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fr_freak — I’m far from naive. You need to update your knowledge.

Recently, a group of French medical researchers published a report on the connection between schizophrenia and marijuana.

The connection between using marijuana and developing psychosis is known to American researchers, too. See:

What doubles the risk of developing psychosis?

http://www.amenclinics.com/blog/tag/marijuana/

My sis has used marijuana for four decades and was briefly addicted to heroin. No matter how much rehab she has undergone, she has never been able to break her marijuana habit. That is an addiction in anyone’s book, and the holes in her brain prove the dangers of marijuana. She used to be a nice person; how she verbally and physically assaults people she says she loves, and she doesn’t understand why she does so.

BIL was a heroin addict for nearly three decades (doesn’t like marijuana) and is an alcoholic who is dying of Hep C.

I’ve reared their son for 15 years. Poor kid has had to deal with the fact his stoner parents abandoned him for drugs. That’s the problem with addictive drugs - they are God to the addict and ruin other people’s lives as well.

Sounds like you've had a tough time watching them self-destruct. I'm truly sorry to hear that. However, by your own admission, each was doing drugs other than marijuana. That's makes it difficult if not impossible to determine which drug did what damage, or caused what behavioral changes.

With regards to the study you are citing, there is the correlation/causation problem which is not addressed:

The other study from an Australian team found that people who smoked marijuana developed psychotic symptoms 2.7 years earlier than people who weren’t pot-smokers.

Here we have a case where the question must be asked, "Which came first, the desire to smoke marijuana to alleviate mental health issues, or mental health issues that arose from marijuana smoking?" In this study, it is easy to see how people with existing mental health issues would have taken to pot sooner than those without mental health issues, and that would skew the data.

Now, let's be clear here: I would never say that pot smoking is good for you. No sane person would. Obviously, marijuana is going to have some kind of negative effect on a person. There is a lot of supposition and hysteria that replaces good science on the subject, unfortunately. Alcohol is not good for you, either. Why isn't alcohol banned? It was once, so why did we stop? If you look at the issues surrounding Prohibition, and why we stopped, they would darn near be identical to the issues we see with the War on Drugs now, and yet we reject as insane and fringe the idea that we should take the same approach?