Posted on 02/13/2019 8:55:29 AM PST by fishtank
Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence
January 2019 • Volume 48, Number 1 • Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson
"Seventy miles northwest of New York City is a hospital that looks like a prison, its drab brick buildings wrapped in layers of fencing and barbed wire. This grim facility is called the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute. It’s one of three places the state of New York sends the criminally mentally ill—defendants judged not guilty by reason of insanity.
Until recently, my wife Jackie—Dr. Jacqueline Berenson—was a senior psychiatrist there. Many of Mid-Hudson’s 300 patients are killers and arsonists. At least one is a cannibal. Most have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia that provoked them to violence against family members or strangers.
A couple of years ago, Jackie was telling me about a patient. In passing, she said something like, Of course he’d been smoking pot his whole life.
Of course? I said.
Yes, they all smoke.
So marijuana causes schizophrenia?
I was surprised, to say the least. I tended to be a libertarian on drugs."
(Excerpt) Read more at imprimis.hillsdale.edu ...
Recreational Chemistry is for losers - bump for later...
"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." - http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2005559,00.html
It would have been YOU destroying your brain. And banning marijuana for adults has been counterproductive in keeping it from kids - for many years (since well before any state had legalized) kids have been reporting that they can get marijuana almost as easily as cigarettes or beer, despite the latter's much greater prevalence in the adult population. Could have something to do with the fact that by banning a commodity you put it in the black market, beyond the reach of effective regulation such as age limits.
People with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are 300-500% more likely to be cigarette smokers.
These findings do not mean cigarettes CAUSED their mental illness. It only means the mentally ill are more likely to abuse drugs
If you smoke a joint (or a cigarette), just be downwind of me. They both stink. Smoke them where I can’t smell them.
> I’ve been in FR since just after 9/11 and never once, not a single time, advocated drug laws or making any drug illegal.
You are doing that by promotion of WoD propaganda.
Lying to me and/or yourself doesn’t change that one bit.
Your additional slander and ad hominem and radical move of the goalpost to teens (not the subject of the conversation) just serves to reinforce that you are being extremely dishonest.
> Everyone knows playing around with its complex communication chemistry will almost certainly cause permanent damage of some kind, as will publicly defending doing so.
Non-sequitur. Anything you consume will have an effect on brain chemistry. Unless you are also waging jihad against the coffee industry, the alcohol industry, the psychopharmacology industry, etc., you’re in hypocrite mode on this.
Go ahead and show me the record of your objections to those other things and I’ll relieve you of the hypocrite charge.
The USA is #85 on the ethnic diversity list.
Above us on that list include quite a number of countries that have world-average incarceration rates, including nations like Israel and Switzerland.
So while there may be some correlation, it cannot be the cause. Something else is doing that, and the WoD policy is it.
If it were controlled like alcohol, you wouldn’t have had anywhere near the level of access to it that you did, and the same goes for kids today.
If you don’t want kids to have access to it, the best way is to legalize and age-regulate it.
You’re talking to a recovering alcoholic here who’ll be twenty-nine years sober on the 25th. of this month. When you see the damage, death, heart ache and horror alcohol can do, pot is a walk in the park. I don’t see anyone calling for a return of The Volstead Act but I’ve had it up to my eye teeth with the anti-marijuana crowd.
LOL!
Unreal... Thanks for that!
Cannabis helped me ultimately eliminate decades long depression, anxiety, insomnia & much more.
Use it responsibly or not at all.
I don't consider either of those examples as "ethnically diverse" on a par with the US. Israel may be as racially diverse as the US, but has religion as the unifying principle. Switzerland is linguistically diverse, but not racially. I would want to see the actual list and the criteria basis used, because those two examples cause me to seriously doubt the validity.
I concur that the "War on Drugs" is a huge factor, but "diversity" isn't helping things.
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