- God did not create the universe, says Hawking
- God did not create the universe, says Hawking
- Common bone drugs linked to esophageal cancer risk
- Heavy in dollars, China warns of depreciation
- Samsung raises 2010 smartphone sales target: report
- UPDATE 1-Wind, rain from Hurricane Earl buffet North Carolina
- Analysis: Japan dilemma as economic dependence on China grows
- Wind and rain from Hurricane Earl buffet North Carolina | Video
- Drug shootout with army kills 25 in Mexico
- Eastern Atlantic depression could head for Caribbean | Video
NYSE and AMEX quotes delayed by at least 20 minutes. NASDAQ delayed by at least 15 minutes. For a complete list of exchanges and delays, please click here.
Marijuana use unlikely to boost suicide risk
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Smoking marijuana (also called cannabis) is unlikely to increase a person's risk of killing themselves later on, an analysis of more than three decades worth of death records on more than 50,000 Swedish military recruits suggests.
"I don't think this can be interpreted as saying, 'Well, there are no risks of using cannabis,'" Dr. Stanley Zammit of the department of psychological medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine in the UK told Reuters Health.
Nevertheless, "we can pretty much rule out a strong effect of cannabis on long-term risk of suicide whether it's through depression or whatever," he added.
Zammit and his colleagues had previously found a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia while looking at the same group of 50,087 men drafted into the Swedish military in 1969-1970. Nearly all were 18 to 20 years old at the time. In that first analysis, the researchers had also found a "much less consistent and overall weaker" relationship between cannabis use and depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide.
To investigate further, Zammit and his team identified suicides among the recruits over the next 33 years in Sweden's National Cause of Death Registry. During that time, there were 600 suicides or deaths from unknown causes.
At the time they were drafted, about one in ten of the men admitted to ever using cannabis. These men were 62 percent more likely to have killed themselves during the follow-up period than men who had never used marijuana.
But once the researchers adjusted for factors that could influence both pot use and suicide risk, such as behavior problems in childhood, psychological adjustment, psychiatric diagnoses, drinking, smoking, and parental drug use, the increased risk of suicide associated with marijuana disappeared.
While the findings suggest that marijuana use is not a strong risk factor for suicide, Zammit said, they do support the possibility that cannabis use may have a causal relationship with psychosis. He and his colleagues are investigating the schizophrenia-cannabis link further, for example determining whether the potency of cannabis plays a role in psychosis risk.
SOURCE: The British Journal of Psychiatry, December 2009.
Yes i totally agree with this, because when people reach a certain page in their lives and they feel like there is nothing to live for, smoking maurijuana, a.k.a (mary-jane) gives them something to fill that emptiness in their lives, and make them feel like life is worth living than ending it.
Slowly, doggedly, the researchers try to prove that cannabis causes every manner of human ill testing each wild hypothesis one by one, and failing miserably each time. Perhaps when they test to see if it causes jaywalking they’ll finally be able to say “AH-HA!”
i agree with u kevin10036!!there study is so funny !! from peolpe going to war!! try another study with people not going to war and another thing what is the perpouse of this study?
When is the world media going to educate themselves on these plants?
This comment, Smoking marijuana (also called cannabis), is completely wrong. The plant family is cannabis, there are 3 main strains Sativa, Indica, Ruderalis, marijuana is slang, not a name of anything at all.
Cannabis is life saving medicine, and the media and governments are refusing to allow lives to be saved.
The only explanation for this is their religious beliefs say cannabis is evil.
Marijuana is ignorance
Cannabis is medicine
Legalise, Educate, Regulate, Tax
Stop the lies and stop the war NOW
What littlbit said. “Marijuana” is corruption of the word “marihuana” which was the Mexican-Spanish name of the plant. Since we’re not speaking Mexican-Spanish but English, use the English name for it: cannabis.
It all goes back to when (racist) Harry Anslinger was named head of the newly formed FBN, that is, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, created alongside the FBI. IT was early in the 20th century. The Civil War ended in 1865 with the north winning and outlawing slavery. Various racist politicians then passed ‘grandfather clauses’ which even I studied in grade school; when those grandfather clauses were struck down as unconstitutional, Uncle Sam outlawed the *naturally growing* drugs that minorities were using instead of drinking the white man’s alcohol, so he could stuff his prisons with nonviolent minorities, thereby *musical flourish!* replacing outlawed slave labor with prison labor (which are full of minorities! Viola!)
Alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug on the planet, because no other drug turns its user into a stumbling, belligerent moron but alcohol.
Read tinyurl.com/1mn
“Well, there it was, you didn’t have to look another foot as you went from state to state right on the floor of the state legislature. And so what was the genesis for the early state marijuana laws in the Rocky Mountain and southwestern areas of this country? It wasn’t hostility to the drug, it was hostility to the newly arrived Mexican community that used it.”
These drug laws are racist to the core and are the means to an end: The United Police State of America.
Call it what you want, the point of the article is:
“we can pretty much rule out a strong effect of cannabis on long-term risk of suicide whether it’s through depression or whatever”
This is an important finding, as there are many valid medicinal uses for cannabis, some of which, according to “Jesus of Cannabis” (see: http://www.reefersmoke.com) are written in the Bible.
That first post is more true than anything I’ve read in awhile- Life is boring for most of us… I does make you appericate life and see the good in people. I also think it boost creativity for sure and in some cases like X game type sports makes peoples performances seem Jedi like. Oh.. Micheal phelps too But Clinton, Obama, even though they suck you can be the president!
There are good things about it for sure it’s not useless to humanity. God put it here for a reason in the form that it’s in. Maybe if legalized it would be a lot less miserable world.
