The Link Between Marijuana and Schizophrenia(excerpt)
But here's the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and '50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.
I would classify the author’s statement as opinion and not fact.
It’s much higher than that.
Then there is LSD.
My sister left at 18, and briefly used drugs, both marijuana and LSD, to the best of our knowledge. One or the other, or both, did the foul trick.
When she became violently insane, her erstwhile hippie friends called my parents and said, Either come and get her or we call the cops.
She has lived with family ever since, unable to take care of herself. A few months with drugs, 50+ years with paranoid schizophrenia.
She was a Straight-A student with zero behavioural problems before that. I, the youngest, got to grow up with someone who seemed like a living landmine ready to explode in my face at any moment without warning.
My brother merely became violently paranoid and sociopathic - not precisely schizophrenic - from marijuana and cocaine. He is semi-functional, and lives in the desert as a nomad. I stopped seeing him after he beat me and dislocated my jaw. (I kept my bloody injuries secret, lest my father with his weak heart drop dead upon finding out.)
He was never a great student academically, but he was King of the Prom (underclassmen), and got the Who’s Who Award for his Blue-Ribbon artwork, at Palo Alto High. Stanford students knew of him when he was just a sophomore.
I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by hopheads. Anyone who says Mary Jane is a nice girl is no one I will take seriously.
I never sampled any drugs - ever. That makes me an objective observer. I do not need to contract syphilis (as Nietzsche ostensibly did) to observe the negative deleterious effects of contracting it.
I consider proponents of unnatural drug use libertines, not libertarians (i.e., classic liberals). Unless one lives entirely isolated as my brother now does, drug use will one way or another negatively impact those around one: slacking off at work, causing car accidents on the road.
I have had to do the work of two or three people - while my supposed co-workers were blissed out - often enough that I have no respect for those who choose that lifestyle.