Pubdate: Thu, 19 Oct 2006
Source: Herald, The (UK)
Copyright: 2006 The Herald
Contact:  http://www.theherald.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/189
Author: Melanie Reid
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?207 (Cannabis - United Kingdom)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

CANNABIS: A DRUG MORE DANGEROUS THAN HEROIN

The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for 
several years.

Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems 
and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering 
an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist 
between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis.

Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no 
way back; that the damage is done.

This is the common pattern.

A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his 
mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his 
school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking 
clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends.

He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The 
teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression 
and psychosis.

At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy 
cannabis user for years.

He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, 
he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the 
National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this 
heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for 
sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing 
brains and psychiatric disorder.

The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. 
But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, 
professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he 
is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running 
into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking 
cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters.

We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug 
(after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how 
little research there is on cannabis.

They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin 
and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that 
has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem.

You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the 
government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C 
drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that 
would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the 
reclassification was foolish.

Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it.

What evidence exists is hard to ignore.

In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse 
effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: 
developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, 
chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe 
function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression.

A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age 
of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later 
life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of 
psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher.

Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users.

In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled 
in 30 years.

Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, 
and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK 
experts studying cannabis.

For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, 
pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in 
psychiatric patients.

The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers 
were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection.

Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists 
would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis.

Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic."

His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social 
justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter 
Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases 
of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy 
users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia 
service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He 
estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble 
their risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, 
has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who 
reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade 
cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or 
schizophrenia was a member.

The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next 
General Election. It's a gloomy prospect.

I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous 
fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a 
polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years 
ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional 
hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade.

It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a 
medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage.

But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families 
will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary 
to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of 
a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now 
blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive 
cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena 
and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We 
are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name 
of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, 
which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively 
mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken 
by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses.

This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the 
natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 
pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it 
regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that 
experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more 
dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons 
select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, 
representing the parents, made the case that the government has not 
contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to 
reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation 
said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to 
communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public 
and to school-age children.

More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health 
Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such 
investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to 
demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about 
this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to 
warn teenagers of the dangers they face.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman