Cannabis Now Worse Than The Nazis

[Tom Scott]

I think that's being a bit optimistic, what about psychological disease and cancer?

People can suffer cancer for years before it kills them, emphysema is incredibly damaging - but i doubt everyone dies from it. And what about schizophrenia (i know it's being awfully pedantic)? While i agree with what you're saying, i think you should encompass a bit more than just death as a flat rule.

Studies of people going insane from smoking weed might be a bit skewed don't you think? I mean its not as if they actually know how much is sold and how many people smoke it.... its illegal! Most of the studies don't claim that it sends everyone insane either, but state it'll cause worse effects if the person was prone to that anyway.
The BBC recently stated that a study found "cannabis users 40% more likely to have a psychotic illness"... 40% more like than what exactly?
The media don't really portray this but put some evil backdrop up with some hoodie youth stabbing a grannie while smoking a spliff (its always a really badly rolled one at that), with the words CANNABIS, MENTAL PROBLEMS, GIVES, CAUSES, INSANE, DEATH.

How many nutters do you see drinking themeselves to an early death each day? Don't see many evil backdrops of a tramp mugging some middleclass woman getting into their Mercedes just so they can get another bottle of White Lightning, do you now?

[Bazzlad]

I'll play Devil's advocate for a bit.

Party with Beer:
Dancing, Laughing, Sexing, Partying.

Party with Canarbeak:
Listening to Jazz in a room with a red light bulb in stating Tom Waits is a genious, talking about God whilst talking about God/playing Xbox.

I know which party I'll be going to


For the record, I've seen 3 close mates all of whom were of the "Weed is great for you, unlike beer" school all regress to the state of not being able to leave the house.

With all drugs, there are users and abusers, dependants and enhancers.
Common sense must kick in at some point.

[Stewart]

Actually, apart from the jazz music stuff (Jazz music is appaling if you are on weed or not), that is a good point, you can abuse any drug.

Take it too often - drug abuse.
Spend too much money on it - drug abuse.
Make it the most important thing in your life - drug abuse.

And I'd say thats true, if the drug is heroin, weed, cocaine, or Es.

Of course, it is (and I don't know as I've no experiance) I'd imagine, tricky to lead a normal life while taking heroin. Some drugs lend themselves to being abused, others, mostly party drugs like E, or casual chill-at-the-end-of-the-day drugs like weed, do not.

Point taken though.

[Whiternoise]

Studies of people going insane from smoking weed might be a bit skewed don't you think? I mean its not as if they actually know how much is sold and how many people smoke it.... its illegal! Most of the studies don't claim that it sends everyone insane either, but state it'll cause worse effects if the person was prone to that anyway.
The BBC recently stated that a study found "cannabis users 40% more likely to have a psychotic illness"... 40% more like than what exactly?
The media don't really portray this but put some evil backdrop up with some hoodie youth stabbing a grannie while smoking a spliff (its always a really badly rolled one at that), with the words CANNABIS, MENTAL PROBLEMS, GIVES, CAUSES, INSANE, DEATH.

How many nutters do you see drinking themeselves to an early death each day? Don't see many evil backdrops of a tramp mugging some middleclass woman getting into their Mercedes just so they can get another bottle of White Lightning, do you now?

I think it was proven that if cannabis was taken from a young age, then there's a significant chance that you might develop a psychotic illness.

As to more likely than what? Well, 40% more likely than if you didn't smoke weed.

But my point wasn't to go on a "media stereotype" tangent, i was merely pointing out in Stewarts post that just saying the number of people dead each year is not neccesarily a good indicator of how bad something is. Take the example of car crashes, sure there are loads dead, but there are a fair few people who don't die but are almost as badly off - suffering from paralysis, etc.

[Stewart]

I take your point, its a complex issue, and there is a lot more to it than just how many people will die.

Having said that, the fact remains that more than 100,000 people (on average) will die from smoking ciggies this year, and it remains legal. This should seem, to most people, a very strange situation, when compared to how many people will die from other drugs, which remain illegal, despite being many thousands of times safer.

