The Times squeezed another hysterical headline out of this non-story last week.
The bald statement that "the risk of psychosis increases by roughly 40 per cent in people who have used cannabis" is totally meaningless, unless we know what the risk is among those who don't smoke dope. As a rough calculation, the risk of a dope-smoker being sectioned is anywhere between one-in-eight-hundred and one-in-three-thousand.
Further, compare and contrast these two statements:
"... cannabis was classified as a less-dangerous Class C drug in 2004..." and "...the proportion of young people using the drug has fallen in the past three years."
Who's to say that the downgrading isn't indirectly the cause of that fall? In which case why not try making it legally available. Since the de-criminalisation in The Netherlands, apparently usage has gone down slightly.
Disclaimer: I smoked dope a few times in my twenties, and to be honest I didn't like it. It stinks and makes me throw up. But each to his own ...
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"
56 minutes ago
3 comments:
The Times names its source for this startling news as below:
"The culmination of this cascade came last July when The Lancet published a big review, concluding that the risk of psychosis increases by roughly 40 per cent in people who have used cannabis, and up to 200 per cent in the most frequent users."
I assume this is the same Lancet that blew much of its credibility on its sensational (and, of course, peer-reviewed - Brighton Pier in this case) publication of the "650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq" paper, exposed as . . er . . exaggerated, here (among other places).
Now the conclusions of the Lancet paper on cannabis use and the derived Times report may be absolutely correct - and you completely wrong. But - as a rule of thumb - I would put as much trust in anything in the Lancet which purports to be disinterested but which appears to back up some item in an illiberal (in the classic sense) agenda as I would in this
I am (for sake of this discussion) not disputing that risk of psychosis is increased by 40% - what pisses me off is the fact that the article does not mention what the risk is in absence of smoking dope.
It strikes me that if one-in-two-thousand dope smokers goes gaga, and one-in-three-thousand non-smokers goes gaga, it's a laughably small risk either way.
Well said on the 650,000 deaths nonsense, I never believed that for a second.
MW
" . . the article does not mention what the risk is in absence of smoking dope."
Of course not but is this just crap journalism (which it is) or is the journalist also trying to make a point? Who knows without going to the source paper?
It used to be that the "quality" press attempted (or at least paid lip service to the intention) to provide an intelligent readership with sufficient information on which an informed opinion could be made. The press also made a distinction between fact and opinion (apart from the occasional egregious instance when it didn't - Dawson and the pre-war Times comes to mind). That this report on cannabis use leaves us all in the air and your point (that the risk increase may or may not be completely trivial) unanswered is contemporary MSM journalism at its typically useless and panic-inducing worst.
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