Smoking pan speeds mental illness

CANNABIS can speed up the appearance of psychotic illness, an innovative Australian study has found. Dr Matthew Large, a staff specialist in Mental health from the University of New South Wales and the Prince of Wales Hospital, said the risks are especially high for younger people, whose brains are still developing. For young people who smoke cannabis regularly, in its place of having about a 1% chance of developing schizophrenia during their lifetime, they would end up with something like a 5% chance of developing schizophrenia, said Dr Large.

His research, that pulled together information on 20,000 patients and drew on more than 80 international studies, is published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The study has again prompted drug experts to call for regulation, not prohibition, of marijuana. With about 33% of the Australian population and 18% of secondary school students using the drug, in a few years there would be more Australians smoking cannabis than smoking tobacco, said Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital and head of the Australian Drug Law restructuring Foundation. He recently said he believed the time was right for an audition of a hash coffee shop in the community of Nimbin.