Ciggies will, given enough time, kill half of the people who smoke them. If half of the people who droped an E died, I'd be able to see why it was illegal, but given that 730,000 people in this country take or have taken Es, and yet deaths are few and far between, and deaths that were actually directly caused by the E itself are almost unheard of, it puzzles me that its a Class A drug.

Deaths may not be the only issue, but its a pretty important one, for most people.

[Knoxville]

The problem here with cannabis, is that it's illegal.

This means that any figure's obtained by any researching body on cannabis use and it's effects may as well look like a big pair of clown shoes because they are about as much use in any reasonable argument form either side of the fence.

A perfect example of this is The Independent's campaign for the legalisation of cannabis ten years ago....

The Independent made calls in the late nineties for the legalization of cannabis. Their campaign had ended with a 16,000 person strong march by advocates for cannabis legalization through Hyde Park and undoubtedly played a role in the labour government’s decision to downgrade cannabis to a Class C drug.

The paper claimed that this "harmless" drug was linked to a meager 1,600 cases of mental illness in the mid nineties, It quoted several senior scientists in its pro-legalisation arguments, including the head of the Medical Research Council, Professor Colin Blakemore.

In 2004 when the government downgraded cannabis from a class B to a class C drug The Independent on Sunday said it believed the current classification and level of police enforcement to be "about right, the fact that the possession of cannabis - and other drugs - is illegal acts as an important social restraint,". The paper then goes on to say skunk smoked today contains 25 times more of the active ingredient than was typically found in cannabis during the 1980s.

It also says cannabis is more easily available, having fallen in price from about £120 an ounce in 1994 to £43 today

Now, those of you that know your smoke will know that crossbreeding in the sixties and seventies gave us most of the strains available today and that cannabis and cannabis resin with a THC content of over 20% have not exactly been uncommon throughout the time line of cannabis use in the U.K.

So how does "skunk" bought today magically have 25 times the strength of the cannabis people have been smoking for decades? Pure and simple truth is, it doesn't, crossbreeding strains did indeed raise the potency of cannabis in the early years but because of it's status as a controlled substance there are next to no official records to support the truth.

Oh and those of you that think an ounce of anything cannabis related with a THC content of over 5% can be purchased at the price of £40 an ounce would be dead wrong. An ounce of good cannabis is still between £100 and £150, it's only "soap bar" or "resin" that are available at such low prices and that's a substance thats generally made up of less than 5% cannabis by the time it reaches the end user.

The turncoat change of heart made by The Independant would be followed by pretty much every major newspaper over the next couple of years starting a propaganda machine that would eventually lead us to where we are today.

The links to cannabis and mental illness are also heavily sensationalised and are often quoted out of context, having worked in one of the bigger mental care homes in the West Midlands I can confirm that it housed not one schizophrenic victim of "Killer Skunk" abuse, problem is the people often asked by newspapers for a quote on the dangers of cannabis are people like Marjorie Wallace, a woman who publicly criticised Big Brother series seven for putting -

"vunerable people in the house"

and

"playing fast and loose with people's lives"

Obviously a woman that never exaggerates, ever.

Of course, many newspapers are now shouting from the rooftops that the number of people being treated for cannabis abuse in this country has doubled/tripled/risen tenfold over the past ten years I think it may be time to bring in a few quotes to help explain this sudden jump.......

The 2006 UNODC World Drug Report also notes this:

“….the best data on treatment presentations comes from the largest cannabis market, the United States, in the form of the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS)…. According to TEDS 111,418 people were admitted to treatment in 1993…comprising 7 per cent of the overall treatment population. In 1999, this number was 232,105, comprising of 13 per cent of the treatment population. In other words the number of cannabis admissions more than doubled in six years…However, this increase took place at a time of renewed law enforcement focus on cannabis use: the number of cannabis arrests increased from 380,700 in 1993 to 704,800 in 1999, an increase of 85 per cent. During this same period of time, non-cannabis arrests by 11 per cent. Partly as a result, the share of of cannabis users in treatment who were there due to a criminal justice referral increased during this period. It appears that changes in criminal justice policy were responsible for the bulk of the dramatic increase between 1993 and 1999, but they do not account for all of it. With regard to treatment data, therefore, the American case is inconclusive.” (Pg 178 – 179)

But that's America, what about the u.k....

