People Who Smoke Skunk Are 18 Times More Likely To Develop Psychosis

[Paracelsus]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113801.php

People who smoke skunk, the extra strong cannabis grown in hothouse conditions, are 18 times more likely to develop psychosis that those who take the milder forms such as hash (cannabis resin), a new study has found.

The study, which was carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry and presented this week to delegates at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, looked at the links between cannabis use of psychosis.

Psychiatrist Dr Marta Di Forti, as part of the GAP (Genetics and Psychosis) Study led by Prof Robin Murray, compared the pattern of cannabis use between 112 patients with first episode psychosis and 75 healthy 'controls' screened for psychosis, both groups from South East London.

They found that people who had a psychotic episode were twice as likely to have used cannabis for longer, three times more likely to have used it every day and 18 times more likely to use skunk.

The cannabis plant is "a rich treasure trove of pharmacology" and contains 60 cannabinoid molecules, said Dr Paul Morrison, a senior researcher working with Prof Murray and presenting at the meeting as well. The one that has attracted the most publicity is THC Delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol, which is responsible for the psychotic symptoms and the cognitive deficits induced by cannabis.

But cannabis it also contains another molecule, CBD or cannabidiol, which seems to protect users from the psychosis and impaired cognition induced by TCH. CBD seems to counteract the effect of THC.

The potency of THC in cannabis has increased steadily over the last decade due to higher concentrations of the drug and its formulation, delegates at the Annual Meeting heard (Data available in a recent paper by Dr Potter, January 2008 Journal of Forensic Science).

In 1995, skunk had 6 per cent THC; now that figure is nearer 16 -18 per cent. Skunk not contains only high levels of THC, but contains no or very little CBD, so there is nothing to protect users against its power.

In contrast with skunk, hash contains much less THC and an almost equal amount of CBD, which might contributes to further reduce the potency of its adverse effect. For example, Savitex, the cannabis drug, used to treat multiple sclerosis, has equal amounts of both THC and CBD.

Dr Di Forti used an analogy comparing users of cannabis to drinkers. Like the drinker who starts off on half a pint of lager and ends up drinking a bottle of vodka a day, cannabis users might start with a weekly joint of hash or grass and graduate to smoking skunk every day, she said.

Because of the difference in strengths of cannabis formulations, Dr Di Forti urged psychiatrists to question their patients on their drug habits in a more detailed way. "We should have more data on cannabis exposure. We should take a cannabis history in a more detailed way like we do when we take a history of cigarettes smoking to establish risk of lung cancer. But it would be naive to say that smoking a joint is safe as we do not have enough data to reach such conclusion," she said.

[Heretic.Ape.]

18 times... stepping it up a notch, eh. Wasn't the last one only twice as likely?

[Raoul duke420]

Straight propoganda IMO, If not then Im gonna be one crazy bastard someday. oh well pass it to the left.

[Rhin]

What's bad about a little psychosis anyways?

Im sure it's not true, maybe a few times more likely but the media likes to bump stuff up a bit, I don't know about 18 times more likely.

[Expat98]

Originally Posted by Raoul duke420

Straight propoganda IMO

How is it propaganda? It's a scientific study.

Originally Posted by Rhin

Im sure it's not true, maybe a few times more likely but the media likes to bump stuff up a bit

It's not the media, it's a scientific study.

Now, if you two are claiming that the study has faults then that's different. But you'll need to explain what you think those faults are.

In SWIM's opinion, it is really not that hard to believe that highly potent cannabis may be much more likely to trigger psychosis than milder forms of the drug. (But he'd just consider this study as one data point and would want to see other studies confirm it before he'd believe this as fact.)

Expat98 added 30 Minutes and 59 Seconds later...

BTW, this thread is a duplicate of this one:

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62455

Reputation Comments on this post:

Quality post.

[Cuberun]

its true, once I saw a guy smoke pot then he masturbated!! only a sinful drug such as mary jumunuana could cause such psychotic behaviour. of course it was perfectly normal for me to spy on y neighbours with my binoculars. this is what a proud conservative citizen should always do.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Your comments are not relevant to the article/study.

