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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

My step-father has cannabis-induced paranoid schizophrenia. It ruined his life, his family's life, my mother's life and my life for the past twenty years. Yes, the horror.

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.

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Right and I know plenty of people that sat in prison for years because of the 'war on drugs' for nothing more than having drugs on them.

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.

In the same breath, my step-father ended up with a criminal record due to his delusions during a psychotic episode.

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 problem is the lack of accountability and access to solutions within Western countries.

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.

What has always baffled me is the coupling of health and publicly traded businesses whose goal of record year-on-year profits is in direct conflict with helping as many people as possible. Profiteering from suffering is surreal.

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.

Are these people you know traffickers? Because being thrown in jail for simple possession of marijuana is very rare. In 2022 the number of people in the US custody for marijuana is zero [0]. Even in 2017 it was very rare

> 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...

I think you're neglecting the last 50 years of the war on drugs here, and yes I will admit that its pretty hard these days to get anything more than just a fine with drugs alone, but to neglect how many people have been jailed in the past when it was much more significant would be foolish.

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.

To be fair, you need a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia and it may have happened anyway, just triggered early by cannabis.

Yeah, other people I know in their forties and fifties didn't get it "early", but a bit of whacky baccy and their lives are a mess.

I also know plenty of people who haven't had any mental issues from it, but the risk is definitely there.

How many lives are ruined by alcohol every year? Oxy? When it comes to risk, weed is the least of my worries.

Plenty. My partner's father ended up in the street for almost twenty years from alcoholism. Again, what we can agree on is that the systems to help people are inadequate and treating people like criminals when they need help is counterproductive.

By induced schizophrenia do you mean that they had underlying schizophrenia, were not aware, smoked weed and have since developed an acute psychotic disorder?

I mean they had absolutely zero reason to suspect they had any kind of underlying mental health issues, then out of nowhere they had a long psychotic episode and never really recovered, and are now medicated permanently, frequently relapsing into delusion and paranoia. These are proper diagnosed cases, and they are now legally classified as disabled.

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.

> cannabis-induced

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.

That's what the diagnosis said, mate. Tell the psychiatrist that it's fear mongering, I'm sure he'd love to know what your qualifications are.

The best answwr today is that it's complicated, very complicated.

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)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/

Recreational drugs alter mental perception, otherwise no one would take them. It's a bit disingenuous to argue that psychotic drugs won't have a relationship to the causes of mental illness.

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