WHAT HAVE WE DONE?

Feb 42 min read

A 2021 study out of Denmark estimated the proportion of cases of schizophrenia associated with cannabis use in that country doubled in recent decades. Though cannabis remains illegal there, concern around this reality and threats of an explosion of psychotic disorders has persisted around any discussion of legalization.

Relatedly, a team of researchers just completed a similar study to investigate the incidence of cannabis associated schizophrenia in Canada. The results are shocking. Their study looked at 13.6 million people in Ontario aged 14-65 years of age between 2006 and 2023. This time period was selected because it segments into: pre-legalization of cannabis (Jan 2006 to Nov 2015), formal liberalization (Dec 2015 to Sept 2018), and the time since legalization and commercialization (October 2018 to December 2022).

The research team found schizophrenia associated with cannabis use nearly tripled. And who are we talking about in this psychosis cohort? They show the schizophrenia population was far more likely to be younger males and those in the lowest income quintile. It seems to me we're pretty keen to kill off this population. Is there another group that, if they wind up as the overwhelming majority of the psychosis, opioid overdose, and suicide categories, wouldn't cause the immediate halting of civilization while we remake all our institutions and culture? We'll, don't we all have a recent analog to go by?

Consider that over a period of four and a half years British Columbia officially lost 2,766 people to Covid-19. And consider the emergency, the rewriting of all rules and norms from top to bottom, the merely the prospect of a few deaths initiated. Now consider that we lost nearly as many in each and every year, more than 9,500 in total, just to opioid overdoses alone over the same period. Right. And those fatalities, unlike with the pandemic virus, were not overwhelmingly seniors in the last years of their long lives but young people in their prime...

Is it just me or is everyone who spent the last decade passionately throwing out the word "disproportionate" at every possible instance, even where it doesn't apply, astonishingly, horrifyingly silent about all of this?