'Skunk-like cannabis' increases risk of psychosis, study suggests

Hash is, per gram, assuming you've made your hash from the same plant as you're measuring against, much, much stronger - as you're getting rid of the useless leaves, stalks, and vegetal matter, and just retaining the resin from the trichomes.

Then as now, it's simple propaganda.

It seems that only people smoking strong cannabis strains, [edit strike]and smoking daily, [/strike] were at risk.

UK gov has again said this is a reason against legalisaton but to me it moves us a bit closer.

Most of these studies do not look carefully at family history and the ones that do find that heavy cannabis users have more family members with psychosis, fully explaining any link between cannabis and psychosis.

Similarly, people who study math have a greatly increased rate of psychosis, but nobody warns kids against studying math because the math-psychosis link is fully explained by family history/genetics.

Before people become overtly psychotic there is a long "prodomal" period where they are just a bit weird, in this prodomal period period pre-psychotic people can have an interest in math and cannabis.

And here's an excerpt: --- Gabor began to read about a group of American scientists who had carried out something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is the most detailed research ever conducted into the long-term effects of early childhood trauma. It looked at ten different terrible things that can happen to a kid, from physical abuse to sexual abuse to the death of a parent, to track how it shapes that child over their lifetime.

These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude17 rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.18

Another long-term study, published in American Psychologist,19 followed kids from the age of five until they were eighteen, to figure out how much the quality of your parenting while a child affects your drug use as you get older. When the children were still small, the scientists gave them a task to carry out with their parents—like piling up building blocks—and then they watched how well the parents helped and encouraged them through a one-way mirror. They wrote down which kids had parents who were loving and supportive, and which had parents who were disengaged or nasty to them. It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time.

If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.” ---

As to "hash skunk cannabis" which is "as bad as heroin" according to the telegraph... don't make me laugh - or are they seriously suggesting I start shooting up because it's no worse than smoking a joint after work?

From what I gather, this is about the age of onset of psychosis in people genetically predisposed towards psychosis, ie. it's already accepted that the participants have a predisposition for psychosis.

I suppose http://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Maccabe/publicatio... is the article; a quick search for the main author also shows e.g. http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/article00725.html regarding the genetics.

Meta-reviews https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=meta%20study%20psychosi... seem to support it as well.

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EDIT: reading the comments here, I feel I have to mention that yes, alcohol is also bad and possibly worse (definitely worse if you look at absolute numbers) and no, cannabis is not worse than heroin and no, we shouldn't ban everything that can do you harm. That still doesn't mean we should pretend cannabis can never do harm.

And yes, I too am around a lot of smokers, and not a one of them shows any sign of hightened "paranoia", whatever that means. See the problem with anecdotes?