Monday, July 30, 2007

Cannabis and conventional wisdom on co-occurring disorders

I haven't been looking and I've stumbled on two posts (here and here) that dismiss the recent cannabis findings. I'm sure I'd find more if I looked.

They argue that the correlation between smoking weed and an increased in risk for schizophrenia is best explained by self-medication--that people who are in the early stages of schizophrenia are self-medicating, rather than marijuana causing the onset of schizophrenia in small numbers of people.

I wonder if this is setting the stage for a little backlash against the psychiatrization of addiction. If addiction researchers have a hard time getting their research taken seriously maybe they'll start putting a little more effort into dispelling self-medication theories.

One can hope.

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