It's a sad story, but it sounds more like the onset of schizophrenia, which usually manifests around that time of the kid's break down. The fact that even when he quit using marijuana he still had to take anti-psychotic, mood stabilizer, points to a pre-existing mental condition which may have been accelerated by marijuana, but then again, maybe not. This kind of propaganda is sad because it pulls at the heartstrings and makes you feel for the kid who is clearly suffering, but then to point the blame on marijuana and use the story as "evidence" of marijuana's dangers... the facts don't bear this out.
the same logic can be applied to legal drugs like alcohol as I'm sure we could round up about a million stories from alcoholics and their families which document the horrors of addiciton. but no one is suggesting that these stories should be "evidence" that beer be made illegal.
- Joined
- 01 Jan 06
- Moves
- 71941
In all honesty I sympathise with your story.However from my own perspective drugs are a personal thing, bar Heroin and Crack I've done a vast galaxy of drugs Canabis, LSD,Magic Mushrooms,and so on.With a little consideration and research drugs are quite simply amazing and it helps if you ignore the bull you read in the papers and see on the TV.Make up your own mind about life not just what you get told, be happy to be yourself and go after what you want, who gives a monkeys cuss what worthless celebs are doing and let's start celibrating each other.
Your loyal servant Emperor Dongle from inside the Atom
Originally posted by ivanhoeHas it ever occured to you that you could be getting more bang for your buck with this kind of a post , I.ho ? You've been known to cut and paste this kind of stuff , and put the same ramble in a couple of forums to maximize it's exposure . Why not cut and paste the same thing many times with different titles ?
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4630938.stm
The government's decision that cannabis should remain a Class C drug came as it accepted it could trigger serious mental illness. Here, one father tells the traumatic story of how cannabis turned his bright and promising teenage son into a wreck.
My son James was always a popular teenager. H ...[text shortened]... rmless.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4630938.stm
May I suggest , "Ivanhoe.....anything but intelligent...." I'd bet more people will read it under that heading , too .
Originally posted by Darth SpongeAbsolutely right.
It's a sad story, but it sounds more like the onset of schizophrenia, which usually manifests around that time of the kid's break down. The fact that even when he quit using marijuana he still had to take anti-psychotic, mood stabilizer, points to a pre-existing mental condition which may have been accelerated by marijuana, but then again, maybe not. no one is suggesting that these stories should be "evidence" that beer be made illegal.
But that's what I've been telling Ivanhoe for more than a year over on the Discussion forum.
That's why I didn't go into it here.
But you seem pretty much right in your diagnosis.
There are also some facts I really think should be pondered on:
"skunk weed" - a particularly potent variety of the drug, that's between 10 to 30 times stronger than ordinary cannabis
I find this hardly likely. Either there's 10x as much THC in the grass or there's 30x as much...
It sounds like a very rough and obviously crap estimate, probably based on various samples over an x-amount of time.
Even then...I live in Holland, home of weed, and I've never EVER encountered weed that you can use 1/30th, 1/20th or 1/10th of the amount to get the same high.
Some experts claim that for many younger people who have "drug induced psychosis", like my son, this sort of mental illness would have happened anyway. That is total rubbish. He was a perfectly normal boy, until this happened.
Yeah. So why's that make the initial statement rubbish? Do you think that when a Schitzophrenic or a manic depressive is born that it's tatoo'd to their foreheads or something?
When he got home it was clear things were going off the rails. He was getting angry and violent, and we were worried he might harm himself.
Yeah...excactly the kind of behaviour one associates with marijuana use....
Let's get a couple of things straight (I didn't want to get into this, but it seems to be in my genes):
1. If you've got a genetic disposition for a mental illness, the chances are something will trigger it. This generally happens before the age of 25 or during labour (giving birth to a child...not during a Blair government...although one never can tell).
2. The trigger in this case could well have been marijuana. It could have been his girlfriend nagging at him for not showering enough. It could have been excessive masturbation.
