Canadian study advances pot's connection to mental illness

 Long-time readers know that I absolutely loathe marijuana because I’ve seen the lives that it destroys. In the best cases, sustained pot use leads to apathy. Sure, stoners aren’t out there committing crimes, but they’re not doing anything else either. They’ve rendered themselves useless.

In the worst cases, in people who are somehow vulnerable, pot is a gateway drug, not just to harder drugs (what anti-drug campaigns warned about in the 1960s), but to psychosis, something that Alex Berenson has documented in Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.

Loathsome as cigarettes may be, they impair neither ambition nor mental health. But the left hates cigarettes and loves pot.

Now, Canada has done a vast study that Alex Berenson was right about that mental illness connection. It turns out that young Canadians are becoming increasingly psychotic:

Out of the 12.23 million people, 152,587, or 0.9 percent, were diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, the study said. The annual incidence of psychotic disorders was found to have increased by 60 percent among people aged 14 to 20 years between 1997 and 2023. Meanwhile, it was stable or even declined among those aged 21 to 50 years.

The incidence of schizophrenia was found to be 70 percent higher among individuals born in 2000-2004 compared to those born during 1975-79.

The percentage of people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder at 20 years of age was 104 percent higher among those born in 2000-2004, according to the study.

Among the 1975–1979 birth cohort, the mean age of diagnosis of psychotic disorders was 25.4 years, which declined to 23.2 years in the 1990-1994 cohort.

 

At the same time, they’re also getting stoned...a lot:

“Rates of substance use—including cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens, and synthetic drugs—have increased over time in Canada; use of these substances is associated with the development and worsening of psychotic disorders,” the study noted.

The same Epoch Times article says that the study, which is from the Canadian Medical Association Journal, proposes all sorts of politically correct (my word, not theirs) theories about the rise of psychosis in Canada’s young people. These include “the expansion of early psychosis intervention programs, socioeconomic stress, adverse childhood experiences, changes in maternal and neonatal health, and changing environmental exposure, such as urbanization.”

However, one of the study’s authors acknowledged that rising substance abuse could be tied to the rise in serious mental health issues:

“A leading possibility is substance use—including cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens, and synthetic drugs. The use of substances, especially earlier in life, is associated with the development and worsening of psychotic disorders, and substance use in Canada has risen over the past two decades.”

The Epoch Times adds something very interesting near the end of the essay, which could go a long way to explaining the problem: Pot is stronger today than it used to be...way stronger: “During the 1980s, typical THC levels in cannabis flowers were around 4 percent, which has currently shot up to 20 percent on average.” Meanwhile, vaping delivers even more concentrated THC into the system.

In the old days, pot gave you a comfortable buzz and a sense of relaxation. It’s why people as diverse as Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby (when he was young) were able to use it daily without destroying either their ambition or their abilities. Today’s pot, though, is a serious psychotropic drug.

When I grew up (my teen years were squarely in the 1970s), the anti-drug horror stories were about the lasting damage from LSD use. One trip could cause you to go blind or leap from a window. (I know someone who leaped from a window, with devastating consequences, while on mushrooms.)

Pot was frowned upon but viewed merely as a soft warm-up to hard drugs. Today, though, it’s pot that’s the hard drug.

Given how dangerous pot has become, how in the world have we ended up with the situation today, where pot has been decriminalized in 24 states? Although it’s still a federal crime to use it, that law is completely ignored, especially since Biden pardoned thousands of people with pot convictions.

The answer, of course, is leftism. The left went after cigarettes, which smell disgusting and cause serious physical health problems, but were a mild stimulant that did nothing to slow down energy and ambition. I hate cigarettes, so I’d be a hypocrite to complain about the war against them.

However, the problem is that, having done away with cigarettes, leftists led America to pot, which, like cigarettes, smells disgusting and causes serious mental and physical health problems. However, unlike cigarettes, it’s a sedative. Pot is the modern opiate of the masses, and it’s a terrible and dangerous thing.

Our country is already pretty darn crazy thanks to leftism, with young people being indoctrinated into gender confusion, the end of borders, sympathy for criminals, not victims, and antisemitism. They really don’t need to have a psychosis-causing drug added to the mix.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/02/a_new_canadian_study_advances_pot_s_connection_to_mental_illness.html