[Expat98]

^^Can we please raise the level of discourse a little bit in this thread? This is not a reefer madness type article. The study itself and/or the conclusion that this article draws based on the study may very well have faults, but so far nobody has made any intelligent comments about it.

I am very much in favor of ending drug prohibition, but I do not believe that the way forward is to stick our heads in the sand when we see a piece of scientific data we don't like, or to dismiss it with a wave of the hand as "propaganda" or "media hype" without taking the time to analyze it. Let's leave those tactics to the other side.

Anyway, why is it so hard to believe that highly potent cannabis may be much more likely to trigger psychosis than milder forms of the drug?

Reputation Comments on this post:

word

[Panthers007]

Something tells me their definition of psychosis involves not voting for Bush and wanting an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Bajeda]

milder forms such as hash

Maybe if you are talking about soapbar....

They found that people who had a psychotic episode were twice as likely to have used cannabis for longer, three times more likely to have used it every day and 18 times more likely to use skunk.

The other two factors seem to have been dropped in favour of 'Skunk' for the headline. I can see how more THC-laden cannabis without moderating cannabinoids to attenuate some of the psychological effects can increase the risk factor for psychosis in those predisposed, but I don't know if a person who doesn't smoke so-called "skunk" yet smokes every day for a year has a much lower chance of not developing psychosis should they be so disposed. Or perhaps people with greater risk of developing mental illness tend to progress towards smoking stronger and stronger bud for some reason, going hand and hand with the progression of symptoms. Maybe the discrepancy in usage for the sample population is in large part due to a tendency to search for a more powerful high by those who are more likely to develop psychosis. Just some speculations to mull over.

Maybe there are already some studies out there on this, but I'd like to see a sample of heavy and long term smokers collected and have the rate of psychosis compared to the levels found in the overall (or control) population, aside from taking people with psychosis and seeing what they smoke and comparing it to a control (as in this study).

[Raoul duke420]

This article is talking about "skunk"- some slang term. IT says that Skunk has very little CBD. Fact is that every strain has its own levels of THC and CBD and those levels can change too. Indica and sativa varietys vastly differ in thier cannabinoid content, so saying that all this new age skunk weed has high THC levels that cause psychosis is bullshit considering all of the factors involved, Sounds like its weed bashing propoganda still to me.

[Paracelsus]

Sorry for posting the same story; somebody please merge the threads.

Please try to retrieve and read the actual paper before simply dismissing it as propaganda. This is propaganda.

[fiveleggedrat]

Swim says we need to carry out our own studies.

Everything this study has "concluded" is completely against common burnout pothead logic, not to mention someone educated on drugs, like the Swimers in this pool.

[Rhin]

SWIM thinks if this stuff can make it 18X more likely to gain psychosis this means he needs some of this skunk because he want's something that strong!

Reputation Comments on this post:

right

[doggy_hat]

For a scientific study, they're using some pretty loose terminology. Skunk is a slang term, it can be used to refer to alot of different strains of weed. And hash can come in a variety of different potencies. They also forgot to mention the fact that cannabis is very unlikely to cause psychotic symptoms in someone who has no predisposition to mental illness. Not to mention crazy people tend to have more addictive personalities. Some studies have concluded that somewhere around 85-95 percent of Schizophrenics are cigarette smokers. Which is about 3 times the average for the whole population. So people that are psychotic, or predisposed to being psychotic are probably going to be more likely to seek more potent drugs.

[Panthers007]

Plus psychotic people tend to be on powerful psychotropic medication at the time any such studies are conducted. Sounds to me like the "LSD Breaks Chromosomes!" story - where they left out a "minor detail" such as the chromosomes were boiled for 6 hours in a solution of sodium hydroxide (Lye, drain-cleaner). Or the "MDMA Causes Brain-Damage!" one where they "accidentally" used methamphetamine in place of MDMA.

