Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Cannabis & Schizophrenia Interview

Following is a very good, recent interview with an Australian psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Campbell on what he is seeing as the impact of cannabis as it relates to schizophrenia and other psychiatric issues. At schizophrenia.com we're not on any type of crusade against cannabis - we're just finding that there is a lot of recent news and research on the subject recently and the news is not good. (Special thanks to Moeder for pointing us towards this interview)

Some brief quotes from the interview:

"What I’m seeing now is a vastly greater number of young people smoking cannabis and you know in the clinical work – both in the acute services and in long term community management nearly 70 per cent of the problems are related to cannabis abuse, now either acute toxicity or the long term effects"

"I think we’ve had strong evidence for many years that cannabis always makes it more difficult to cope with schizophrenia"

"my impression is that a lot of people out there who’ve developed a psychosis who wouldn’t have otherwise developed psychosis, and that’s down to smoking daily cannabis in their teenage years."

In a nutshell, what’s your message to young people?

R. Don’t use cannabis. Certainly if you’re young - under 21 - I’m not recommending it for the over 21s, but it’s much more of an insidious poison for the under 21s. It creeps up on people. It changes the way they’re functioning. They don’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late. Amphetamines are quite different.

Click Here for the Full Interview with Dr. Campbell