The horror of thinking the sun is going to explode. The horror of thinking the people that care the most about him are going to kill him. The horror of thinking there's faces in the sidewalk. The horror of thinking aliens visit him and attempt to abduct him. The horror of thinking he gets messages from the aliens via the static on a TV. The horror of thinking he's married to someone else who doesn't know who he is. The horror of not being able to look after himself or work. The horror of him being homeless in another country because the system there failed him. I could go on for hours.
I know several others since the legalization of pot who induced schizophrenia in themselves in adulthood. Overeating? Consider yourself lucky.
It turns out there are risks both ways. A black market makes crime and causes violence. A completely open and unregulated market can create problems for at risk people including the issues your step-father experienced.
There is no perfect solution. There are just ones that do the least harm.
The problem is the lack of accountability and access to solutions within Western countries. IMO, if cannabis can be made so readily available on a legal basis and easily accessible, the treatments for schizophrenia must be too. The risks generally aren't highlighted, only the benefits of cannabis are. The media would have you believe it's a wonder drug with no dangerous side effects.
He ended up coming back from Canada where his family live to live in the UK again because he couldn't get access to a specific monthly injection he needed for his schizophrenia. Lived in the street for about two years in Canada, until his delusion led him to commit a crime, and he agreed to stay in a psychiatric hospital for x time. After which, they simply released him into the street again...
The lack of viable, affordable, healthcare in the US is a tragedy of huge proportions that scales far past just drug abuse itself in to pretty much every part of our lives for the people that live here. The fact so many of us live in fear of losing our jobs because we're at risk of dying if we do is a joke for a country as wealthy as we are.
As an outsider looking in, whilst the UK's NHS isn't in a good place right now due to mismanagement and underfunding, I can't help but feel that in a land of many billionaires, healthcare should be means-tested in its pricing, or there should be an equivocal for the NHS.
This'll be an unpopular take on HN, but what is it going to take? Government intervention? Wealth caps? Heavier taxation over x for the mega wealthy? Heavier pricing for the mega wealthy? If people can accrue billions in personal wealth and sit on it then there's a problem.
Access to healthcare shouldn't be limited by money. Society would be more productive if it were well. There would inevitably be less crime too.
The UK risks losing the NHS as-is. It's terrifying for most folks. No health insurance required to access it. Sure, you may wait for help, e.g., there's a six months waiting list on entering titration for ADHD meds, but access to the same private healthcare provider is there via the NHS, and the waiting list is generally no different than if someone were to pay for it out of their own pocket other than an additional week or so as part of the "Right To Choose" system to be referred.
> Moreover, separate data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission show that only 92 people were sentenced for marijuana possession in the federal system in 2017, out of a total of nearly 20,000 drug convictions.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/weighing-impa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/ge...
With that said, you've evidently ignored the plentra of police cam videos out there that show that "Cops are real pricks quite often", and suddenly the cop harassing you for drugs is now arresting you for assaulting an officer, in which you're going to jail for unless someone else happened to film it because juries believe cops almost all of the time.
I also know plenty of people who haven't had any mental issues from it, but the risk is definitely there.
The first time it happened, my step-father jumped into a river to "escape capture by aliens". Had a family member not swam out to him, he'd have drowned.
Likewise, he totalled a car with others in it during a psychotic episode. Again, he shouldn't have been allowed to drive, but the laws at the time did not prevent him from doing so.
I find that hard to believe. You could probably correlate many mental facility intake patients with those that ate yogurt for breakfast. This is ignorant fear mongering.
Eg: as laid out in [1] which deserves a thorough and close reading.
There's little evidence that cannabis induces (causes) schizophreniform psychoses in people who aren't already at risk of developing such conditions already.
( Eg: A study modelling trends in the incidence of psychoses in Australia did not find clear evidence of any increase in incidence following steep increases in cannabis use during the 1980s
And that's from a thirty year look back in a country of 20+ million with extremely comprehensive public health records and cheap accessable professional docters and access to medication )
There's ample evidence that cannabis and schizophreniform psychoses go hand in hand in a self reinforcing spiral that leads to no good end.
( Numerous examples cited with the paper [1] ).
Like most drugs it's one that's best avoided until full maturity and fully avoided if there are any signs of onset psychoses otherwise relatively harmless in moderation and with an eye to actual effect.
