> Are we going to see similar harms from these drugs a few years after they gain more popularity?
I think we’re already starting to see this on a smaller scale.
One of my friends is a therapist who does a lot of social work predominantly for low-income people coming from difficult situations. She encounters a lot of people who have become heavily dependent on marijuana under a mistaken impression that smoking multiple times every day is a good treatment for depression or anxiety. Many of them are under the impression than marijuana is a wonder drug that treats everything from psychiatric illnesses to cancer. Meanwhile they’re clearly too impaired and unmotivated to get their lives together due to being constantly high. She spends a lot of time convincing people to moderate their consumption or even abstain entirely. The results are great if she can convince them to stop, but that’s a difficult task.
More worrisome is the increasing number of parents she sees who are trying to medicate their juvenile children with marijuana. Some of the stories she tells about parents who are convinced they’re doing their kids a favor by giving them THC edibles before school (supposedly for anxiety) are downright tragic.
There is a growing mistrust of pharmaceutical companies and mainstream psychiatry that mirrors the rise of things like anti-vaxxers and belief in essential oils. Many companies are rushing to fill this demand for alternative medicine with products and services ranging from pushing heavy THC consumption to ketamine clinics that will give ketamine to anyone willing to pay a few hundred dollars per dose.
In the case of this article the discovery of ketamine’s actions is more likely to spur development of new molecules that can be used without the obvious side effects of ongoing ketamine treatment (which is not as harmless as it sounds when repeatedly dosed over a lifetime).