German Study: Marijuana Users at Risk for Personality Disorders

German Study: Marijuana Users at Risk for Personality Disorders | Culture & Lifestyle | Deutsche Welle | 22.12.2008
German researchers are warning that using marijuana can have serious psychological side effects. 

Men who use cannabis risk becoming antisocial while women often become depressed and insecure.

Who told you I was anti-social?  Why, I’ll kick his ass!  Well, maybe later, my insecure wife is crying over something…

Cannabis users between 17 and 30 years are at greater risk of developing multiple types of personality disorders than non-smokers in the same age group, a German study found.

Cannabis also effects women differently than men, the study published in the German psychiatric journal Fortschritte der Neurologie Psychiatrie found.

Researchers at the Protestant Bethanien Clinic in Greifswald discovered that young men tended to become anti-social or develop borderline personality disorders while women who smoked cannabis often become depressed and insecure.

Of the 99 cannabis users examined, 90 percent later developed an antisocial personality disorder.

Damn, that sounds serious!  Nine out of ten people who smoked cannabis became anti-social!  Think about that.  It means every time you’re passing a joint in a circle of ten people, nine of those people that you just met and spoke to and laughed with are anti-social!  That must explain why you never see cannabis consumers in large social groups, huh?

Symptoms included disregard for social norms, reduced or non-existent empathy for other people and an inability to change behavior despite negative experiences.

One third of the participants in the study had three or more personality disorders.

Excuse me… “disregard for social norms?”  If the social norm says you get locked up for smoking cannabis, and you’re smoking cannabis, aren’t you disregarding social norms by definition?  

“Reduced empathy” for others?  Do you even know any cannabis consumers?  I’ve got a team of over a dozen cannabis consumers who volunteer their time two Saturdays a month to help hundreds of complete strangers who are new to the medical marijuana program.  Those strangers benefit from the donation of cannabis starts and excess medicine donated by other strangers.  I’ve never met more giving and caring people than cannabis consumers.

This whole study sounds like a bunch of bunk.  I wonder if they committed the most basic of errors in this research… wait for it… 

However, the study could not determine whether using cannabis was responsible for any initial change in their personalities.

Bingo!  In other words, causality cannot be proven.  You cannot know whether cannabis made certain subjects depressed or whether depressed people naturally seek out cannabis.  You cannot know whether cannabis makes people anti-social or whether cannabis prohibition makes people anti-social.  

This is one of those surveys where they ask a bunch of questions to people and then break down the results by whether or not you use cannabis.  Well, even I’ll grant you that people who smoke cannabis are culturally different from people who do not.  Being part of a prohibited class of persons will do that do you.  It’s like the NORML slogan – a pot smoker is arrested every 36 seconds, and you wonder why we’re paranoid?

Now don’t think that your average reader is going to figure that out from the last paragraph.  Points like that are always buried in the last couple of paragraphs after most people got “Men who use cannabis risk becoming antisocial while women often become depressed and insecure.”