed schizophrenic without any use of cannabis. What prize do I get????
The big question remains: is this downside worse than the innumerable and absolute known downsides associated with alcohol? If not, this is a purely acedemic issue.
Explains the downfall of Elmo [1]. Bro hasn’t been the same since that fateful day on JRE.
Don’t do drugs
Maybe an increase in misdiagnosis?
> The annual incidence of schizophrenia was stable over time, while the incidence of psychosis NOS increased from 30.0 to 55.1 per 100 000 individuals (83.7%) in the postlegalization period relative to the prelegalization period.
So increased cannabis use after legalization did not result in increased rates of schizophrenia, though it might have made some cases worse.