Santa Cruz County health official & pot & schizophre

[palmspringsbum]

December 1, 2005


County health official questions research linking pot with schizophrenia

By Nancy Pasternack
sentinel staff writer
www.santacruzsentinel.com


SANTA CRUZ — Mention a causal link between pot smoke and paranoid thoughts, and you may elicit a knowing chuckle from Santa Cruz's recreational drug users.

But bring up a recent flurry of studies that link marijuana use to schizophrenia, and the buzz wears off quickly.

"There's a lot of bamboozling going on here," says Valerie Corral, founder of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana. Corral has a decidedly nonrecreational approach to both the drug and the political issues surrounding it.

Research claims broadcast on CNN, ABC, in magazines the Nation and National Review, and on dozens of governmental and nonprofit agency's Web sites in the past year have warned that smoking pot increases the risk of developing schizophrenia — a chronic, disabling brain disorder that affects 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Suspiciousness, delusions and impaired memory are tell-tale signs of serious mental illness brought on by the active ingredient in marijuana, according to study results quoted repeatedly on the Web.

Like Corral, Rama Khalsa, director of the county's Health Services Agency, is skeptical of the findings, and the motives of those who promote them.

"Until the Bush administration," Khalsa says, "I'd never seen science used so much for political purposes."

"I'm troubled," she says, "by the administration's comfort level with manipulation and their distortion of research."

Studies detailed online by such organizations such as the Radiological Society of North America, and the government's National Institutes of Health and National Office of Drug Control Policy, refer to studies conducted in Britain, Sweden, New Zealand, Japan, Italy and several in the United States, including one from Yale University.

Proportions of sampled pot smokers who eventually were diagnosed with schizophrenia vary from study to study, but conclusions about the basic relationship are similar in each.

"The findings," reads a press release from Yale following the release of that university's study in June 2004, "go along with several other lines of evidence that suggest a contribution of cannabis ... to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia."

The drug control agency uses the research link as part of a television and Web campaign titled, "Parents. The Anti-Drug."

Khalsa is not impressed.

"You need to know what you're looking at and how the results are interpreted," she says.

Those who smoke marijuana or who take any other drugs need to know the actual risks involved, say both Khalsa and Corral.

"Marijuana doesn't cause schizophrenia, but many people may think it's a no-harm drug," says Khalsa. People who already have a serious mental illness, "can have a relapse" by smoking pot, she says.

"It's important to understand the implications in taking any medications," says Corral. The mentally ill often attempt to "self-medicate," with marijuana — a bad idea for schizophrenics, say Corral and Khalsa.

Andrea Tischler, co-owner of Compassion Flower Inn, says that a lack of research about the medicinal benefits of marijuana is the real problem.

Tischler's place offers rooms where medical marijuana users can gather and smoke freely.

"This healing plant has been used for more than 5,000 years as medicine, but they can't get the funding to study it because it's not FDA approved. It's a Catch-22," she says. "And if marijuana is so bad, why are doctors recommending it in every state where they are allowed to do so?"

Contact Nancy Pasternack at npasternack@santacruzsentinel.com.