Page 30 - Spring 2019 Journal

Kingdom researchers have reported an associa- tion between high-potency cannabis and “an increased severity of dependence, especially in young people,” with “marked effects on memory and paranoia.”31
Marijuana’s links to schizophrenia are also under-recognized by the general public, even though science on the topic is accumulating.32 A longitudinal study in Finland tracked more than eighteen thousand patients over a sixteen-year period (1987-2003) after their discharge from the hospital for a first diagnosis of substance- induced psychosis; the researchers found that cannabis-induced psychosis led more often to a subsequent schizophrenia diagnosis (46 percent) compared to psychosis resulting from other substances such as amphetamines (30 percent), “hallucinogens” (24 percent) or opioids (21 percent).33 The substance least likely to lead to schizophrenia was the one most widely used by Finnish patients: alcohol-induced psychosis resulted in schizophrenia in only 5 percent of the cases.
Alan Clough of James Cook University in Australia is a leading expert on substance abuse among Aborigines and other remote popula- tions. In 2009, Clough and fellow researchers reported on their five-year study of heavy mari- juana use in three remote Aboriginal communi- ties,34 describing cannabis use by indigenous Aborigines as “endemic yet neglected.”35 When Clough spoke about the study with the newspa- per The Australian, he shared several sobering observations about mental health, noting that “After 15 years of a cannabis epidemic we’re really starting to see the chronic mental effects appearing. We’ve seen acute psychosis that is irreversible, as well as depression and depen- dence. Unfortunately, we also have the situation where suicide is linked not just with cannabis use but also through withdrawal.”36
In August 2018, researchers published the results of the largest known brain scan study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease; the study involved over thirty-one thousand participants (ages zero to over one hundred) and over sixty- two thousand scans.37 The researchers, led by Daniel G. Amen, MD, founder of the Amen Clinics, found that cannabis use, along with schizophrenia and alcohol abuse, were impor-
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tant factors related to accelerated brain aging. “The cannabis abuse find- ing was especially important, as our culture is starting to see marijuana as an innocuous substance,” said Amen, adding that “This study should give us pause about it.”38 In January of 2019, the Journal of Neurosci- ence published a report indicating higher grey matter volume (GMV) in fourteen-year-old adolescents with very infrequent marijuana use, comparing them to nonusers.39 Higher GMV is associated with lower performance on the Perceptual Reasoning Index and with future gener- alized anxiety symptoms.
CANNABIS AND SUICIDE
The risks of cannabis use for adolescents are particularly worrisome.
As Dr. Bertha Madras at Harvard has stated, “This is not a war on drugs: it is a defense of children’s brains.” A study in Lancet Psychiatry confirms the importance of protecting young people’s brains to safeguard their future health and well-being. The researchers examined the association of cannabis use before age seventeen with seven different developmental outcomes up to age thirty. They found “clear and consistent associations and dose-response relations between the frequency of adolescent cannabis use and all adverse young adult outcomes.”40 Youth who had regularly used marijuana were nearly seven times more likely to attempt suicide.
Some of those who start using cannabis as adolescents go beyond attempting suicide to actually succeeding. Lori Robinson, a California parent grieving the loss of her son by suicide, read about Alan Clough’s work with Australian Aborigines and cannabis and took special note of the researcher’s comments about suicide. Gaining immediate insight into the cause of her own son’s death, Robinson coined the term “cannabis withdrawal suicide.”41 Her son Shane had begun using marijuana and ex- perienced two separate psychotic incidents. He was able to recover from the first episode, but when he later relapsed into further marijuana use, he experienced a second psychotic episode with more lasting consequences to his career and his marriage. Tragically, seven months after his parents got him into rehab and he stopped using the drug, they lost him to suicide.
Andy Zorn, described by his family as “handsome and funny,” began using cannabis in high school out of a desire to fit in socially. He managed to function at a high level for a time, graduating from high school, earn- ing a college associates degree and serving three years in the military. However, his adolescent drug use became an adult addiction that he could not conquer. When he killed himself at age thirty-one, he left a suicide note that read, “Marijuana killed my soul [and] ruined my brain.”42
CANNABIS AND THE HEART
Marijuana can raise both blood pressure and heart rate—sometimes
even causing the heart to beat more than one hundred fifty times per minute.43 In the early 2000s, M.A. Middleman, a Harvard heart disease researcher, studied heart patients to determine possible triggers of acute cardiovascular events like arrhythmias and stroke. Publishing a study in Circulation, the researcher noted the rising rate of marijuana use “in the age group prone to coronary artery disease” and concluded, based on research with almost four thousand patients, that marijuana could
Wise Traditions SPRING 2019