Medical Matters: The health and social benefits of abstaining from cannabis

Where possible, doctors strive to practice evidence-based medicine. But we are human, and not immune to the influence of the unusual or extreme case. What makes one patient stand out more than others may be a feature of the disease, the patient, or our own sensitivities.

As a medical student, the details of the first patient I saw with psychosis have remained with me. He was not much younger than me, and had started university some months earlier.
He had been admitted to hospital with a florid psychosis, convinced he was Christ.

Not unlike the many adolescents starting college this month, the freedom from home and the lights of a big city meant new experiences. Among these was the easy availability of cannabis; he had smoked a number of joints in the previous weeks.

Unfortunately, the expert opinion was that his use of cannabis precipitated the psychotic episode.

Now this was the first and only time I have seen cannabis-induced psychosis, so in the greater scheme of things it is nothing more than medical anecdote. Nonetheless, the details of the case have stayed with me to emerge from the memory banks following the publication of some related research last week.

Drug statistics

The large meta-analysis – a study of combined previous research – showed that people who are daily users of cannabis before the age of 17 are more than 60 per cent less likely to complete secondary school or to complete a degree compared with those who have never used the drug.

Published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry, the authors also found that daily users of cannabis during adolescence are seven times more likely to attempt suicide and are eight times as likely to use other illicit drugs in later life.

In this study, a team of Australian and New Zealand researchers combined data on some 3,765 participants who used cannabis from three large, long-running longitudinal studies to find out more about the link between the frequency of cannabis use before the age of 17 and seven developmental outcomes up to the age of 30.

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Source: Muiris Houston, Irish Times, 15/09/14