Pot-induced murder (ditto Columbine, etc.)

More study needed on the link between pot and psychosis
Gordon Clark, Vancouver Province, Nov. 9, 2016
Canadians, especially lawmakers, gleefully rushing headlong to legalize marijuana should pause to consider the horrifying, heartbreaking stabbing death of 13-year-old Letisha Reimer, as innocent a crime victim as one can imagine.

Gabriel Brandon Klein, the 21-year-old homeless man from Alberta charged with second-degree murder in the death of the Abbotsford Senior Secondary School student, and aggravated assault in the non-fatal stabbing of a 14-year-old girl in the Nov. 1 attack, was a heavy pot smoker who recently “became manic, paranoid and frightened,” some of his friends told CBC. ....click "Read More" below to continue....
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Nathaniel Spidell, 23, told a CBC reporter that Klein believed “he’d smoked pot that had been tampered with acid, and began acting very strange, talking about leaving Canada, and trusting no one.”

“Everything went downhill after that. He wasn’t the same person,” Spidell told the reporter, expressing shock that his “best friend,” who he couldn’t imagine being violent, had been charged with murdering a young girl. “He never carried weapons at all. He was just a stoner. He loved his mom.”

“People are labelling him as some monster now and that’s just not the person I knew,” another friend, Jordan Reid, 23, told CBC.

There is an implication in the comments of Spidell, Reid and other people Klein knew who spoke to other media outlets, that the accused was just another happy hempster — “just a stoner” — as if that made the act he is accused of committing even more surprising.

No one seems to be noticing or discussing what to me seems obvious — that Klein’s heavy use of marijuana, well known to induce psychosis, especially in young people, may have led directly to Reimer’s unspeakably tragic death.

Klein’s mental state, according to the last reports, has not yet been examined by a psychiatrist and so we don’t know if his heavy marijuana use is a factor in the crime for which he is accused. But marijuana-linked psychosis is now commonly noted by forensic psychiatrists in reports written for the courts involving accused with mental illness. And every time governments move to liberalize marijuana laws, doctors and other health experts warn about the dangers, especially to the health of young people and their developing brains, of making pot more freely available.

The Schizophrenia Society of Canada notes an “accumulating body of evidence has suggested that there is an association between some youth who use cannabis regularly and enduring psychosis. Several recent studies suggest that frequent cannabis use during adolescence is associated with a clinically significant increased risk of developing schizophrenia and other mental illnesses which feature psychosis.”

While the society noted that more research is needed to better understand the link, why are we risking the health of children — and potentially future violent acts linked to psychosis, even if they are rare — by removing the prohibitions on marijuana? Surely we should be asking those questions before legalizing pot. Certainly those who like to get stoned or who make a lot of money off the sale of pot — the ones pushing the pro-marijuana agenda on society — are not.

The experience of liberalized marijuana laws and access in Colorado show that the proportion of young people using pot and the subsequent adverse affects in terms of hospitalizations, impaired driving and school attendance all rise, not drop, after prohibition ends.

In an interview with 60 Minutes aired Oct. 30, Dr. Steven Simerville, medical director of the newborn intensive-care unit at St. Mary-Corwin Medical Centre in Pueblo, Colo., noted the rise in babies being born with THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, in their blood. Babies exposed to marijuana in utero are at risk of developing verbal, memory and behavioural problems in childhood, reported 60 minutes correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook.

“This drug has been shown to cause harm in developing brains,” said Simerville, who opposes legalized recreational pot. “You need to be able to protect babies and you’re going to need to protect teenagers, and by teenagers, or developing brains, you have to take in mind that marijuana potentially permanently affects brain growth until people are 25 or 30.”

Politicians jumping on the feel-good, aren’t-we-hip, “no one should ever say anything is wrong or tell others what to do” bandwagon of modern self-indulgence around marijuana use should reconsider whether having an increasingly stoned populace is such a great policy. The friends and family of Letisha Reimer likely are.
Gordon Clark is a columnist and editorial pages editor of The Province
http://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gordon-clark-more-study-needed-on-the-link-between-pot-and-psychosis