[1] Cannabis use and the risk of developing a psychotic disorder World Psychiatry (2008)
Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver were halved by Prohibition, and didn't return to pre-Prohibition levels until the late 1960s. Similarly, per-capita alcohol consumption dropped to 30% and then plateaued at about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition consumption, only returning to pre-Prohibition levels in the 1980s.
Prohibition worked. But arguably it was too expensive, and certainly inconvenient. OTOH, national Prohibition turned out to be much stricter than originally intended; the 18th Amendment was originally sold to the public as way to ban hard liquor, not beer and wine, permitting Congress to harmonize state laws which primarily banned the former, not the latter. The ban on beer and wine was a turn that most didn't expect. If Congress' Volstead Act hadn't been so extreme or if SCOTUS hadn't interpreted the amendment so loosely, we might still have the 18th Amendment.
Cannabis use is not a virtue. It can be responsible so that the negatives are less than or equal to background negatives from the rest of life, though, similar to alcohol and other ingesteds.
While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof, tens of thousands died from drinking alcohol the government intentionally poisoned, crime increased, and the Mafia profited heavily.
I'm all for people choosing for themselves what they should or shouldn't do with their bodies, and it seems like the more people try to force others to adhere to their own moral hangups the more it just brings suffering
The war on drugs caused far more harm than it did good.
Jake Foot was caused by a change of ingredients to Jamaica Ginger, which had been a popular cold remedy in America for over 100 years. It was caught almost immediately. And while Jamaica Ginger, along with many other patent medicines, was indeed a popular alternative to hard liquor[1], it was also consumed by many Americans (quite possible a majority--it was the Nyquil of the 19th century), including children. Only a single dose of Jamaica Ginger was required for paralysis or even death, and this why children were among the many victims. There were other cases of organophosphate poisoning around the world, some much worse, that had nothing to do with Jamaica Ginger or Prohibition. Jake Foot is just another story popularized in support of the mythology of Unintended Consequence in which anti-government conservatives, and now liberals, love to revel.
You also greatly exaggerate the number of methanol poisoning deaths from the infamous government-sanctioned liquor adulteration scheme.
All-in-all, the number of deaths in both cases don't seem to exceed the number of reduced deaths from cirrohsis alone, let alone all the other alcohol related deaths. It's difficult to exaggerate how much Americans drank prior to the institution of Prohibition, and more importantly the extent of the public health catastrophe that had long been unfolding. (And the peak came well before Federal Prohibition as state Prohibition laws had already become common, so looking back merely to the 18th Amendment doesn't properly capture various causes and effects.) There's a reason the country passed a constitutional amendment, which is, to say the least, not something that happens regularly; it requires an uncommon degree of political consideration and agreement across the population, testifying to how significant of an issue it was.
But, as I said, Prohibition as enacted may indeed have been too expensive. Not because in a simple statistical sense there were more net deaths from Unintended Consequences(TM) (which is almost certainly wrong), but because it had the effect of changing the demographics of death. Increased criminality resulted in more highly publicized random deaths of bystanders who might have never touched alcohol. As with terrorism, the archetypical example, people respond in an exaggerated manner to things which they feel they have no control over. As has been shown time and again, the middle class is more than willing trade the well-being of the poor for improvements in their own quality of life; and that exchange can happen both when prohibiting something but also when permitting something.
There are other lenses with which to view this. Prohibition was at its heart a feminist movement designed to and arguably quite successful in reducing spousal abuse and economic impoverishment of the household.
To say "prohibition doesn't work" is trite and easily falsified. There are all kinds of cases where prohibition works like a charm for its intended cases. Take, for example, drug trafficking in Singapore. The question is whether the result is worth it, and very often the answer to that pivots on a qualitative analysis, not quantitative. But people want to avoid qualitative analyses because it requires making moral arguments which are much more difficult to justify, so you end up with a bunch of junk quantitative "science" to justify a position, and that tactic is just as available to "bad" people as it is "good" people.
[1] See this article from 1900 about a group of woodsmen who overdosed on Jamaica Ginger: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101... Maine banned the sale of liquor in 1856.
Maybe you went to a different type of school than me, but from my memory no one ever took the 'drugs are bad, mmmkay' speeches seriously. The visiting anti drug crews were taken even less seriously. And my school was one of the more respectable ones in an affluent area.