Page 459 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 2019
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caused by cannabis. He cites numerous studies which all point to cannabis as contributing to increased violence, including domestic violence.
I would like to quote from an extract of a particularly harrowing tale. This is from a media article released on 5 May 2017 titled “Cairns children killings: does extended cannabis use play a role in psychosis?”:
When Cairns mother Raina Thaiday killed eight children in 2014 she had been clean of cannabis for months, but a psychiatrist found her prior long-term use may have triggered the violent schizophrenic episode.
There is a widely held view within the medical and social work community in Australia that there is a link between extended use of cannabis and psychosis.
While most research is careful not to draw causal links, a study by the University of Queensland that followed more than 3,800 21-year-olds for almost three decades revealed individuals who used cannabis for six or more years had a greater risk of developing psychotic disorders or symptoms like hallucinations and delusions.
The same document outlined how smoking cannabis at a younger age more than three times a week could increase an individual’s risk for schizophrenia up to six times …
The Salvation Army’s Brisbane Recovery Service Centre program manager, Leon Gordon … said …
“Anecdotally, before ice became an issue, we saw that people in their early to mid-thirties who were straight cannabis users came in quite damaged” …
He said there is still a lack of awareness about the toll marijuana can have on someone’s health.
“In most cases they’re no different from anyone else, but the long term heavy users can be quite withdrawn and paranoid …
“The idea that it’s a drug that you can stop using straight away is naïve, that’s not our experience.”
I have done research on range of academic articles. I quoted from one recently and I will quote from some others here. This is from World Psychiatry in 2008, over a decade ago, “Cannabis use and the risk of developing psychotic disorder”:
The consistent finding of an association between cannabis use and psychosis makes chance an unlikely explanation of the association, and there are also now a number of prospective studies showing that cannabis use often precedes psychosis …
The strongest evidence that cannabis use is a contributory cause of schizophrenia comes from longitudinal studies of large representative samples of the population who have been followed over time to see if cannabis users are at higher risk of developing schizophrenia.
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