Since it has been shown that Canada has the world’s highest rate of cannabis use, the reefer madness has expanded to epidemic proportions.  First we had Barbara Kay and her illogical anti-cannabis ravings in the National Post, now we get Margret Kopala writing in The Ottawa Citizen:

What we know about marijuana
Leading the recent National Post debate on cannabis, columnist Barbara Kay can’t have anticipated Vancouver’s safe injection site, rather than legalized cannabis, would be the Trojan Horse for the legalization of all addictive drugs.

This week, the right of addicts to continue use of illicit drugs was upheld by the B.C. Supreme Court even though no treatment of which I am aware uses the substance that caused the problem to cure it. Smokers use nicotine gum, not more cigarettes, to kick the habit, don’t steal to feed their habit and if heroine [sic] and cocaine are so helpful, why aren’t doctors prescribing them in pill form?

(I agree the heroines are very helpful.  Like Wonder Woman.  I don’t know how you out a heroine into a pill form, though.  I think she’d be quite upset.)

First of all, doctors are prescribing cocaine every time you get that numbing shot in your gums at the dentist, and other opium derivatives, like morphine, are routinely prescribed.

Second, addicts wouldn’t steal to feed their habit if they could buy their drug or a patch-type alternative cheaply and legally, like cigarette smokers can.

And finally, there is a very common medical treatment that uses the dangerous substance to cure or prevent the damages from that substance; they are called vaccines.  A disabled version of a virus is injected into the bloodstream to promote the growth of natural antibodies.

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Cannabis increases risk of psychosis in teens - Telegraph
Teenage cannabis users are more likely to suffer psychotic symptoms and have a greater risk of developing schizophrenia in later life, research has found.

Among more than 6,000 youngsters interviewed for the largest study of its kind, users of the drug had a higher average number of symptoms associated with a risk of psychosis.

These included feeling like something strange or inexplicable was taking place, suspecting they were being influenced or followed and difficulty in controlling the speed of thoughts.

Researchers also found that those who took cannabis in adolescence had a greater risk of developing schizophrenia than older users of the drug.

The teenagers, aged 15 and 16, were asked about their drug use before their risk of developing a psychotic disorder was assessed by experts.

More than 5 per cent said they had used cannabis once or more, and one in 100 had used cannabis more than five times. Girls were more likely to take the drug than boys.

The study, carried out by a team at the University of Oulu in Finland, is published on Monday in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr Jouko Miettunen, who led the research said: “These teenagers are likely to be vulnerable to the mental effects, which means they are probably vulnerable to developing psychosis at some point.”

Once again, we have to agree that teenagers shouldn’t use marijuana.  There is evidence that the developing adolescent brain can be negatively affected by cannabis use.

That said, these symptoms that are associated with psychosis risk - that association was discovered in non-drug-using populations, right?  I mean, if you have never used cannabis, and you felt something strange was happening or couldn’t control the speed of your thoughts, then you’d be considered at risk for psychosis.

But what if these “symptoms” are just the natural by-product of what some of us call the “mind expansion” from using cannabis?  What if early cannabis users do have “speedy thoughts” or feelings of being followed, but then that never leads to full-blown psychosis?  Maybe inexplicable feelings and a bit of paranoia are as far as it progresses?

Looks like the UK reefer madness has now spread to Canada - this is an editorial from Canada’s National Post:

Barbara Kay on the new marijuana: Not your mother’s reefer - Full Comment
The words “intoxicate the brain” bring to mind the Post’s 2007 editorial on marijuana, enunciated in response to evidence that Canada’s marijuana consumption was the highest in the industrialized world: “What is really remarkable about Canada’s status as a cannabis capital is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it … you would have an awfully hard time finding them. Legalizing pot makes sense.”

What was the editorial board smoking when these words were written? In fact, one would not “have an awfully hard time” finding reasons to worry if one were actually open to finding them.

In 1997, the liberal U.K. newspaper The Independent launched a campaign to decriminalize marijuana. …Since then, “skunk,” as Britons call the hybrid form of cannabis in current usage, has offered users a 25-fold increase in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient. The mental and physical effects of this chemical change have been dramatic.

In March, 2007, The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, declared cannabis to be more dangerous and addictive than LSD and Ecstasy. About the same time, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief of the Medical Research Council (and in 1997, the moral authority behind The Independent’s liberalization campaign) unequivocally reversed his cannabis-friendliness: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

As a result, The Independent last year offered its readership a fulsome apology: “If only we had known then what we can reveal today…”

Psychiatry professor Robin Murray of London’s Institute of Psychiatry estimates that cannabis usage is causally linked to a full 10% of the U. K.’s 250,000 bipolar patients.

Indeed, just this past February, the European Respiratory Journal reported on a New Zealand study indicating that long term cannabis use increases the annual risk of lung cancer in young adults by 8% for every year of use.

In 1970, pot contained 1% THC. Bud contains 20% THC. Imagine a glass of wine or beer with a similarly proportioned alcohol content and consider the “rush” it would provide.

Two weeks ago, the Home Office in the U.K. announced: “Cannabis will be reclassified as a Class B drug, sending a strong message that the drug is harmful.”

The verdict on the new marijuana is in, and it’s “guilty.” I would therefore respectfully ask the Post to reconsider its editorial stance on the legalization of “pot,” clearly a superannuated description of cannabis today, and in future commentary on this issue, so critical to our youth’s health, exercise a little more intellectual — ahem — sobriety.

Intellectual sobriety? How about instead, a few facts, please:

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If you haven’t followed the War On (Certain British Subjects Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs going on “across the pond”, then you’re missing some Reefer Madness reminiscent of the days of Harry J. Anslinger and warnings of marijuana being more frightening than Frankenstein and the devil’s tool to make Negroes kill white men and rape white women.

The tactics are familiar. Anslinger took “cannabis” and “hemp”, which almost every early-20th Century American knew to be a common medication and a source of rope and canvas, and re-branded it “marijuana”. That way he and his buddy, William Randolph Hearst, could spread sensationalist lies about cannabis in Hearst’s newspapers, and the scary, Mexican-sounding word helped frighten people about weed in a way that scaremongering on “cannabis” and “hemp” would not.

But the British version of this, happening right now in the 21st Century, is to re-brand the popular herb as “skunk”, with the addition of the scaremongering “this ain’t your father’s pot” rhetoric (”’skunk’ is fifty times more potent than the ganja of the 1960s!”). And this time, it’s not the Negroes coming to hurt whitey, but rather the patently false claim that ’skunk’ triggers psychosis and schizophrenia.

Here is a typical article, from The Argus in the UK…

A mother driven insane by cannabis stabbed herself repeatedly through the chest with a carving knife after claiming she was spoken to by a dog.

Julie Cross told friends the animal was “trying to tell her something” before picking up the 5in blade and ramming it at least five times into her chest and abdomen.

An inquest was told the former receptionist, from Goring, used speed and cannabis on a daily basis and in the weeks running up to her death had slashed her wrists and smeared her blood across a crucifix and also hung a noose from her attic.

Cannabis and speed! Do ya think, perhaps, the speed had more to do with the psychosis? That’s a link that has substantial basis in research and plenty of anecdotal evidence that I’ll testify to as a former club musician who’s seen his share of tweekers.

And yet the headline is “Cannabis-smoking mum stabbed herself to death”.

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