3. Excessive use of ANYTHING is generally not good for you. Try using aspirin (bad for your stomach), alcohol (bad for your liver) or cars (most kills per year) excessivly...see how long you last.
4. The proven effects of marijuana use are:
a. Short term memory loss
b. Weight gain! (Due to the munchies)
c. Marijuana psychosis...very rare and only when using extreme amounts. Stops when the use of the drug is lowered.
5. Many mental health patients use marijuana to ease their symptoms. So do many people with muscle and nerve disorders.
And since we're on the subject, let me give some advice:
Never take drugs (including alcohol!!) alone until you know what you are doing.
Never take any drug more than 2x a week.
Stick to recommended dosis. (read up on what the effects are and how to use them).
Don't mix drugs. (unless you want to phone Starrman late at night)
Don't use hallucinagenic drugs (mushrooms or LSD) until you're over 25.
Never use crack cocaine.
Never shoot (using a needle) heroin.
Originally posted by Darth Spongehttp://www.rcgp.org.uk/press/2004/9422.asp
It's a sad story, but it sounds more like the onset of schizophrenia, which usually manifests around that time of the kid's break down. The fact that even when he quit using marijuana he still had to take anti-psychotic, mood stabilizer, points to a pre-existing mental condition which may have been accelerated by marijuana, but then again, maybe not. no one is suggesting that these stories should be "evidence" that beer be made illegal.
"The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) called today for the health risks of cannabis to be debated, saying that its reputation as a safe drug is unjustified."
“The debate around cannabis has always focused on and been polarised by views on legalisation with the health effects largely un-debated”.
The health risks of cannabis, says Dr Gerada, are “considerable”:
“The evidence that it produces dependence is beyond dispute, with around 5-10% eventually becoming dependent. Cannabis also impairs concentration, short-term memory, attention and rational thought, driving and piloting skills and amplifies the driving impairments caused by simultaneous alcohol use. Larger amounts of cannabis can produce anxiety and depression, psychotic states lasting several days and an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.”
Originally posted by ivanhoeFunnily enough though, when the they tested drivers who were stoned (on marijuana) and drivers who were sober...they both drove equally well.
“The evidence that it produces dependence is beyond dispute, with around 5-10% eventually becoming dependent. Cannabis also impairs concentration, short-term memory, attention and rational thought, driving and piloting skills and amplifies the driving impairments caused by simultaneous alcohol use. Larger amounts of cannabis can produce anxiety and depress ...[text shortened]... psychotic states lasting several days and an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.”
A 5 to 10% dependency rate? Crikey...
Nose picking scores higher!
Most things can impair concentration. Try not sleeping for 3 nights running.
As for attention and rational thought....I don't know. I know a lot of people who are very focussed when stoned.
I do know that it frees up creative thought though. maybe being creative makes one less productive in a systamatic sense of the word?
I agree on the "anxiety and depression". This is referred to as "marijuana psychosis". It's not common and it can only occur when using extreme amounts of the drug. Even then, it fades when you stop using it (same as the short term memory loss).
The increased risk of developing schizophrenia is obviously correct. EVERYTHING and ANYTHING increases the risk of developing a mental illness, if you've got the pre-disposition for it.
If you don't have the pre-dispostition...you ain't gonna get it, no matter what you do.
It's a bit of a false statement then. Isn't it?
Originally posted by ivanhoeThe key word here Ivanhoe is larger ... all substances taken in abundance is bad for your health. As stated before sunbathing causes cancer ... but you are not suggesting we should ban it do you?
http://www.rcgp.org.uk/press/2004/9422.asp
"The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) called today for the health risks of cannabis to be debated, saying that [b]its reputation as a safe drug is unjustified."
“The debate around cannabis has always focused on and been polarised by views on legalisation with the health effects largel ...[text shortened]... chotic states lasting several days and an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.[/i][/b]”[/b]
CANNABIS, WHY IT IS SAFE
Claims by Baroness Greenfield and Dr Thomas Stuttaford that cannabis is harmful are an idiosyncratic reading of the scientific and medical evidence.
