Reefer madness

In the mornings, Mrs Z sometimes has the breakfast telly on. I'll idly let it play out in front of my eyes when I drink my coffee, paying scant attention to the overtanned nonthinking man and woman's crumpet, who are pretending that we all want to be jolly in the AM. Dunno about you, but I'd sooner watch someone who reflected my mood: a bolshie guy in his dressing gown saying "fuck this shit" would do it. Some bimbo beaming as she relates the latest casualty figures from someone else's misery just doesn't get my engine firing.

One thing that did catch my eye was an interview with a troglodyte from one of Sydney's less salubrious suburbs. She had been a heavy marijuana smoker, and had suffered psychosis. Her son had copied her marijuana smoking, and had also suffered psychosis. The segment was, you guessed it, not Dull Lives in Sydney's West, but Marijuana and Psychosis.

Tracy, our hostess, asked, do you think that there might a genetic link? Well, I thought that was a good question (although clearly misdirected, because I'm reasonably sure that the woman didn't have a deep knowledge of genetics). Here's a disease that often has a genetic component, with an onset in late teens.

No, said the woman, he was just copying me and the mary jane did it.

Tracy wheeled on a doctor. What did Doc say? Those hoping that a man of science might have injected a note of caution into the air of marijuana will send you madness were quickly disabused of the notion. There is increasing evidence of a link between marijuana and mental illness, he said. Studies have shown pot definitely makes you mad.

But do they? Of course not. Most studies show a correlation between marijuana use and mental illness. In other words, usually the scientist studies a cohort over time, having divided it into tokers and jokers. She gives it a year maybe, and counts the nutters. Most studies of this kind find a slightly increased level of depression and anxiety in the heaviest users in the toking group. Not quite the "one joint can make you men'al" line of Channel Nine's "health expert" but something.

So case closed, hey? Smoke dope, go crazy. Well, hang on. Did the study show a link? Did it show that puffing weed will make you go nuts? No, it didn't. To do that, you'd have to feed THC to rats and see whether any started thinking they were Napoleon. That's a different study altogether. These studies show no more, no less than that kids with depression are more likely to have smoked marijuana. They could of course either be showing that pot increases your chances of developing depressive illness or that people with depressive illness are more likely to smoke pot or that a third class of person might be more inclined to do both. At least one study showed that the kids who smoked pot and became depressive were attracted to counterculture; in other words, they were outsiders. Now, being an outsider doesn't necessarily make you a nutter, but being predisposed to mental illness would, one could hypothesise, make one predisposed to being an outsider.

Other studies have shown that smoking dope can aggravate the symptoms of schizophrenia but this is a different issue. Smoking dope is not illegalised only for diagnosed schizophrenics.

I'm not saying marijuana doesn't affect your mind. That's the point of smoking it. But suggesting it causes psychosis is not supported by any evidence at all. (The study that had so much publicity for finding a link studied psychotics, I believe, and found that they were more likely to have smoked dope. It should be clear that this is arse-backwards, the same sort of reasoning that allows pollies to say dope should be banned because it's a gateway to heroin and that's proved because 90% of heroin users have used dope (yeah, but 99% of them have also used beer and 100% have been frequent abusers of cheese).)

But let's say that marijuana does carry a small risk of inducing psychosis in teens. Let's assume, against all the evidence that we have, that you can become psychotic just because you smoke a joint (and not have the psychosis that you will suffer anyway, triggerable by a heavy session on the piss, say, or a stressful conflict situation or whatever). It must be a very small risk, because you can feed a rat THC all day long and it'll just want more to eat (man, if they were arguing that pot makes you fat and useless, there'd be no argument). Should we ban it on that ground?

Well no. We allow other much more risky activities at the user's risk. Driving a car is renownedly dangerous. On a per-use basis, it's very much more dangerous than smoking a joint. Taking an aspirin is considerably more risky, with each year several deaths solely attributable to reactions to it. Drinking heavily is not only more strongly correlated with mental illness but more proximately risky (not to mention that you just don't get mary jane louts smashing up the town).

The worst of it is that most people don't bother thinking about what they see on the Today show. They don't look into it. They accept that the "expert" is a scientist -- a neutral voice and not a person with an agenda that coincides with that of the show he appears on (a very conservative agenda, of course, not least because it's shown on a Murdoch network, not that Seven is radical in any way) -- and are convinced that marijuana will make their kids mad. They walk away believing that the poor woman's poor kid went nutso because he copied her smoking pot, and not because he had a disorder that proper attention at the right age would have seen diagnosed and treated. They do not conclude, as they might, that the poor woman, racked with guilt, is not a bad mother because she smoked a few joints but is one rather for simply not bothering to find out the truth about what ails her and what ails her kid.

My own view is, of course, that marijuana should be legalised. I'm what you might call an informed-consent libertarian. I think the state's duty of care extends to ensuring you are informed of the dangers that exist in what you might choose to do (because it has the resources to find out what they are and disseminate what they learn) but not to preventing you from exposing yourself to them (with the caveat that I also believe the state has the duty to protect others from you, so I would disapprove of feeding your six-year-old hash brownies). I'd support legalisation of all drugs, and an end to intrusive laws such as those forcing you to wear a seatbelt etc (but again, I would fine you for not belting your kid in -- you'd have the right to make the wrong choice for yourself, but not for others). I'm aware that there is an argument that poor choices incur costs on the society around you, and I agree that it has some force. However, I think it is more often the excuse for infringing on the citizen's right to choose than it is a genuine concern. Ultimately, I'm happy to pay for hospitals that treat people too stupid to do a small thing that will prevent them from exiting their car through the windscreen, just as I am to pay for them to treat you if you gorge yourself on burgers and the resulting fat you have to carry strains your heart. The bottom line is that I provide the hospital in part to sweep up after your bad choices and I think that's a cost worth paying.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:11 am