The UK in 2007 was just coming to an end of its 10 year Crime and Drugs Strategy (CDS). What was significant were the new CJIT teams – drug treatment workers hired within the criminal justice system and who work alongside probation officers – and innumerous new treatment programs for drug “abusers”. Everything in UK drug policy under CDS was about diverting users of any substance towards treatment. Treatment was the be all and end all of drug use.

Hmm the plot thickens....

[mroz]

The links to cannabis and mental illness are also heavily sensationalised and are often quoted out of context, having worked in one of the bigger mental care homes in the West Midlands I can confirm that it housed not one schizophrenic victim of "Killer Skunk" abuse,

Ooh, an interesting thread. Alas as I'm not exactly anonymous & might one day be primeminister I had better exercise caution - not of course that I have anything to be cautious about.

The stuff about strains not having changed much in the last twenty years is one I'd be particularly interested in following up on.

Anyhow main reason I'm posting was that I just wanted to ask what a 'mental care home' exactly is? I've not heard that term before.

As to the link between hallucinogenics & psychosis, firstly, schizophrenia isn't the only psychotic illness, but that aside there's certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence - ignore the tabloids & instead try to find a psych in casualty who can spare a moment to talk to you. There seems to be a trend. Of course anecdotal evidence is just that.

It's not hard to find research showing an increased use of such drugs amongst those with psychotic illness compared to the general population, however that of itself isn't enough to imply a causitive link. Still, my own gut reaction is that if this was studied further it would show health risks easily comparable in spread & severity to smoking of tobacco.

This report from the Psychiatric Times seems typical of the saner information currently available.

[Knoxville]

A browse around any number of forums with a reasonable forum knowledge base will fill you in on the history of most strains of cannabis far better than I ever will, but if you look at cannabis from the stand point that originally there are two main type's of plant, indica and sativa, both of which have been crossbred with each other numerous times over the last thirty years with differing degree's of success to change the plants potency/yield/flowering period/high resulting in what appears to be many different strains with new strains appearing every year all these strains still come from the same basic genetic stock and still carry the same limitations with regards to potency that the plants these strains came from carried back in the seventies.

Mental care home isn't the right term, the correct term for where I worked I suppose was a residential home for people with challenging behaviours and disabilities, my job was to support people with challenging behaviours and conditions such as Autism and Schizophrenia.

To tag cannabis as a hallucinogenic isn't exactly correct as per my understanding, its a psychoactive substance that rarely results in visual or auditory hallucinations with the severity associated with lysergic acid or psilocybin, even very mild visual hallucinations are rare in my experience.

Cannabis is only as damaging to health as tobacco if smoked, if ingested this leaves only the mental health issue to deal with, which as I've already stated is fairly inconclusive in my opinion.

[Bunjiweb]

Well I know a few people who have done it for years, 3 of which are the most intelligent highly paid people I know, in professional jobs (or just retiring from one!)

As far as Im concerned it is only as damaging as the person who is smoking it. If you already have underlying mental health issues then any psychoactive substance, including alcahol will accentuate it. If you totally abuse it then inhaling smoke of anything could possibly damage your lungs, but I think the humans resistance to this varies wildly.

I've smoked it, im quite happy to admit this. It hasn't damaged me at all, and infact it has helped me relax when i've needed it in a much more calming way than alcahol could, which is why I havent had a drink in a few years. I know many old friends that have never touched a joint yet they go out 3 nights a week and spend easily £100 a week on booze. This is far more money than ive known anyone spend on weed in a week?

Banning alcahol isn't going to happen and I don't see what re-classifying weed is going to do, I really can see it having no effect. I think it's time we stopped living in a media fuelled and obsurdly shrouded world. How can anyone say they live in a free nation when they are fed information which is based on current opinion rather than properly founded fact or science?

All I have to do to confirm what I have seen is watch StreetCrime UK... pretty much everything on there is an alcahol related incident!.....

[chicken]

Wow this thread got serious fast! Anyway, I haven't seen this point here yet so I'll raise it...

A few years ago we got a new housemate, he seemed nice enough, maybe a bit fidgety and smoked 40 a day but otherwise fine.

