It’s not a helpful coping mechanism, but there’s a reason double blind studies are considered so important. Untangling complex mechanisms especially when they have feedback in both directions is inherently difficult.
You're really going to call for a double blind study here checking if excessive cannabis is bad for people conditional on their lives falling apart? How do you propose to get that past an ethics board?
You can still do a randomized trial and that's the one that wouldn't pass the IRB.
(Or, use high school freshman for the study and really convincing upperclassmen as actors to convince them it is a real bag.)
There aren't many studies on what are the real impacts of CBD.
Are we to presume that the high itself isn't potentially a causative factor?
Sometimes we’re stuck with “I don’t know” and recognizing that is IMO important.
So, I know.
Clearly, smoking a shit ton is bad for people with marginal mental health or marginal emotional health.
Clearly, weed is good
I mean, it kind of does. If you want to design intervention, it helps to know which causes the other to a greater degree.
But, should we (the gov) spend 10 million dollars on social services to prevent people's lives from going to hell, should we spend 10 million dollars on anti-alcohol addiction services or should we spend it half and half, are questions we as a society need answers to.
Sadly, I’m seeing a new trend of people taking too many psychedelics and going off the rails.
The way they’re being pushed as cure-alls for depression is getting scary.
One of my friends developed severe problems after following the microdosing trend. It developed slowly over a long period of time, but he thought he was okay because he was following one of those protocols from one of the biggest microdosing experts.
Like alcohol or opiates will make your good life bad if you fuck too hard with them.
Pot, in my experience, won't really ruin your life unless you're already on that path.
My thing is that it's mostly harmless, but the problem with it is that young people can become complacent with it. It won't necessarily ruin your life, but you'll be content to sit and veg your life away. So not bad, but not good.
So it's not the legalization at fault, it's people who are overdosing any stuff that's available to them. Casual smoking a weed once a week won't harm you that much.
I suspect that it triggers part of your brain that rewards you for making connections or something like that.
I’ve seen this pattern emerge time and again over decades in people with completely different backgrounds. It expresses itself in different ways but smoking absolutely rewires your brain, makes you more receptive to “secret insider information”.
From one of the papers: “the Aberrant Salience (AS) construct […] refers to an excess of attribution of meaning to stimuli that are otherwise regarded as neutral, thereby transform them into adverse, dangerous, or mysterious entities. This leads the patient to engage in aberrant and consequently incorrect interpretative efforts concerning the normal perception of reality and its relationship with our analytical abilities. AS appears to play a significant role in the onset and perpetuation of psychotic disorders. The internal conflict arising from aberrant attributions of significance leads to delusional thoughts, ultimately culminating in the establishment of a self-sustaining psychosis.” — https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1343...
Maybe one that examines the rise of the alt-right and it's relation to legalization. The timing seems correlated.
Of course it matters. Different drugs and doses have completely different effects on the brain.
Trying to to equate different drugs and claim they’re all similarly risky goes completely against everything we know.