Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nitramp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I would say Marijuana is a completely safe and harmless drug. The effects of the use are a lot less drastic than with other drugs, but regular and heavy users, in particular if they are young, are known get sluggish to the point where it becomes a huge problem for them. Some also develop mental illnesses.

That is probably a lot less drastic than the effects of e.g. getting completely drunk every day. But one of the problems is that there is no public evidence based knowledge about the effects of drugs like Marijuana. People either believe it's completely harmless, or they think it's the devil. There is also no good social canon on the use of such drugs. Getting drunk every day has obvious social stigma in all circles, but smoking hash every day can be accepted behaviour in certain circles.

That is actually the nice thing about this study, they try to correct this and give facts.

View on HN

known get sluggish to the point where it becomes a huge problem for them... Some also develop mental illnesses.

Citations, please.

A phrase to remember when citing anecdotes about mentally ill people taking Drug X is self-medication. This is a technical term in counseling psychology; it refers to a very common phenomenon where a person who is suffering a mental health issue -- which can be anything from a mild acute depression to full-blown schizophrenia -- figures out, by trial and error, that taking a certain drug seems to alleviate their symptoms, or make those symptoms more tolerable. This often causes the patient to end up with two health problems, which can be difficult to sort out from each other and which generally must be treated together.

So even if you uncover evidence that mental illness and taking drugs are correlated, you can't simply assume that the drugs cause the mental illness. It could just as easily be the other way around.

I don't have proper sources, nor am I an expert on the subject. I just remember this being the result of a study I read about some years ago, and it fits my personal experience with several friends.

Some Googling finds this: Pope HG, Gruber AJ, Hudson JI, Huestis MA, Yurgelun-Todd D. Neuropsychological performance in long-term cannabis users. Arch Gen Psychiatry 58(10):909–915, 2001.

Your caveat about correlation and self-medication could be right. It might also be wrong - you don't give a good citation either. My point was that I think we have a lot less knowledge about the effects of these drugs than e.g. alcohol which we're (ab-)using since millenia, so the UK analysis is certainly an improvement.

"Longitudinal studies indicate that, in long-term, the higher use of cannabis is associated with an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, and probably, major depression in subjects initially without affective disorder, but was not found increased risk of cannabis use among those initially only with mania or depression." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20658056

the source is not very reliable(some obscure journal in portugese),

This is why I will never vote for the legalization of MJ. Proponents will never admit that there are negative effects of the drug and when someone tries to mention it, they are immediately attacked and silenced.

A very small percentage of people are smoking it for health effects. The rest just want to forget about whatever is going on in their lives and get high. Why can't people just admit the truth?

"The rest just want to forget about whatever is going on in their lives and get high. Why can't people just admit the truth?"

Many people consuming alcohol are doing so for similar reasons.

I know this. Alcoholics also aren't trying to tell the world that it cleanses your kidneys.

I'm not a user of THC, but it doesn't help the debate when opponents spread huge amounts of misinformation and propaganda on the opposing side of the topic either, often citing debunked toxicity studies, and claiming false links to mental illness, none of which have been shown to be causative. Many of the dangers claimed are observations made from animal necroscopies after LD50 doses or doses non-representative of recreational or medical usage. Not joking, the LD50 of cannabis leaf for humans is roughly 3/4 of a ton, or something like 17lbs of pure THC.

I'm just curious, your opposition seems largely centered on people being high and not the medical effects, are you a prohibitionist too? What about self-induced altered states of mind, hypnosis, etc? Neurochemically active foods (chocolate->dopamine link)? What's the reasoning?

I don't see how mechanical_fish was attacking Nitramp, and he most certainly did nothing to silence him. Could you explain what mechanical_fish did that was inappropriate?

I thought a glass of red wine a day was recommended by doctors and this advice was widely followed by the middle class?

It's generally not recommended by doctors, though it's though to be good for your physical health.

There is a difference between a glass of wine a day and getting drunk.

What's interesting there is that a glass of wine a day (which might be healthy, though such claims get regularly debunked) is socially accepted. I think our societies just have better knowledge of acceptable use of drugs that we're more familiar with, as a whole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com