It turned out he was Schizophrenic and had a "panel" of doctors discussing his case. One thing about him was that he was mad about weed.

*OMG* points the Guardian! A Definite Link Between Smoking Weed and Mental Illness.

The trouble with this arguement though is he had known he had a mental illness for most of his childhood, years before starting with weed. He said himself that he chose to smoke weed because he found it took away the effects of the illness for the time being and allowed him some sense of normality.

Now I don't know how often this happens, but like the good old GTA Causes Violence arguement, what a lot of reviews don't take into account is that the people in the results may well not be ending up with issues because of it, but end up more likely to use iit because of problems they have already.

[mroz]

{snip}

Fair points, not that I necessarily agree with all. I think one thing we might agree on is that the criminalised nature of the drug greatly effects the quantity of clinical research that has, or rather hasn't been able to be conducted on the subject.

[mroz]

Now I don't know how often this happens, but like the good old GTA Causes Violence arguement, what a lot of reviews don't take into account is that the people in the results may well not be ending up with issues because of it, but end up more likely to use iit because of problems they have already.

Self medicating is very common using alcohol, caffeine & illegal drugs. A lot of people with undiagnosed problems self medicate to cope with symptoms (sometimes quite sensibly) without consciously even realising what they're doing. It only becomes apparent after they're diagnosed & had a history taken.

[MilkMan]

In Holland, smoking weed is “legal” or should I rather say, controlled.
Yet when I went on holiday last year, everyone seemed Okay to me.
It looked just like every other city I have been too.

I don’t know much about the countries economy, but I don’t think that legalising weed has made the country or its people bad.

I also think that by legalising something (i.e: smokes/weed/alcohol) , the government can then control the output, thus making money and making it saver.

Everything in live is a risk, and its up to the person to understand those risks.
What I mean is, smoking / drinking / driving / flying and even walking is a risk.
But that is live and we have to accept it

Its almost weekend, so let me go get ready and start to roll my joi….

[trusz]

I'd like to say, after smoking almost every day for the last 3 years I'm still feeling quite sane.

I will admit that it does have an affect on my short term memory but it's nothing horrendous. I study BSc Computer Science and managed to average a first for my second year so it's can't be killing my brain too badly.

Isn't it great how all this money is spent on the pathetic Talk to Frank adverts about squishy brains rather than giving real advice on real affects and adverse side-affects of using cannabis? How about putting out a public health warning about cannabis being sprayed with fibre glass/glass etching spray that was going around for a good 6 months? The government are aware how widespread cannabis use is. They claim these laws are there for harm prevention yet they cause more harm than good and they don't give a monkey's about warning people when potentially serious harmful contaminations come about. It took months for news stories to start coming about on the internet but nothing was put on TV.

As far as ecstasy/mdma goes...it's use is pretty massive all over. I go to large capacity dance events every couple of weeks where probably 80-90% of the people there have taken it. Every one has an awesome time and I've never seen a fight at any of these events, yet I walk in to town and see the streets at bar kick out time and there're brawls everywhere. It's only dangerous to uneducated people (yet again the fault of the government) who take it because their friends did, but don't have any idea what to expect and how to stay safe because they were told "ecstasy will kill you" by every news program and newspaper article, yet they see plenty of people doing it, and as human beings, they’re curious.

From a fair amount of reading, unless you are extremely allergic to MDMA (I’ve heard very little about this), it won’t directly kill you by any sort of overdose that you could manage. I’m not condoning or encouraging it’s use but the best advice I can give if you are going to, is to read up about what you’re taking, especially pill reports as they can contain pretty much anything, drink plenty of water (but not litres and litres like in the case of Leah Betts), and don’t over do it, like with any other drug.

Rave safe

[Knoxville]

Fair points, not that I necessarily agree with all. I think one thing we might agree on is that the criminalised nature of the drug greatly effects the quantity of clinical research that has, or rather hasn't been able to be conducted on the subject.

Indeed, and I think that is defiantly something that needs to change, quickly.

[trusz]

Here's an article I read on the BBC site a couple of months ago

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6474053.stm

Some professionals actually talking sense about drugs and drug law.

Shame about the completely pig-ignorant comment made by the Home Office Minister.