[Paracelsus]

Panthers: it was mentioned that the recorded cases were "first episode psychosis." So no diagnosis of mental illness or antipsychotics.

I'm curious about when and where the actual paper will be published (as this apparently was just a talk at a meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

[stoneinfocus]

You're put immediately on "anti" -psychotics, that's their job.that left aside, you can get deported as easily as snapping your finger, when your enemies call the police on you and witness. Of course, you're "psychotic" when/whilst being robbed.(thug experiment:"the only way to get out was admitting to everything and claiming to make aprogress")

Plus, grass is a lot more psychedelic, I'd be careful about an panic attack on grass, defining it as a psychotic episode.Million ways to manipulate, just by exaggerating "normal" symptoms and making panicing users expect the worst to come, from all sides. Of course propaganda hasn't changed during the decades. ;-)

[enquirewithin]

Medical News is not exactly an academic, scientific publication. The choice of headline is quite sensational. There is a great deal left out. What is a 'psychotic episode' here anyway? Being stoned? The other problem I have with all this skunk research is that the THC content is not really very high. Hashish in Asia appears to be stronger and has been being smoked for a very long time. That's not to say that smoking cannabis all day is a very good idea for most people.

They [the researchers] found that people who had a psychotic episode were twice as likely to have used cannabis for longer, three times more likely to have used it every day and 18 times more likely to use skunk

The headline made it sound as if the skunk caused the 'psychotic episode.' It's deliberately misleading. Propaganda can be subtle or or very obvious. The current government is going against advice and reclassifying cannabis becuase this goes down well with 'middle England', for political reasons Researchers will tend to get grants if they produce results which are currently acceptable to those who give grants for research. Science is not free from politics, although it should be. Remember Ricault and MDMA?

I found this abstract from Forti, a different E. London study

Use of cannabis in a East-London fi rst episode psychosis sample: data from the GAP, genetics and psychosis study Dr Marta Di Forti, UK

Abstract
Background: Exposure to cannabis is associated with a risk of developing psychosis. Individual susceptibility depends on age of onset of cannabis abuse and on genotype (Arseneault et al., 2004; Caspi et al., 2005).

In the general population cannabis use is associated with lower educational achievement (Macleod et al, 2004). There are not study addressing this association in individuals with psychosis. In this study we investigate whether early age at fi rst cannabis use is associated with longer and regular use and whether cannabis use predicts level of educational achievement in a fi rst-episode psychotic population.

Method: We collected demographic, clinical and cannabis use (age at fi rst use, frequency, length of use) information in a sample of 200 fi rst-episode psychosis patients. All the subjects were recruited as part of the Genetic And Psychosis (GAP) study.
Results: 110 (55%) smoked cannabis, eighty-nine were male and 21 female. We collected data on age at fi rst use on seventy subjects, of whom 44 (62,8) began their use before age 16. The mean age at fi rst use of cannabis was 16,24
years. The mean age of onset of psychosis in the cannabis users group was 2 years earlier (mean 23,2; SD 4,575) than in the non cannabis users group (mean 25,3; SD 7,004), p= 0.014. However there was no signifi cant difference in age
of onset between genders.
Among those who commenced cannabis use before age 16, the mean length of cannabis use was 9,5 years compared to 5,4 years among those whose use began after 17 years. We had data on frequency of cannabis use on sixty-three subjects. Forty-one began their use before age 16, and of these 33 (70,2%) used cannabis three or more times a week compared to the 14 (29,8%) of those who started after 16 years. Applying a multiple regression, we found that age at fi rst use predicted years of cannabis use (p=0,008) independent of age of onset of psychosis
and showed a trend towards signifi cance for frequency of cannabis use (p=0,07). We had available data on level of education achieved on 81 patients, 55 (67.9%) male and 26 female (32.1%), mean age: 31.0yrs, range 19-59yrs
(SD: 7.7). Of these 81 cases 54 (66.7%) were cannabis users, with mean age of 29.2 y (SD 5.9) and 27 cases (33.3%)
were not cannabis users, mean age 34.7 y (SD 9.5). Applying linear regression analysis using level of education as the dependant variable and frequency of use as the independent variable we found that frequency of cannabis use predicts level of education achieved (p=0.03).
Conclusion: Early age at first use of cannabis is associated with longer and regular use in patients with their first episode of psychosis. Counterintuitively, our data also show that frequent cannabis use is associated with higher academic achievement in a first episode psychotic population. This is not due to the non-users being of lower age. Further analyses will be conducted to explore this interesting finding.

