Pot And Schizophrenia Linked: Can Smoking Pot Cause Psychosis?

Pot and schizophrenia are linked, according to a new study. According to The Los Angeles Times, medical science suggests that schizophrenia symptoms can be linked to cannabis use. Apparently, smoking weed makes someone twice as likely to develop a psychotic illness at some point in their lives.

As the report points out, the flip side of that is that people who have psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia are more inclined to smoke pot. It’s almost as if the two are interchangeable: cannabis use can lead to mental illness and mental illness can cause cannabis use:

“A European research team led by Kings College, London, suggests that at least part of the reason why schizophrenic symptoms and pot smoking overlap may lie in shared genetic markers.”

If pot and schizophrenia are linked, and these theories are true, it could alter how legislature looks at the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana. The way that people react to marijuana on the surface is one thing, but to have to be concerned about how pot alters someone’s internal genomes is another.

According to the study, about 49 percent of the 2,082 people involved have smoked pot in the past. The study showed that “those with the strongest genetic profile for schizophrenia risk also were more likely to use cannabis.”

Robert Power, a psychiatry researcher at Kings College, said:

“We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as — that a predisposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use.”

The fact that pot and schizophrenia appear to be linked is not one to be taken lightly. According to NBC News, it appears to be the same genes that “increase the risk of a person developing schizophrenia may also increase the chance they will use cannabis.” It seems as though legalizing marijuana for medical and/or recreational use could end up creating more problems than solutions. If people are encouraged to smoke pot “for fun,” at what price does that “fun” become too much?

That’s not to say that everyone who smokes weed from time to time will end up with a mental illness later on in life, but you never know. Studies continue to show the strong connections between these two things, and this could become a more serious issue in the not-so-distant future.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, people who use pot have also been accused of becoming more violent. Some believe that pot smokers become more violent when they are high — another internal chemical change. What do you think?