I'm speaking as a medical student. And I can't speak for what it's like in the US - only Sweden. Here it's not uncommon for schizofrenic patients to self medicate with marijuana. I guess it increases their quality of life until they have just a little too much and end up having a psychosis. That said, at least among Swedish psychiatrists, it's well know that marijuana can trigger schizophrenia in people that are ~16 years old.
By what pathway is the schizophrenia triggered?
And is the trigger causal or catalytic?
I guess that's the thing with psychiatry: the whole field is pretty far away from basic science, mechanisms etc. My (second hand) understanding is it actually triggers schizofrenia in 16 y.o. people who would not otherwise have gotten it. Not sure if it's clinical experience or if there is data to back it up. The 16 yo-scenario is one of the few medical arguments I've heard for why there should be an age limit on marijuana.
I had a girlfriend with a brother he was schizophrenic. He had a classic break with Ronald Reagan directly addressing him through the television and all that. Like most patients, he did not like the side effects of anti-psychotics. He tended to drink light beer all day. At some point he started smoking cannabis and said it was the only thing that had made the voices go away for him. However, this effect seem to go away with tolerance, which isn’t surprising. He also ended up hanging out with a different crowd and starting to smoke crack about six months later, which probably is related to how one was forced to access illegal markets that also sell other drugs to obtain cannabis at that time. Not surprisingly, crack was not good for his schizophrenia. Cannabis, however, seems promising. The way he described it is similar to my experience with pain relief from cannabinoids, which is the unpleasant sensation is still there but you don’t pay any attention to it.
Nice to make an illiterate sounding typo in the first sentence. Of course I meant “who was schizophrenic.”