You could write an article based on this called, "Cannabis Smoking Makes You Clever!"

Click here for a 2nd International Cannabis and Mental Health Conference PDF.

[Expat98]

Originally Posted by enquirewithin

The headline made it sound as if the skunk caused the 'psychotic episode.' It's deliberately misleading. Propaganda can be subtle or or very obvious.

You have two groups of cannabis smokers. The people in one group had exhibited a first episode of psychosis. The people in the second group had not. The study found that the people in the first group who had suffered psychotic episodes were 18 times more likely to have smoked highly potent cannabis than the people in the second group, who primarily smoked less potent forms of cannabis.

Now granted that correlation is not the same as causation, but 18 times is a very high number and is strongly suggestive of causation. So yes, the headline and the article do make it sound like the psychosis was caused by the skunk. But this seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion. (Much more follow-up work needs to be done of course.)

How else would you explain the 18x difference? People have suggested various things above, but none of it sounds very compelling. This is a good case in which to remember Occam's razor:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.

The simplest theory here is that the skunk caused the psychosis. You have to come up with some elaborate and somewhat far-fetched assumptions to theorize anything else.

BTW, all the points made above about science being subject to politics are very true and well-taken. There could be something very wrong with this study. It's difficult to say without having access to the full paper.

However, SWIM tells me that based on his experience he really does not find it very hard to believe that high potency cannabis may be much more likely to trigger psychosis in people who are susceptible to it (key phrase) than low potency cannabis. There is a very real difference in the mental effects of kind bud versus "normal" weed. (Granted that there's some ambiguity in what they're calling "skunk", but I think we can all agree that all cannabis is not created equal.)

Expat98 added 54 Minutes and 28 Seconds later...

BTW, I think something that should be pointed out here is that this study says nothing at all about the percentage of people who experience a psychotic episode after smoking skunk. For example, it could be true that skunk causes a psychotic episode in a very small percentage of people who smoke it. But even if this is the case, it may still be (and almost certainly is) highly unlikely that any given person who smokes skunk would experience psychosis.

From a drug policy point of view, the question that is really important to ask is, "What percentage of people who smoke skunk experience psychosis?" This study does not address that question, and you cannot draw any kind of valid conclusion about that question based on this study's data. (You could try to draw a conclusion about that in a roundabout sort of way, but there are too many problems with doing that to make the conclusion have any validity.)

[Panthers007]

Oh heck yeah - way back yonder in the early 1960's when it was legal - the rule was don't give psychedelics to psychotics. No doubt about that one. That was in force both above and below the radar.

[AntiAimer]

What Smurf would love to know is the effects of the psychosis that these people are are exhibiting. These studies keep popping up but never get to the point other then trying to yet again demonize Marijuana while throwing in made up percentages for dramatization\shock value. "It's god's gift to humans" could make a doctor view you as having psychosis symptoms.

Just seems to Smurf that once these people get high and even more so off "Skunk weed" they label the high as being psychosis. Like in "Super High Me", the guy in the docu smokes for 30 days straight and takes these "tests" when he is sober and then when he is not and when he was high the doctor said he showed symptoms of psychosis but when he was not, he did not. Let's also note that this guy smokes, not just for this "documentary" and all he did was stop for 30 days and then start again for 30 days.

"People experiencing psychosis may report hallucinations or delusional beliefs, and may exhibit personality changes and disorganized thinking."
Drugs are drugs and can surely have these effects no matter the substance(even water!).

