Replies

I had no experience with marijuana thirty years ago, but I did smoke a little as early as twenty seven years ago and I can tell you there was plenty of strong pot out there back then. It may vary well be that the average is a little higher than it was twenty years ago, and that the strongest marijuana is stronger than the strongest of twenty years ago, but it all does the same thing. Unless it's just so weak that it makes you sleepy and gives you a headache before it ever gets you high, it will all do the same thing if you smoke enough of it. The marijuana of today is not some new drug. Just like beer and distilled spirits are the same drug that will do the same thing, stronger marijuana and weaker marijuana are the same. And just as it works with alcohol, people tend to consume less of the stronger marijuana than they would of he weaker stuff.

As for marijuana making everyone crazy, I just don't believe it. I could see how people with mental illness would gravitate toward marijuana just as they gravitate toward other intoxicants in an attempt to get some relief from their difficult miserable lives, and I could see how like other intoxicants it might exacerbate an existing condition, but I haven't seen any solid proof that it actually causes mental illness. All we really have in these studies is proof of a link, proof of correlation, but not proof of causation.

It seems to me that if marijuana is really making so many people crazy, we'd have a much higher instance of serious mental illness in states with higher rates of marijuana use than in states with the lowest rates of use. In order to test this theory, I looked at data from the The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which collects data on both mental illness and drug use. My thinking was that if marijuana really causes serious mental illness, there would be correspondingly higher rates of mental illness in states with higher rates of marijuana use. Doesn't that make sense?

First I looked at the state with the highest past month marijuana use, New Hampshire. In that state 10.23% reported use of marijuana in the past month on the last survey and and according to SAMHSA 8.8% of New Hampshire's population suffer from serious mental illness compared to the national average of 8.76%. Then I looked at the state with the lowest marijuana use, Utah. There only 4.00% reported past month marijuana use but SAMHSA says 10.97% suffer from serious mental illness.

Now, that was interesting to me but there are too many variables that can come into play that call into question the results from just two examples. So, I dug a little deeper and looked at the ten states with the highest and ten states with the lowest marijuana use. The national average past month marijuana use was 6.18%. The top ten states averaged 8.93%. Serious mental illness in these states averaged 8.73%, compared to the national average of 8.76%. Serious mental illness in the ten states with the lowest marijuana use averaged 9.44%, even though past month marijuana use only averaged 4.73% in these states.

Why is it that the states with the highest marijuana use actually lower rates of serious mental illness than the states with the lowest marijuana use? I honestly don't know. I don't think you could conclude from that that marijuana use reduces mental illness, but it certainly does call into question research that shows that marijuana use drastically increases mental illness.

Here are the tables I used from SAMHSA's 2003 NSDUH. The link to the past month marijuana use by state is here: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k3State/appB.htm#tabB.3

The link to the serious mental illness numbers by state is here: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k3State/appB.htm#tabB.21 "