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Cannabis 'Must Be Unlawful'
author | icBirmingham | 01/20/2005

A BIRMINGHAM psychology expert today said the results of studies into the side effects of cannabis smoking were still unclear.

(BuzzNote: Cannabis is the oldest therapeutic agent known to man. Isn't it strange that no one suggested that is had any negative side effects until quite recently?)

As Home Secretary Charles Clarke rejected calls to reverse the Government's decision to downgrade the drug Dr Nicholas Barnes, a reader in neuropharmacology at the University of Birmingham, said mental health experts used "the numbers game" in proving that clinical depression and schizophrenia were linked to cannabis use.

The drug should continue to be illegal and treated as a "substance of abuse", he said.

Mr Clarke yesterday refused to reclassify cannabis - which was downgraded as a Class C drug - following the emergence of an unpublished report.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs apparently found the impact of smoking cannabis on mental health was more serious than previously thought.

Dr Barnes said: "The studies into cannabis are usually a numbers game. You cannot say if you take cannabis you will get clinical depression - you just look at the numbers. It is not black and white."

(BuzzNote: Despite a large expansion in the number of people using cannabis, the incidence of schizophrenia holds at 1% of the population. AFAIK, there is no evidence that cannabis is linked to depression. Recent studies have shown that cannabis users are less depressed than the general population.)

"If you are a cannabis addict there is a greater risk, but it is the same argument that the tobacco industry has used. You cannot prove that there is a link between lung cancer and smoking, but more people who smoke get lung cancer.

(BuzzNote: Tobacco smokers are 21 times as likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers. If that's not proof, it comes awfully close. Studies indicate that if you are a male with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia and you smoked huge amounts of high-potency pot starting in your early teens, your chance of exhibiting symptoms earlier than non-smokers is somewhat higher. In one case there is a clear causal link, reproducible in vitro in the lab. In the other there is a correlation and a strong possibility that it comes from a common source: pre-schizophrenics smoke a lot of pot to deal with their early symptoms.)

"We do not actually know how cannabis smoking leads to depression. We do not even understand the neurochemistry of depression."

(BuzzNote: We don't know if cannabis smoking leads to depression, much less how.)

Dr Barnes added: "My personal, not professional opinion is that it is a drug of abuse and it should not be legalised."

(BuzzNote: If we want to criminalize drugs of abuse we should start with alcohol and tobacco - the ones that kill people.)

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