A FALSE LINK BETWEEN MARIJUANA AND MENTAL ILLNESS

The article published today in "Health News" makes the claim that
smoking marijuana is "linked" to early onset of mental illness.

However, although the article implies some sort of cause and effect,
that conclusion has no scientific basis. In fact, the authors of the
study don't even bother investigating whether marijuana use causes
mental illness or if people with mental illness have a higher rate of
smoking marijuana than the general public.

If marijuana caused mental illness, then cultures that have a higher
rate of marijuana smoking than the U.S. should have a higher rate of
mental illness. But in fact, the opposite is true. Cultures with
higher rates of marijuana consumption have lower rates of mental
illness than the United States. This would indicate that rather than
marijuana causing mental illness, as your article implies, it is
people with mental illness who are self medicating with marijuana in
order to alleviate their symptoms.

This (more correct) reading of the data, however, does not fit the
narrative being presented by the politicians who are making their
careers by "getting tough" on marijuana smokers, nor does it fit the
narrative of the manufacturers of the currently legal psychotropic
drugs, like Prozac and Zoloft, who stand to lose billions of dollars
if medical marijuana is legalized, and who funnel millions of dollars
to those politicians who present their dubious science as fact.

Had your newspaper even taken the time to Google the Archive of
General Psychiatry, you would have found that the "study" you cited
was conducted by the "Genetic Risk and Outcome in Psychosis (GROUP)
Investigators," who publish only articles against medical marijuana.
That alone should raise a red flag to anyone with a basic
understanding of scientific research. When someone conducts numerous
studies and publishes many articles that all draw the same
conclusion, whether the evidence leads to that conclusion or not, the
critical eye should suspect some ulterior motive at work. It's not
possible to keep an open mind when you have an axe to grind.

William Smith, Baltimore