My wife is a psychiatrist, and marijuana is a constant frustration because her patients think it doesn't have negative effects. Like me, she could give a fuck if people smoke weed for fun, and she wants it to be fully legalized. She also believes it's a beneficial treatment for chronic pain. But as a psych medication, she's not impressed. It makes some psych symptoms worse, and interferes with some medications, in addition to increasing the risk of psychosis as you describe here.
I hope that after legalization, we can talk about the negative effects without people freaking out -- like we can for alcohol. Plus, people who just want to smoke weed can leave doctors out of it.
For a while, my wife worked in a state where the only psych condition that qualified for medical marijuana was PTSD. So, she had all of these patients who were determined to get a PTSD diagnosis. Arguing with college students who clearly just want to smoke weed is.... not what she pictured when she went to medical school.
Considering we don't even really know how most treatment drugs for mental illness work, I'm always baffled that people think they already know exactly how weed affects them. It's not proof of anything (and the treatment conclusions he comes to are fanciful and were later abandoned), but Mark Vonnegut's early '70s memoir about sinking into schizophrenia on a comune in "The Eden Express" is a really compelling read. I did some kind of report on it for a psych class years & years ago, and it scared the crap out of me, pretty much permanently. What I remember most (though vaguely at this point) are the crazy vivid descriptions of exactly how his grip on reality just kind of gradually loosened over time. Our brains are fascinating! (And resilient -- apparently Vonnegut eventually became a pediatrician.)
The other thing to consider is alcohol- if alcohol had never existed throughout history but had been invented in a lab in 1975, and then people were trying it out and finding they liked it, it would be massively more destructive than marijuana is. Kills thousands of people a year and god knows how many millions of dollar of property damage by drunk driving, fucks your liver, ruins jobs, causes fights, and if you use it long enough you die if you stop cold turkey. They need whole facilities devoted to dragging drunks away from the grave, and even if they stop for years the urge to drink more is still there.
Even the worst case scenario vis a vis marijuana- if it does sometimes cause psychosis and does lead to more stoned driving and generally worsens public health a bit- is nowhere near as horrible being able to swing by the liquor store after work for a bottle or a twelve pack.
(Frankly, I doubt anything crazy or dangerous will be uncovered by future studies. The vast majority of people I’ve met have smoked at least casually, even if they don’t hang up paintings of marijuana leaves in their living room or wear themed tshirts. If tens of millions of people smoking sub rosa for decades hasn’t produced something detectable, I suspect all the downsides are already plain and we’re just waiting on somebody in a labcoat to tell us what we already know.)
But since we discovered that a top-down banning of alcohol justified by public health was counter productive and anti-social, I see no strong case for a top-down banning of weed justified by public health regardless of what data emerges from future studies. Fundamentally, I am not willing to use the police to harass people and ruin their lives over getting high, regardless of whether or not there are hidden downsides to getting high. And even forcing people into jail for a night, even a simple triple digit fine, even putting a footnote on someone’s record for future job searches, is enough to wreck a poor person’s life over some bullshit.
So there is the National Institute of Drug Abuse that's the main funder of NIH research on marijuana. But I put it to you that the institute's title biases Congress against funding. After all, who wants to be primaried for his/her support of drugs? I put it to you that Congress can cover themselves by authorizing funding for weed research through the National Institute on Aging. Everyone ages, right? Call your congress(wo)man now and ask her/him to pass the Willie Nelson-Keith Richards Immortalization Act.
Speaking to your first footnote, "people getting arrested without getting imprisoned" is a huge feature of the modern War on Drugs; there's a discussion of this in David Simon's The Corner, though it's mostly focused on harder drugs. Simon's not in favor of imprisoning more people, of course, but he points out that the system tends to maximize how many peoples' lives get disrupted while minimizing deterrence.
My wife is a psychiatrist, and marijuana is a constant frustration because her patients think it doesn't have negative effects. Like me, she could give a fuck if people smoke weed for fun, and she wants it to be fully legalized. She also believes it's a beneficial treatment for chronic pain. But as a psych medication, she's not impressed. It makes some psych symptoms worse, and interferes with some medications, in addition to increasing the risk of psychosis as you describe here.
I hope that after legalization, we can talk about the negative effects without people freaking out -- like we can for alcohol. Plus, people who just want to smoke weed can leave doctors out of it.
For a while, my wife worked in a state where the only psych condition that qualified for medical marijuana was PTSD. So, she had all of these patients who were determined to get a PTSD diagnosis. Arguing with college students who clearly just want to smoke weed is.... not what she pictured when she went to medical school.
Considering we don't even really know how most treatment drugs for mental illness work, I'm always baffled that people think they already know exactly how weed affects them. It's not proof of anything (and the treatment conclusions he comes to are fanciful and were later abandoned), but Mark Vonnegut's early '70s memoir about sinking into schizophrenia on a comune in "The Eden Express" is a really compelling read. I did some kind of report on it for a psych class years & years ago, and it scared the crap out of me, pretty much permanently. What I remember most (though vaguely at this point) are the crazy vivid descriptions of exactly how his grip on reality just kind of gradually loosened over time. Our brains are fascinating! (And resilient -- apparently Vonnegut eventually became a pediatrician.)
538 but with better writing!
The other thing to consider is alcohol- if alcohol had never existed throughout history but had been invented in a lab in 1975, and then people were trying it out and finding they liked it, it would be massively more destructive than marijuana is. Kills thousands of people a year and god knows how many millions of dollar of property damage by drunk driving, fucks your liver, ruins jobs, causes fights, and if you use it long enough you die if you stop cold turkey. They need whole facilities devoted to dragging drunks away from the grave, and even if they stop for years the urge to drink more is still there.
Even the worst case scenario vis a vis marijuana- if it does sometimes cause psychosis and does lead to more stoned driving and generally worsens public health a bit- is nowhere near as horrible being able to swing by the liquor store after work for a bottle or a twelve pack.
(Frankly, I doubt anything crazy or dangerous will be uncovered by future studies. The vast majority of people I’ve met have smoked at least casually, even if they don’t hang up paintings of marijuana leaves in their living room or wear themed tshirts. If tens of millions of people smoking sub rosa for decades hasn’t produced something detectable, I suspect all the downsides are already plain and we’re just waiting on somebody in a labcoat to tell us what we already know.)
But since we discovered that a top-down banning of alcohol justified by public health was counter productive and anti-social, I see no strong case for a top-down banning of weed justified by public health regardless of what data emerges from future studies. Fundamentally, I am not willing to use the police to harass people and ruin their lives over getting high, regardless of whether or not there are hidden downsides to getting high. And even forcing people into jail for a night, even a simple triple digit fine, even putting a footnote on someone’s record for future job searches, is enough to wreck a poor person’s life over some bullshit.
So there is the National Institute of Drug Abuse that's the main funder of NIH research on marijuana. But I put it to you that the institute's title biases Congress against funding. After all, who wants to be primaried for his/her support of drugs? I put it to you that Congress can cover themselves by authorizing funding for weed research through the National Institute on Aging. Everyone ages, right? Call your congress(wo)man now and ask her/him to pass the Willie Nelson-Keith Richards Immortalization Act.
Speaking to your first footnote, "people getting arrested without getting imprisoned" is a huge feature of the modern War on Drugs; there's a discussion of this in David Simon's The Corner, though it's mostly focused on harder drugs. Simon's not in favor of imprisoning more people, of course, but he points out that the system tends to maximize how many peoples' lives get disrupted while minimizing deterrence.