Pot Smoking and Crazy: Cause or Effect?

From the desk of Stacy McCain, news that pot smoking has been linked with schizophrenia:

This Could Explain a Lot of Things

Dr. Samuel T. Wilkinson, a physician in residence at the Yale University department of Psychiatry, writes in the Wall Street Journal: “There is a significant and consistent relationship between marijuana use and the development of schizophrenia and related disorders.”

You can read the whole thing — that is, you could read the whole thing, if you weren’t a raving psycho who’s smoked enough weed to fry your brain. Of course, correlation is not causation, and there is the chicken-and-egg problem: Which came first, the crazy or the weed?

We could hypothesize that mentally unstable people are more likely to do a lot of potentially dangerous things — smoke marijuana, vote Democrat, date tattooed women — without any one of these factors being the cause of their insanity. Advocates of the legalization of marijuana could therefore say, “Yeah, crazy people smoke a lot of weed, but . . . Hey, man, stop being such a buzzkill, OK?”

Speaking from personal experience, I know for several years in the 1970s, I suffered from the psychotic delusion that Robert Plant was singing in key on all those Led Zep albums I listened to. And there are long-term effects, too. Even after I stopped smoking weed, I continued voting Democrat for more than a decade.

Of course, the answer to such either/or questions is generally yes, both.  On a statistical basis, I would suspect that schizophrenics have a higher rate of drug use of many kinds because they relate so poorly to the strictures that bind most of us.  And I suspect there's a heavy dose of "self medication" involved as well.

However, I wouldn't discount the possibility that  you can smoke yourself crazy; but the threshold must must be pretty high or a whole lot of us would be.... oh, wait, a whole lot us are crazy.

Hey, I still like Zep, even though I know Plant was only screaming something sort close to the note that would eventually be scored in that place.  These days, though I've taken a liking for Zepparella:



Linked by Wombat-Socho in the "Rule 5 Monday: Independence Day Weekend Catch-Up Edition" at The Other McCain.