You’ve heard it for years now: marijuana makes you insane. This myth has been floating around from the 30’s government propaganda publicizing that one puff of a joint could make you a murderer, to the modern notion that marijuana use may cause schizophrenia. Despite countless studies advocating tolerance, legalization, and the relative harmlessness of marijuana as compared to other substances, once in a while you find a study that pushes back. It is these fringe ’scientific’ articles that politicians seize hold of while jabbering on about increased potency, witch-hunt-like tales of smoke-induced spells, crime, and mental disorder. Aha! they say. Behold! The demon is real.

Recently The Lancet published one such article summarizing evidence that marijuana increases ones risk of developing schizophrenia.¹ They found that occasional use will increase the risk of schizophrenia by 40% and heavy use will increase risk by 50-200%. The authors claim that their results are nearly free of bias and confounds, but the summary was based on only 7 studies. These were judged by the researchers to be the “relevant” ones out of over 4800. The study admits that many of the articles they used did not make adjustments for alcohol use, mental health disorders, and most were unlikely to adjust confound statistics for all mental health symptoms. It is quite likely that those predisposed with a biological risk for schizophrenia have personality traits that make them more likely to engage in marijuana consumption.

To further complicate matters, it is unclear whether ‘psychotic’ symptoms reported during much of the research was due to intoxication or due to schizophrenia itself. So…they might not have been schizophrenic, just high. If thats not enough, of the 7 summarized research articles, 50 possible confounds were identified. Thats right 50. In other words, there were 50 other potential causes for the increased risk of developing schizophrenia that may have compromised the results. And while we’re on the topic of confounds: nearly all contributors to the study are admittedly on the payroll of large pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, and/or Merck. Some are even paid to investigate marijuana compounds for these companies. Companies which, to my knowledge, are not developing marijuana-derived medication of any kind, but who may be threatened should medical marijuana be made available on a large scale. Sounds like pretty definitive research doesn’t it?

There is no doubt in my mind that this type of research will be used to advocate the continued ban on marijuana. So despite the fact that less that 3% of the population is at risk of schizophrenia, that marijuana only marginally increases this risk, and that the research supporting it is questionable at best - the rhetoric is always the same: Marijuana causes insanity. I can see it already… spin doctors estimating the number of suicides attributed to marijuana based on this assessment, medical marijuana benefits trumped by the potential for psychosis in court, and fear mongering ads citing this garbage across our airwaves. Thank God for science.

If this doesn’t sound ridiculous enough for you, maybe some numbers will help. In the U.S., between 1979 and 1998: 380,000 people died from alcohol-induced incidents (over 7000 from alcohol-related psychosis ), 30,000 choked to death on food, 24,000 died falling down steps, 10,000 slipped or tripped to their death, 8,000 were accidentally poisoned to death by car exhaust, 4,000 died by accidentally lighting their clothes on fire, 1,000 were killed by bees, 200 died from sniffing glue, 65 died in sports tackles, and 33 accidentally fell to their death in a manhole.² And how many died from marijuana?

23… Just above flatulence and gas pain.

It should also be mentioned that many marijuana-induced deaths involve car accidents where another substance was abused at the same time; probably knocking it down below gas pain as a cause of death. By the way, the number of recorded human history deaths related to marijuana overdose is still running at an astonishing benchmark of 0.

But who knows! Maybe marijuana does make you crazy. Maybe its worth it to spend billions of dollars catching, incarcerating, and punishing smokers for the rest of their lives. We don’t need those hundreds of billions of our tax dollars or the hundreds of billions that could be raised by taxing marijuana. Worthless really. Health care is as good as ever, mental illness is on the decline, economy is strong, education is cheaper than ever, and our society is in pristine shape. I mean, every rich bastard needs something to blow his or her money on don’t they? We like drugs. Buying the expensive ones - baning the natural ones.

A Brave New World indeed.

I’ll leave you with one of the most historically accurate marijuana documentaries of all time to digest for now. Government sponsored of course. Oh the Reefer Madness!

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1. Barnes, T., et al. (July 2007), “Cannabis use and risk of psychotic or affective mental health outcomes: a systematic review.” The Lancet. 370: 319-328. [↩]
2. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention [↩]