By Noah Pond
On Oct. 3 at 6 p.m., a group gathered in Siemens Hall for a cannabis forum led by cannabis studies lecturers William Dolphin and Michelle Newhart. The two led a lecture titled Cannabis & Mental Health: The Paradox, based on their book The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy Stigma and the Patient Experience.
The room was buzzing with chatter before the lecture began. Once Newhart started to talk, the room went silent as everyone’s attention fell on the projector screen.
The presentation started off by comparing laypersons’ — regular people — ideologies around weed to psychiatric and medical people’s ideology of it. One side says cannabis helps manage mental health, and the other says it’s detrimental to it.
They went on to present data that shows that in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, managing mental health is one of the top three reasons to use cannabis.
If that’s the case, then why do we see so many articles linking psychosis and schizophrenia to cannabis use?
Dolphin and Newhart explained that this is because most cannabis research, averaging around $1.2 billion, is funded by the National Institute of Health which is a huge federal umbrella company. When you look a little deeper, you can see that under the umbrella, it’s really the National Institute of Drug Abuse who spends $1 billion on it.
‘Correlation is not causation’ is one of those phrases that your 6th-grade science teacher would be droning on about. It is also the same way they decided cannabis has a negative effect on mental health. They use something called a black box theory; you have an input — a black box — and an output. The system is described by its inputs and outputs, yet you cannot know how it works internally or in other words, what’s going on in the black box.
This idea that weed harms mental health is based on faulty research that a mid-19th-century physician performed on himself. Jacques-Joseph Moreu, a European physician found out about cannabis on a trip to Egypt, where he was given hashish. He brought a ton of it back with him to Europe and began to do experiments on himself with doses of hashish from 700 to 2,000 milligrams.
Mareu developed a hypothesis that when he would take these doses of cannabis, he would find himself in a state of psychosis. This is where we see the words abuse and use get mixed up. 700 mg is way too much for the average person and would probably make most feel like they are going crazy.
So, now you have all this research on one side going against cannabis as a way to treat mental health.
“Neutral research was suppressed for 100 years, and now there’s this sticky problem of what do you do with an entire body of research that’s only on one side,” Newhart said. “How do you fix that? And there is not a clear answer. You can’t just throw out everything that everyones done so far, but you also can’t treat that like it’s an equal balance of information that’s available either.”
It comes down to finding there aren’t enough researchers dedicated or even open to pushing the bar in terms of cannabis. Either because they are not interested or because they wouldn’t be taken seriously in their field of work.
The presentation ended with some final words that really seemed to stick with the crowd.
“Claims to mental health harm are the last linchpin in the drug war,” the final slide on the projector screen read.
Noah Pond is a Junior at Cal Poly Humboldt and a reporter and opinion editor for the Lumberjack. During his free time, he enjoys cold beer and his skateboard.