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Criminalization more harmful than the use of marijuana
By Hempology | August 2, 2007
Guelph Mercury, ON
01 Aug 2007
Joseph Hall
CRIMINALIZATION FALLS SHORT: RESEARCH
A British study claiming pot smokers have a 40 per cent higher risk of developing psychotic illnesses does not prove tougher Canadian drug laws are needed, experts in this country say.
Canadian researchers say that stiffer penalties here have traditionally failed to curb marijuana use in a country that has one of the highest per capita numbers of pot smokers on earth.
As well, they say questions about the harmful effects of the drug have in no way been put to rest by the new study, which is an analysis of past research that may well have contained significant flaws.
“Marijuana, like all drugs, is not completely harmless,” says Dr. Scott Macdonald, assistant director of the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C. at the University of Victoria.
“But criminalization has its harms as well, it’s very costly to process cases and marijuana is widely used,” Macdonald says.
He says that by many important health and public safety standards, alcohol is a far more dangerous drug than pot and yet drinking is perfectly legal here.
“It’s a matter of weighing the public health consequences versus the consequences of criminalization,” Macdonald says.
“And in Canada it’s my sense that the public is seeing that criminalization has not really achieved much.”
Macdonald says education programs would likely be much more effective that jail terms in curbing marijuana use. He also says the increased potency of modern marijuana, noted in the study, does in itself cry out for tougher controls.
Most marijuana users, he says, smoke to a desired high and that the more potent weed simply allows them to achieve that level with fewer puffs.
Wende Wood, a psychiatric pharmacist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, questioned the study’s conclusions, some of which she feels were hyped in a Lancet press release that many media outlets picked up on.
“It’s being sort of stated or implied by Lancet that this ( harm ) is a done deal and this proves it finally,” Wood says.
“And from reading the study I don’t see that it adds that much to the already confusing discussion on this.”
Wood says there is definitely “some kind of a link” between pot and psychosis.
“But I still don’t think this answers the question of causality or why,” she says.
Wood says that marijuana is likely only one of many potential causes of psychosis, including genetics, and would not by itself lead to such things as schizophrenia.
Wood says that even if the 40 per cent increase in psychotic outcomes from cannabis was true, it might only push the actual number of cases up to one per cent of the general population, raising the issue of criminalizing its use for millions of users who are in no danger of such neurological catastrophes.
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