Medical doctor Laura J. Bierut wasn’t writing about fentanyl, cancer or alcoholism. She was writing about a deadly drug legalized for recreation in all of Canada and 24 US states plus the District of Columbia: marijuana.
This is not your baby-boomer hippie Woodstock All-You-Need-Is-Love cannabis, but a far more potent and more lethal strain. According to the Potency Monitoring Program, a project led by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the average amount of THC—the main psychoactive component in cannabis—has increased by more than 1,000 percent.
“We need a nationwide public health campaign to address the dangers of cannabis use.”
And now a just-released study confirms what we already suspected: Cannabis is a killer. The study, published on February 6, revealed that patients addicted to cannabis died at almost three times the rate of individuals without the dependence over the next five years, and that patients who couldn’t stop using cannabis—even when made aware of the dangers associated with it—were more likely to die from trauma, toxic doses of other drugs and lung cancer.
And their chances of suicide increased tenfold.
A second report published two days earlier by the same research group looked at whether Canada’s legalization of marijuana in 2018 affected the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis in that country. It did. The rates of schizophrenia attributable to cannabis use nearly tripled from 3.7 percent before legalization to 10.3 percent afterward.
According to Ontario health records, 106,994 people were identified as addicted to cannabis during an emergency department visit or hospitalization between 2006 and 2021.
Researchers compared the mortality rates of those dependent on the drug to those who weren’t. Even allowing for deaths by all other causes, the researchers concluded that those with a cannabis dependency were at a threefold increased risk of death.
The risk was greatest among adults between the ages of 25 and 44, the period in life at which many are the most energetic in pursuing their goals.
The study’s author, Dr. Daniel Myran, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, believes the threefold figure is low, and that for every person treated for cannabis addiction, “there are another three who didn’t seek care.… Either way, this group is really, really high risk, and could benefit from intervention and monitoring and prevention,” he said.
“We must adopt a robust public health approach, similar to the successful strategies used to reduce tobacco consumption, to mitigate the harms associated with cannabis,” Laura Bierut writes. “We need a nationwide public health campaign to address the dangers of cannabis use.… Given the ongoing expansion of the multibillion-dollar commercial cannabis interests and the promotion of their products, swift action is essential to protect public health before these worrisome trends become even more entrenched.”
What Dr. Bierut proposes is correct but cannot succeed with a lock-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted approach. Nipping the problem at the source—the decision to take drugs in the first place—not waiting until abuse has happened 10 or a 1,000 times, is the best approach. So an education-based solution like Foundation for a Drug-Free World’s effective Truth About Drugs program is best. The largest non-governmental anti-drug information and prevention campaign on Earth, sponsored by the Church of Scientology and spearheaded by Scientology ecclesiastical leader David Miscavige, it has distributed 160 million educational booklets in 17 languages across 188 nations.
The myth of marijuana’s harmlessness—that “oh, it’s fine, it’s just a plant, after all” dodge—has been stripped away by the numbers, and the numbers don’t lie.
Yeah, sure, it’s a plant.
So is hemlock.