The effects must be very subbtle for them to never state there actual findings while spewing out percentages that they made up in there head. Which is very apparent to the millions and millions of users who "seem" to be fine untill a doctor looks at them. You could look at anyone under the influence and say there in a form of psychosis, heck read up on religion and view there followers and you will find alot of psychotic "sober" peoplethat show major symptoms that can fall under psychosis. Whoever thought up the T.V and computer and internet, must have been viewed as psychotic untill they prooved otherwise. So just saying people who smoke "skunk weed" are 18 times more likely to develop Psychosis means nothing, very vague.

And back to the "reefer madness" we go.

[stoneinfocus]

Don't know where the analogy to homosexuality went, but I've posted somehing like homosexuality has been seen as a desease until declared by laws, it's not.Psychiatry and Pharmas would still happily treat it as a desease, if treating it were backed up by law once again and they still're doing it, just by other diagnosis. Same goes for drugs. If they are backed up by law, you're not psychotiv, while being drunken, desorientated and aggressive to people, it's normal.

Whilst this happens on smoking illegal MJ, just the slightest change or different aspects of a high might be seen as a psychotic episode, because you essentially have no right to be high on MJ, you may smoke it, but you have no right, behaving strangely, that might be called psychotic; making your own trial and errors are "wrong failures," those failures are forbidden, so there're wrong failures and right failures(like drinking and gettign drunk abnd adjusting it), which is paradox to me, for a free country, when it comes to drug-experiences. Drinking and driving -okay, to some extend, then gradually punished.Impairment in driving, okay, when clean, but not okay on a drug adn punished. No impairments in driving, not okay, when using a differnt drug, than a prescription drug.

Behaving strangely in the public eye while being stoned, or being carried to the police station might make you panic more and this again will trigger a cascade of deteriotatoin and disorientation, wich weren't there otherwise, because, you might be as stoned as hell you still know how the mob, people you know, psychiatry and judges can fuck with your life and your reasoning and courage will go byebye, along with your sane image, in any case, though you were just beahing accordingly with anyone in this state of mind and for the drug used, given.

[enquirewithin]

The article does not define what 'psychosis' nor whether the subjects were tested high (presumablely the case) or not under the influence. Cannabis is obviously NOT going to be good for schizophrenics (however that term is defined or used), ie. people who are obviously unstable.

Is a drunk, whilst drunk, 'pyschotic' (if not why is beating up his wife, etc) Maybe the psychiatrists need to distinguish between the effects of marijuana and those of psychosis?

I read elsewhere, that ketamine causes 'autistic' symptoms-- so does every other general anaesthetic expect that we call it anaesthetised.

The UK papers make it clear that Brown wants evidence that skunk is linked to shizophrenia (evidence to it's comparative harmlessness to de damned), to justify his politically motivated reclassification from C To B. Hence the number in inconclusive studies that it does.

[stoneinfocus]

Originally Posted by enquirewithin

Cannabis is obviously NOT going to be good for schizophrenics (however that term is defined or used), ie. people who are obviously unstable.

I'd question even that, I've made some observation that, when "unstable" are feeeling save and smoke MJ, it seems to be beneficial, but that's hard to accomplish, when even tough motherfuckers break out into sweats, while dealing with MJ openly.

[GoddamnElectric]

No worries for swim. Honest to goodness he couldn't be any "crazy"-er than he already is. Clinical insanity would be a hardcore trip.

You've all heard it before but life is full of all kinds of so-called "dangers." In my experiences with life, most of these so-called dangers are overblown myths and the result of humanity's intrinsic unstoppable neurosis. Must of the shit you can do isn't going to kill you. Drinking bleach will, but eating donuts probably won't. Smoking weed seems to be less dangerous than eating donuts from everything I've ever heard or seen. I know of exactly zero people who got an illness from smoking weed, but I do know some people who got diabetes, which is blamed on diet from what I've heard. Is weed harmless? 'Course not. But it's not very harmful either.