Who is Funding These Clickbait Headline US Government Marijuana Studies?

clickbait cannabis studies

Will you kill yourself if you smoke high potency bud and are already thinking about killing yourself?

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/20/health/marijuana-abuse-teens-suicide-wellness/index.html

https://wacotrib.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/marijuana-abuse-by-youth-with-mood-disorders-linked-to-suicide-attempts-study-finds/article_bd6b3f16-f999-5c71-8fcf-fbea958ab9f2.html

According to a new study, if you’ve got bipolar disorder or depression and you’re a kid – you’re probably going to kill yourself or murder someone else because of weed. Oh, you thought this was reefer madness?

Nope – this is a study published in JAMA Pediatrics but once again – I have no idea how these studies get funded. I went through the data and found so many issues with their findings that the scientists who published the study must either be willfully ignorant about their findings or their personal biases have ruined their objectivity that it can’t really be considered “science” anymore.

Firstly – they conflated so many different issues together that the study seems more like it’s “guess work” than actual science.

For example; the factors that you could be at risk of when smoking weed and having a mood disorder – and this is important, we’re talking about a population already at risk of violence and suicide – include; Deaths by suicide, unintentional overdoses, motor vehicle crashes, and homicide.

In other words – just a whole bunch of different things they could throw together in order to conflate the data to make a “point” that cater to the whims of NIDA – who funds virtually only anti-cannabis studies.

The next factor that should be looked at is the source of data. It was from the Medicaid records from Ohio where they retroactively looked at death certificate data and people who were dubbed “Addicted to Cannabis”.

They didn’t analyze the data in a place like Colorado or Washington which have had medical cannabis since the early 2000s and legal cannabis for 9 years now. No – the data was sourced from a place that barely legalized medical cannabis in 2016 and are planning on legalizing cannabis in 2021.

What this means is that the disproportion of diagnoses in “Marijuana Use Disorder” could very well be “off”. It’s an arbitrary definition by clinicians anyhow;

People are considered dependent on weed when they feel food cravings or a lack of appetite, irritability, restlessness and mood and sleep difficulties after quitting, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Such a wide definition of symptoms will make virtually anyone who smokes weed “addicted.” When you smoke weed, you get an extra dose of cannabinoids to the body. When you stop, it’s not there – the body compensates.

But to the scientists at NIDA – this means you’re addicted. I mean, if this was the criteria for being addicted – the entire planet is addicted to sugar, coffee and a host of other substances on this planet. I’m sure if I would look at suicide rates or homicide rates for people “addicted to sugar”, I would be able to conclude that “eating sugar increases the risk of going on murderous rampages”. I would be laughed at for that conclusion – yet when we see studies like this, it’s widely reported by most media outlets.

The Problem with Retroactive Studies

The major issue I have with this study is that they looked at death certificates, people who smoke weed, and then assigned some meaning to their deaths because of a statistical occurrence that had a 5% margin of error.

The major problem with these retroactive studies is the way you frame them. Since NIDA and JAMA Pediatrics are looking at cannabis via a pathological lens – they were trying to find the connection between these deaths and mood disorders.

They weren’t objectively looking to see what happens. They also didn’t see how many suicides cannabis prevented. They were solely focused on finding whether cannabis contributed to more deaths in a highly niche demographic – young people with mood disorders.

“Mood disorders” also include a wide range of disorders – which means that the net they casted to correlate this evidence is wide.

Finally, one of the biggest issues is the discrepancy is the age group they were studying. They included people from the ages of 10-24. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a 10 year old stand next to a 24 year old – but they are entirely different beings.

That would be similar to testing the health conditions of a 50 year old and a 64 year old. Except, the 10-24 difference is even more extreme due to things such as puberty.

Why do people kill themselves?

In most cases, trauma is the biggest contributor to suicide. Trauma which turns into depression which could eventually trigger a psychotic event where someone overwrites their own survival instincts.

The fact that people who commit suicide also smoke weed, does not indicate causation – which again, was the suggested conclusion of this bogus study.

As I mentioned so many times before – I’m not opposed to actually finding out whether cannabis contributes to these issues – but I do take issue with the fact that they use poor science to “prove” their hypothesis.

I wish we could Ctrl + Alt + Del our scientific processes and remove the stain of politics from it. Studies like the one they published above should be considered criminal.