Reefer?
Posted on 07/07/2022 5:17:08 AM PDT by T Ruth
You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that the Highland Park shooter is sick in the head.
His evil act is unfathomable, but he does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness.
Those who knew the 21-year-old suspect, Robert Crimo III, say he habitually smoked cannabis, a habit he appeared to share with young mass shooters, including at Uvalde, Dayton, Parkland and Aurora.
Obviously weed didn’t make them commit their evil acts, but it may have scrambled their brains enough for empathy to take a holiday.
As the country rushes headlong into the embrace of Big Weed, we need to heed the warning signs, not least in the scientific literature which increasingly shows that cannabis triggers psychosis, and in the emergency rooms where mentally ill kids are the living proof of its harms.
***
[A New York newspaper] last month warned of the high potency of cannabis products in the newly deregulated legal market and the potentially harmful effects to young brains: “Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick”.
THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, 20 years ago was at about 4% potency, but today’s Big Weed products are close to 100%.
We have known for at least 15 years that cannabis use can increase the risk of psychosis in susceptible people by about 40%, according to the medical journal Lancet.
A study last year of 204,000 people aged 10-24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s pediatrics publication found that cannabis use and abuse is associated with depression, bipolar disorder and increased risk of suicide.
***
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Yeah, let’s all watch Reefer Madness one more time and blame the object and not the person. The pot doesn’t control the person, the person controls the pot. Plus he’s the type to have been on prescription psychotropic drugs. If he wasn’t then he needed to be. Instead of blaming pot, blame the enabling parents who also should be brought up on charges for covering for their monster son.
Reefer?
Same with my BIL. He wigged out at 16 yrs old after a serious bout of reefer reefing. Been on serious meds ever since.
Pot smoking thieves and burnouts have been a plague in schools and communities well before the psychotropic drug craze was a thing. The abuse of psychotropic drugs because the federal government pays school districts more for special ed kids than normals, just made it worse.
Ping
The worst thing about potheads is their evangelism and arrogance. Drunks and tweakers know that there is something wrong with them. Potheads think being incapable of getting through the day without smoking is a sign of superiority rather than a serious flaw.
I wonder if more mass murderers over the years have smoked tobacco or marijuana?
Would not insurance cover his treatment? The shrinks would be no better if practicing under the imprimatur of government than they are now.
In fairness, people who need lawyers, but can't afford them are also in quite a pickle.
But it may have scrambled their brains enough for empathy to take a holiday.
Don’t need to be a psychiatrist to note how so many teen to thirty groups behave they do so many stupid and childish things.
The THC level is so much many more are going to ER hospitals but they keep doing it some logic huh Moe.
It covered him until age 26. But after age 18 treatment is their own option. They are legal adults and we don’t get to see their treatment records after age 18.
Do you know if he decided voluntarily to discontinue treatment? Without income, he would qualify for zero-premium insurance, or Medicaid.
Agree!
The new stuff is like 10+ times as strong as the old stuff.
Cabover Pete with a Reefer on ...
.
“he does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness...”
a) It’s not “distinctively American”. Distinctively “Western” perhaps, as there have certainly been mass shooters in other Western countries where they can get ahold of firearms (Christchurch, Anders Brevvik, Hanau shooting in Germany), and perhaps even just distinctively “post-Industrial”, since the same types of incidents regularly occur in non-Western industrialized countries too, just more often involving stabbings and such, where firearms are not available.
b) I think if you actually did the research, you’d find that not all mass shooters were using recreational drugs. Use of prescription psychiatric drugs seems to be much more of a prevalent common link instead.
A close family friend’s son was fine — smart, good grades, steady, all-around good kid — until he vaped strong cannabis when he went off to college. Right after that, he suddenly became so depressed he was nearly catatonic, and suicidal. The parents tried everything, no expense spared, to bet him help. The (very costly) mental health professionals said this was an unusually severe case, but it can happen. His mother had suffered from depression, so it may have “set off” an inherited predisposition to depression. Despite much love from his parents, family and friends and the best treatment money could buy, the young man ended up committing suicide in less than a year.
Extreme case? Yes. It’s also thought that while cannabis does not cause schizophrenia in those who do not have a genetic predisposition, it can “set it off” in those who do. It’s still debated, granted, but it does at least appear that cannabis use triggers psychotic episodes in those genetically at risk for schizophrenia:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01330-w
And what about lowered IQ in teens who become heavy users early on, or regular users during their teen/young adult years? And what about other neurocognitive effects?
Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1206820109
Impact of adolescent marijuana use on intelligence: Results from two longitudinal twin studies:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516648113
Smoke weed regularly in your teens (even the milder 1970s stuff), lose 8 IQ points (does not affect adults the same way):
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/healing-addiction/202007/does-cannabis-decrease-iq
Pot is not a totally harmless substance. If adults want to mess with it, fine. Lots of adults pickle their livers and brains by abusing alcohol. But it looks to be quite harmful to developing brains. And our brains continue to develop into our mid twenties, so ...
... it seems Southeast Asians had it right: traditionally, it was an “old folks” thing for relief of aches and pains. Young people wouldn’t be caught dead smoking it, any more than our young people would want to be caught dead taking Geritol and wearing Depends. (That’s now all changed there, sadly, thanks to Western influence.)
Interesting food for thought!
More likely he was influenced by the Dem/leftist hate for America and their “F*** the 4th” hate....
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