Public opinion on cannabis is shifting.
The question of whether the law on cannabis ( and other drugs, too ) should be liberalised is, of course, complex and politically charged.
Some of the arguments are legal, some ethical, but the decision should also be based on accepted scientific opinion.
So it was disappointing that Baroness Greenfield of Ot Moor and Dr Thomas Stuttaford, both influential communicators of science and medicine, have recently condemned cannabis as a seriously harmful drug. In alarmist articles in The Times and elsewhere, they argued that scientific evidence shows that cannabis is addictive, causes personality change and psychosis, promotes heart disease and cancer, is more harmful than alcohol, and impairs driving long after intoxication has worn off. Most disturbing of all, Lady Greenfield claimed that even a single cannabis joint shrinks and kills brain cells and scrambles nerve connections.
Certainly, if this represented the prevailing scientific view, and especially if cannabis were thought to be more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, it would undermine any argument for relaxation of the law. But theirs is an idiosyncratic interpretation of the scientific and medical evidence.
Of course, all drugs are harmful if taken in excess -- even aspirin kills many elderly people every year because of its tendency to cause gastric bleeds. But in judging the risks of cannabis, we need to keep a sense of proportion and listen to the consensus reached by several recent exhaustive reviews of this topic from medical and scientific experts on both sides of the Atlantic. These include the British Medical Association, the Police Foundation, the US Institute of Medicine, and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.
Although it cannot be assumed that cannabis use is entirely harmless, many of the points stated as established facts do not seem persuasive. In our opinion, the views of Lady Greenfield and Dr Stuttaford do not reflect the current balance of scientific and medical opinion, and it is questionable whether they would have passed the rigorous process of peer review and editorial control that regulate professional communications between scientists.
It is claimed that cannabis smoke is more harmful to the lungs than tobacco smoke because it contains much the same mixture of noxious substances, and because cannabis users inhale more deeply and deposit more tar in their lungs. On the other hand, cannabis users do not smoke 20 to 40 times a day, as many cigarette smokers do. There may be a health risk, and it is compounded by the combination of cannabis with tobacco, but there is currently no indisputable evidence for a link with cancer.
The reports of cancers of the throat, mouth and larynx in cannabis users were based on small numbers and did not rule out effects of the concomitant use of tobacco. A much larger study in the United States monitored the health of a group of 65,000 men and women over a ten-year period.
The 27,000 who admitted to having used cannabis showed no association between cannabis use and cancers, nor were there any other serious adverse effects on health.
It is implied that cannabis is inherently more harmful than alcohol.
This contradicts received opinion.
Unlike cannabis, alcohol in overdose can kill. Chronic alcohol abuse has well-documented health risks, including liver disease and severe brain damage leading to a form of dementia.
Use by pregnant women also carries the risk of damage to the foetus, leading to severe mental impairments. There is no firm evidence that cannabis use carries any of these serious health risks.
Several expert groups that have compared the risks of alcohol and cannabis have concluded that cannabis is less dangerous.
As the Police Foundation's report last year stated: "When cannabis is systematically compared with other drugs against the main criteria of harm ( mortality, morbidity, toxicity, addictiveness and relationship with crime ), it is less harmful to the individual and society than any of the other major illicit drugs or than alcohol and tobacco".
Cannabis produces a variety of well-documented short-term effects on perception, memory, thought and coordination, which might be expected to compromise driving skills.
Lady Greenfield suggests that it does so for more than 24 hours after smoking, but the evidence for this is far from clear-cut. There are many serious studies that show little or no effect on driving even during acute intoxication. The association of cannabis with traffic accidents and deaths is hard to interpret, as most of these also involve alcohol.
And, just as for alcohol and mobile telephones, evidence for an effect on driving would not argue for an outright ban.
