Hey! Who keeps saying that pot is harmless? Well, pushers and others seeking to get rich off of it mostly. What if it isn't?

NY Post opinion piece by Miranda Devine The link between pot, shootings may be closer than we think

Even as evidence mounts of the health problems associated with marijuana, New York has insisted on joining other greedy states scrambling to legalize this deceptively dangerous drug.

It makes no sense at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.

And, in all honesty, we cannot rule out a connection between increasing marijuana use, mental illness and the recent spate of mass shootings by disturbed young males.

We don’t yet know much about the mental state or drug use of the El Paso or Dayton killers. But a former girlfriend of Dayton killer Connor Betts, 24, has indicated he was mentally ill, and two of his friends interviewed by reporters this week mentioned his previous drug use.
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You can’t address the youth mental health crisis without considering the effect of rising teen marijuana use.

Among American teenagers, the drug’s “daily use has become as, or more, popular than daily cigarette smoking” according to the National Institute of Health’s 2017 Monitoring the Future study.

We’ve successfully demonized cigarettes while new laws send kids the message that marijuana is harmless.

Yet we’ve known for more than a decade of the link between marijuana and psychosis, depression and schizophrenia.

In 2007 the prestigious medical journal Lancet recanted its previous benign view of marijuana, citing studies showing “an increase in risk of psychosis of about 40 percent.”

A seminal long-term study of 50,465 Swedish army conscripts found those who had tried marijuana by age 18 had 2.4 times the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the following 15 years than those who had never used the drug. Heavy users were 6.7 times more likely to be admitted to a hospital for schizophrenia.

Another study, of 1,037 people in New Zealand, found those who used cannabis at ages 15 and 18 had higher rates of psychotic symptoms at age 26 than non-users.

A 2011 study in the British Medical Journal of 2,000 teenagers found those who smoked marijuana were twice as likely to develop psychosis as those who didn’t.

See also Another Threat to Society - "Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence":

A really interesting article from the Hillsdale College publication Imprimis Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

Over the last 30 years, psychiatrists and epidemiologists have turned speculation about marijuana’s dangers into science. Yet over the same period, a shrewd and expensive lobbying campaign has pushed public attitudes about marijuana the other way. And the effects are now becoming apparent.

Almost everything you think you know about the health effects of cannabis, almost everything advocates and the media have told you for a generation, is wrong.

If you are concerned about the effects on our society of the promiscuous use of legal and illegal drugs, then this article about the relationship of marijuana to mental diseases, you should read this article.

The issues raised need far more exposure.

Not only should we be concerned about what the research reported on by Mr. Berenson indicates, we should also be concerned about the long-term effects on the bodies of habitual users of marijuana - if inhaling tobacco smoke or chewing tobacco are known cancer risks, it seems pretty obvious that doing the same sort of ingestion with another substance must pose some risk - one that the users of today will tomorrow being suing the legal purveyors of their supply for "misrepresentation" of the health benefits of their product.

Things are seldom as they seem, and, as with "feel good alcohol" use, there is a price to be paid down the road for the harm the purveyors of marijuana are doing with their "harmless buzz" pushing of their product.