Posted by detroitpistons on February 26, 2009, at 15:51:43
In reply to Re: In Defense of Cannabis, posted by dcruik518 on February 26, 2009, at 15:06:06
Mmmmm, I think the psychosis thing is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. Though not impossible, this must be a very, very, VERY rare phenomenon. I think that somebody would only have psychosis related to marijuana use only if the psychosis was going to happen anyways. I'm sorry, I just don't see it. Pot can affect different people in different ways, but compared to a lot of other substances (some of which are prescribed to us), I think marijuana is relatively harmless. I'm just speaking from personal experience, research of my own, and a lot of observation of actual pot smokers...call it field work, if you will.
People said Syd Barrett was an "acid casualty." More realistically, he was probably prone to schizophrenia because of his genes, and perhaps the daily LSD use sped up the process or triggered the first psychosis, but we have no way of knowing. But LSD and marijuana aren't even comparable in that sense. I bring this up just as an example.
People with predispositions to different kinds of mental and emotional disorders are going to get abnormal effects from lots of different drugs. If you give adderall to someone with severe anxiety, guess what? It might not be suitable for that person. They may have a panic attack.
People with addictive personalities will probably smoke marijuana too much, and perhaps have some bad consequences. Almost anything used excessively is bad. It's true, a lot of people who smoke too much pot may become lazy/ listless, etc. But you know what? The people I've encountered who let that happen aren't exactly the most motivated to begin with, by their very nature.
None of this means that marijuana is inherently "bad" or "good." I don't think anyone can convince me that daily marijuana use is any worse than daily alcohol consumption...not gonna happen. Alcohol is way more destructive. As for occassional use, I'd say that 99.9% of the "once in a while" crowd has zero problems.
There are plenty of people who have absolutely zero negative reaction from smoking cannabis, and there are plenty of cancer and terminally ill patients who get a lot of benefit from it. At different points in my life, I've smoked marijuana on a regular basis. Not once have I ever experienced any kind of withdrawal or "discontinuation syndrome" when I stopped. To the contrary, if I miss an Effexor dose by 8 hours, I'm a complete mess. Marijuana can have a soothing, stabilizing effect for me. That's just me. Some people get good results and others don't. It's as simple as that.
The bottom line is that there are just too many variables involved to try to make judgments about marijuana, one way or the other.
> > I don't want to reproduce the whole debate here, but I have researched old Mary Jane, and she has the potential to precipitate psychosis in some individuals. There is also some question that it might accelerate the induction of schizophrenia.
> >
>
> Yeah, and from what I just heard it seems like pot is a common trigger for depersonalization and derealization disorders, which can be devastating.
>
> http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090223/msgs/882661.html
>
> ~D
>
> > That's all. If people want to debate the issue, I would recommend the Psycho-Babble archives or do some searches on Google and PubMed.
> >
> > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/
> >
> >
> > - Scott
>
>
poster:detroitpistons
thread:877445
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090223/msgs/882666.html