Lady Greenfield asserts that even tiny doses of cannabis cause brain damage. In correspondence with us she has cited recent research on nerve cells maintained in test-tube conditions, but the lowest concentration of the drug that caused any effect was still many times higher than that likely to be found in blood after cannabis use.
It is generally accepted that observations in living animals and people carry greater weight in risk assessment than experiments on isolated cells. A wealth of such data has failed to show evidence of organic brain damage either in chronic human cannabis users or in animals treated with very high doses of cannabis extract or its active ingredient. In these studies doses up to 1,000 times higher than those needed to produce intoxication in man were given to rats or monkeys every day for 90 days, without causing serious adverse effects on the brain or other organs .
Dr Stuttaford says cannabis is so harmful that it would not pass animalbased toxicity testing.
But it already has! The benign results of those tests have allowed the active ingredient of cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol ( THC ), to be registered as a prescription medicine in the US. The data also satisfied Britain's Medicines Control Agency. In contrast to the title of Dr Stuttaford's article "Cannabis Kills", the British Medical Association, in its 1997 report, Therapeutic Uses of Cannabis, concluded that "the acute toxicity of cannabinoids is extremely low: they are very safe drugs and no deaths have been directly attributed to their recreational or therapeutic use".
For some users, perhaps as many as 10 per cent, cannabis leads to psychological dependence, but there is scant evidence that it carries a risk of true addiction.
Unlike cigarette smokers, most users do not take the drug on a daily basis, and usually abandon it in their twenties or thirties.
Unlike for nicotine, alcohol and hard drugs, there is no clearly defined "withdrawal syndrome" -- the hallmark of true addiction -- when use is stopped. And while some heavy users of cannabis become demotivated and unfit for intellectually demanding work, several studies of regular users have shown remarkably little impairment in academic grades or work output.
The claim that cannabis use can lead to psychosis is a longstanding one. There was a lively debate in the British Medical Journal in 1893, for example, as to whether the endemic use of hashish in Egypt led to mania and insanity. There was also concern that the mental asylums in British-controlled India were filling with cannabis-induced lunatics.
In 1894, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, after questioning more than 1,100 witnesses, concluded that there was no such causal link; this has been the position reached by most subsequent studies.
It is accepted that cannabis can exacerbate existing mental illness and may itself cause a temporary toxic psychosis if taken in overdose.
But there is no evidence that the actual incidence of the true psychoses -- schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression -- has risen over the past 50 years, while the number of users has risen from virtually zero to more than half the young population.
Dr Stuttaford claims that cannabis damages the heart and cardiovascular system, and may impair sexual development and function.
Even small doses of cannabis do have effects on the heart and circulation, but regular users tend to become tolerant of these effects, and it is not generally accepted that cannabis use leads to increased incidence of cardiovascular illness. The suggestion that cannabis may adversely affect reproductive function is based largely on animal experiments that used very high doses.
There is no evidence that cannabis use adversely affects human fertility.
Finally, the portrayal of the Dutch experiment in decriminalising cannabis as a disaster is at odds with much careful analysis performed by Dutch and other experts.
It is true that heroin use has risen in The Netherlands since cannabis decriminalisation, but it has risen more here. Significantly, the use of hard drugs has declined in recent years in The Netherlands, while it is still rising in the UK and most other Western countries. The Netherlands has fewer drug-related deaths than any other European country and cannabis consumption is somewhat lower there than here. Significantly, it is substantially lower among schoolchildren -- the very group that everyone most seeks to protect.
More than half of Britain's young people have used cannabis.
We think that it is wrong to wish on them a criminal record that could blight their lives, and we hope that the cannabis debate will not be stifled by fears that it is a deadly drug.
