The main question everyone wants answered is does cannabis cause mental illness. We know many people with psychosis or schizophrenia use cannabis, we also know they seek cannabis out despite it often making their symptoms worse. What we don’t know is why they do this and whether cannabis creates psychosis in people not predisposed to the disease.
When Dr Attakan asked patients at the Maudsley why they take cannabis, they answered "because it makes me feel relaxed or in some way ‘better’". They found cannabis one of the few means of obtaining pleasure and using it gave them a sense of belonging.
Which is all well and good, but why continue to take cannabis if it makes symptoms of psychosis worse? The answer may lie in one of cannabis’s largely ignored compounds – CBD. Cannabis with much more THC than CBD (i.e. “skunk”) seems to make people with a predisposition to psychosis more susceptible to a psychotic episode.
However, CBD itself has an anti-anxiety effect and if the ratio of THC to CBD is more equal, or if there’s more CBD than THC then cannabis can help some sufferers experience fewer or less extreme episodes. So perhaps patients are seeking out cannabis in an attempt to self-medicate, the problem being if they use THC-rich cannabis they might suffer more.
Unfortunately, the jury is still out as to whether cannabis can create psychosis in people who don’t have a predisposition to the disease. Evidence suggests that if there is a link it is relatively insignificant; vastly more people use cannabis now than thirty years ago yet the number of people with psychosis has remained fairly stable.
The problem, if any, lies mainly with younger people smoking a lot of THC-rich cannabis. A thirteen year-old brain isn’t fully developed and introducing THC-rich cannabis like ‘skunk’ to it may cause some of the mental health issues prohibitionists are so worried about. Despite these findings Dr Attakan was the only panellist who openly opposed prohibition.
The people most at risk from the dangers of cannabis are young people, so the question is how best to warn them. A problem Annemare Carr, from HIT, attempted to solve.
