The worst thing that can happen if you smoke cannabis is to get arrested and to never be able to get a good job or get a scholarship to school
If it's a effect over a long term, it will take quite a while to show up (e.g. cigarettes and cancer).
WA, OR, CA etc aren't recently high consuming states, they have been huge producers and consumers for decades (relative to some other states).
Of course, there's lots of other factors that likely make that analysis hard.
I'm not sure legalization has increased usage in those places, but if it has, it will take more than a few years to see the effects.
Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption in the 20s: http://patterico.com/2014/07/28/yes-prohibition-worked-in-te....
(I am not asking this to support prohibition. I support legalization of marijuana).
It might also make it less cool. Teenages might be less likely to smoke if their parents/teachers/etc do (wild guess)
I personally don't understand that, but I guess it's fun to do something rebellious if it's arguably harmless*
*(I realize that I'm using the word "harmless" quite loosely here)
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/prevalence-mar...
I couldn't locate much information with some quick googling, but I don't think rates of schizophrenia have doubled in the same time period.
The amount of people reporting increased. It is difficult to tell if actual use increased or if people are just more likely to admit they use it because of decreasing taboos.
Same thing with smoking. Schizophrenic people are far more likely to smoke. It turns out that they very recently discovered this was a form of self medication as well.
Actually, that's exactly it - people with a predisposition for schizophrenia are known to be drawn to drugs (particularly nicotine) in a form of self-medication. People with depression and ADHD are more likely to smoke tobacco as well, though the link there is a lot less strong than it is for schizophrenia.
The link between cannabis and schizophrenia has also been studied, and it appears that marijuana can catalyze the onset of symptoms, but it won't produce them in someone who wasn't already going to develop schizophrenia anyway.
So yes, if your family has a history of mental health issues, you probably want to stay away from marijuana. But otherwise, you're probably safe.
if you have it in you, anything can trigger it. legal drugs, illegal drugs, stress & hardships of life and work, serious accidents, failed relationships and so on.
I don't think this is typically deliberate, but it's sloppy, at the very least confidence levels should be adjusted to account for assumed error rates.
Some studies fall apart completely (in the sense that you cannot reject the hypothesis that increased marijuana use is driven by current symptom strength, not the other way around) under reasonable assumptions about how correlated symptom strength and diagnosis probability are.
I don't think this is just a theoretical problem, either. At least anecdotally, most of the people that I've known with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia were undiagnosed for many, many years before finally figuring it out, despite clearly having a lot that was "wrong". There are massive stigmas that make sufferers hesitant to disclose the true severity of their symptoms, even when asked, until they become unbearable.
It would be ridiculous to say that cannabis smoking causes someone to be male.
> I suppose it is possible schizos are drawn to heavy pot use in their teenage years as a sort of self medication, but it seems unlikely.
We know that the increased use of tobacco is because of self-medication.
It doesn't seem that unlikely that people are also self-medicating with cannabis.
We do not know enough yet to say which way round the causal link is.
People are reacting to this as if it is personal, which is a mistake. I've used more than my share in my youth. Obviously correlation doesn't imply causality, but simply dismissing the possibility because it makes you feel bad is weak minded thinking.