Author: Colin Blakemore and Leslie Iversen
Note: Leslie Iversen, FRS, is Visiting Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford
University and the author of The Science of Marijuana (Oxford University
Press, 2000). He was a specialist adviser to the House of Lords Select
Committee on Science and Technology for its review of the medical uses of
cannabis. Colin Blakemore, FRS, is Professor of Physiology at Oxford
University, Director of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and
president of the Physiological Society. He is a former president of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1435.a04.html
Originally posted by ivanhoefirst of all, Ivanhoe, why do you care? are you just pulling quotes off the internet in order to hear people talk about them? What do YOU think?
http://www.rcgp.org.uk/press/2004/9422.asp
"The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) called today for the health risks of cannabis to be debated, saying that [b]its reputation as a safe drug is unjustified."
“The debate around cannabis has always focused on and been polarised by views on legalisation with the health effects largel ...[text shortened]... chotic states lasting several days and an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.[/i][/b]”[/b]
second of all "The evidence that it produces dependence is beyond dispute" is not beyond dispute. In fact, it has been disputed scientifically and by the experience of millions around the world. Anything can produce psychological dependence. But as for physical, metabolic addiction: No, consistent marijuana use does not produce that. (alcohol does, heroin does, crystal meth does...) "withdrawl" if you want to call it that, is mild. a lingering itch, a slight frustration... like not getting your coffee in the morning if you're a coffee drinker.--- and i'm talking about consistent, all the time use here. for occasional users, no withdrawl symptoms exist.
as for the dimished short-term memory and the capacity for rational thought- yes, they are imparied while you are under the influence of the drug, just like alcohol or anything else. once the effects wear off, then your "normal" mental state returns. i mean, we can debate what different people consider "rational"... under the influence of stone cold sober... rationality is a judgement call. speaking from my personal experience, I work a corporate job with lots of numbers a great deal of attention to detail. i have to think logically and clearly every day. when i leave work, I go home, get stoned and play with my band. when it's time to work the next morning, i'm fine. no psychosis, no vampires (it would be cool if there were), no diminished short term memory, no irrational lunacy...
this kind of propaganda pisses me off because it's dishonest, and one of the biggest problems facing kids these days is they don't know who to beleive when it comes to drugs. If they've heard all the scare tactics on marijuana and then try it and find out that the propaganda is false, then they begin to wonder: "what else about drugs is merely propaganda? perhaps they lied to me about heroin? or methamphetamines? maybe i should try those?"
we need honesty about the effects of drugs, not misleading propaganda that plays on sensationalism and emotions. when i think back on that story, it seems to me now that the father couldn't accept that his son has a mental illness and needed to pin the blame on something external- something apart from his own somewhat "tainted" genes. it must have been the weed.
and I am still curious, Ivanhoe, what are your motives? Do you want to stop people from using marijuana with scare tatic propaganda? what is your stake in this?
http://society.guardian.co.uk/drugsandalcohol/story/0,8150,990171,00.html
Cannabis link to psychosis
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Thursday July 3, 2003
The Guardian
Very heavy use of cannabis could be a cause of psychosis, according to a leading psychiatrist who believes that society should think carefully about the potential consequences of its increasing use.
Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley hospital in London, says that in the last 18 months, there has been increasing evidence that cannabis causes serious mental illness. In
I used to smoke a lot of skunk. I still have some in my freezer.
I stopped smoking it, because the next day I often felt down and worried about things too much.
I once went to Amsterdam on a weekender. One of our group was very stoned when he stumbled in front of a tram. He spent 3 months in hospital.
Despite these misgivings I feel it should be legal. It is essentially a herb that grows naturally. If man wants to smoke a plant - including opium - then the government should not punish him for doing so.
It is the government's job to educate rather than dictate.
Originally posted by Darth SpongeTake it easy on Ivanhoe; he was just stoned and bored.
first of all, Ivanhoe, why do you care? are you just pulling quotes off the internet in order to hear people talk about them? What do YOU think?
second of all "The evidence that it produces dependence is beyond dispute" is not beyond dispute. In fact, it has been disputed scientifically and by the experience of millions around the world. Anything ...[text shortened]... om using marijuana with scare tatic propaganda? what is your stake in this?