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For babies, life may be like an LSD trip

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Re: For babies, life may be like an LSD trip

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting the temporal cart before the causal horse. With or without drugs, mental health issues can be latent or unacknowledged for years. And without defending marijuana use, naïve -- even unconscious -- self-medication is a very simple explanation for what you're describing.

Yeah, I particularly like two counter examples. Example 1: We have prevalence of schizophrenia of 1-2% both in countries with extremely high use (Australia, 25-30% last year) and extremely low (Japan, Example 2: The countries with the absolute biggest rates of tobacco prevalence are hovering around 40-50%, the US is sitting at around 20%. Among schizophrenics, though, it goes around 75-90%. But funnily enough, you do…

The tobacco lobby was quite successful debunking that myth. Cannabis had no lobby yet.

The association is likely tied to self medication. Tobacco contains a low level monoamine inhibitor, these have some uses in psychiatry. (it is the main bit that is addictive - not really nicotine alone - harman and norharman, related to harmaline)

Re: For babies, life may be like an LSD trip

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting the temporal cart before the causal horse. With or without drugs, mental health issues can be latent or unacknowledged for years. And without defending marijuana use, naïve -- even unconscious -- self-medication is a very simple explanation for what you're describing.

Yeah, I particularly like two counter examples. Example 1: We have prevalence of schizophrenia of 1-2% both in countries with extremely high use (Australia, 25-30% last year) and extremely low (Japan, Example 2: The countries with the absolute biggest rates of tobacco prevalence are hovering around 40-50%, the US is sitting at around 20%. Among schizophrenics, though, it goes around 75-90%. But funnily enough, you do…

> But funnily enough, you don't see anyone claiming tobacco causes schizophrenia!

We have extensive research on tobacco, so we know it doesn't cause psychosis.

We now know that if you smoke cannabis at 15 you're more likely to develop schizophrenia than people who don't smoke; we know that this is dose dependent; and that the people who smoke will develop illness earlier than people who don't smoke. There are strong reasons to believe that cannabis will cause psychotic illness in some people. Obviously that's not all people. Just as not everyone who drinks heavily will become alcoholic, not everyone who smokes heavily will develop psychosis.

But schizophrenia is sufficiently harmful that we want to provide good warnings to people to take care with cannabis. Avoid use if you're under 21; avoid heavy and prolonged use; seek help early if you're having trouble.

When campaigners claim cannabis is a harmless herb they make it much harder for people like me who are trying to get it legalised and regulated.

Re: For babies, life may be like an LSD trip

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if by 'in right now' you mean at least 7k - 9k years you might be right [0][1]. If you believe what ethnobotanist like Terence Mckenna [2] say, then it's much older and has shaped the hominids evolution quite significantly. It seems almost all cultures found local hallucinogens and exploited them heavily for ceremony, healing etc and was strong part of who they were [3]. Anecdotally, I think hallucinogen just h…

This is exactly what we mean by "kind of forced" For most of history people didn't have the free time to be regularly using drugs the way some people today imply. If your life is farming from sunrise to sunset you're gonna need a lot of sleep and there isn't much time left to be tripping balls. You'll probably only can justify using your available free time to do whatever your local drug is at special occasions, what…

people used to have a lot more free time than today
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