Marijuana Madness
One can't help but be suspicious when the American Government, perpetrator of the decades long failure called "The Drug War", declares that cannabis causes mental illness. A quote:
"A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems," said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.
Administration officials pointed to a handful of studies to make their case. One, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adult marijuana smokers who first began using the drug before age 12 were twice as likely to have suffered a serious mental illness in the past year as those who began smoking after 18."
Perhaps people who start smoking marijuana before age 12 have been neglected or otherwise abused by their parents. Neglect has been known to cause mental and emotional issues. I imagine that people who became drunk on alcohol for the first time before they were 12 have similar mental health statistics. Tens of millions of people have managed to smoke cannabis without becoming schizophrenic or depressed. Sadly there are no medical journal articles about the person who smoked cannabis, ate a lot of snacks, took a nap, and woke up fine.
Surprisingly, both the liberal group "The Sentencing Project" and the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have called for "renewed national discussion" about the drug war. AEI reported that, ‘despite spending at about $40 billion a year now and toughening drug sentencing laws, "America continues to experience the Western world's worst drug problems."'
There may be a mental health issue here, but it's not that of potheads. It seems that the government is in denial. It cannot accept the fact that it cannot stop adults from using illicit substances if they really want to. If they cannot stop drugs in prison, the most restrictive and civil rights-free place in the country, how do they expect to stop them in public? It's delusional. Maybe they should be forced to take medications that come from a nice, safe pharmaceutical company. Lord knows no one was ever harmed by Valium, Thorozine, or Oxycontin.
"A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems," said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.
Administration officials pointed to a handful of studies to make their case. One, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adult marijuana smokers who first began using the drug before age 12 were twice as likely to have suffered a serious mental illness in the past year as those who began smoking after 18."
Perhaps people who start smoking marijuana before age 12 have been neglected or otherwise abused by their parents. Neglect has been known to cause mental and emotional issues. I imagine that people who became drunk on alcohol for the first time before they were 12 have similar mental health statistics. Tens of millions of people have managed to smoke cannabis without becoming schizophrenic or depressed. Sadly there are no medical journal articles about the person who smoked cannabis, ate a lot of snacks, took a nap, and woke up fine.
Surprisingly, both the liberal group "The Sentencing Project" and the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have called for "renewed national discussion" about the drug war. AEI reported that, ‘despite spending at about $40 billion a year now and toughening drug sentencing laws, "America continues to experience the Western world's worst drug problems."'
There may be a mental health issue here, but it's not that of potheads. It seems that the government is in denial. It cannot accept the fact that it cannot stop adults from using illicit substances if they really want to. If they cannot stop drugs in prison, the most restrictive and civil rights-free place in the country, how do they expect to stop them in public? It's delusional. Maybe they should be forced to take medications that come from a nice, safe pharmaceutical company. Lord knows no one was ever harmed by Valium, Thorozine, or Oxycontin.
posted by Christine at Wednesday, May 04, 2005
1 Comments:
Here's something interesting along the same lines -
----------------------
Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving
26 February 2005
JOHN HALPERN clearly remembers what made him change his mind about psychedelic drugs. It was the early 1990s and the young medical student at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, was getting frustrated that he could not do more to help the alcoholics and addicts in his care. He sounded off to an older psychiatrist, who mentioned that LSD and related drugs had once been considered promising treatments for addiction. "I was so fascinated that I did all this research," Halpern recalls. "I was reading all these papers from the 60s and going, whoa, wait a minute! How come nobody's talking about this?"
More than a decade later, Halpern is now an associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard University's McLean Hospital and is at the forefront of a revival of research into psychedelic medicine. He recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give late-stage cancer patients the psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy. He is also laying the groundwork for testing LSD as a treatment for dreaded super-migraines known as cluster headaches.
And Halpern is not alone. Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades. "There are medicines here that have been overlooked, that are fundamentally valuable," says Halpern.
These developments are a remarkable turnaround. Scientists first became interested in psychedelic drugs - also called hallucinogens because of their profound effect on perception - after Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, accidentally swallowed LSD in 1943. Hofmann's description of his experience, which he found both enchanting and terrifying, spurred scientific interest in LSD as well as naturally occurring compounds with similar effects: mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus; psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms; and DMT, from the Amazonian shamans' brew ayahuasca.
At first, many scientists called these drugs "psychotomimetics" because their effects appeared to mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. However, many users rhapsodised about the life-changing insights they achieved during their experiences, so much so that in 1957, British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond proposed that the compounds be renamed "psychedelic", from the Greek for "mind-revealing". The term caught on, and psychiatrists started experimenting with the drugs as treatments for mental illness. By the mid-1960s, more than 1000 peer-reviewed papers had been published describing the treatment of more than 40,000 patients for schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism and other disorders.
http://www.newscientist.com/
channel/health/mg18524881.400
Post a Comment
<< Home