WHAT HAVE WE DONE?

A 2021 study out of Denmark estimated the proportion of cases of schizophrenia associated with cannabis use in that country doubled in recent decades. Though cannabis remains illegal there, concern about this reality and threats of an explosion of psychotic disorders has persisted around any discussion of legalization.

Relatedly, a team of researchers just completed a similar study to investigate the incidence of cannabis associated schizophrenia in Canada. Their study looked at 13.6 million people in Ontario aged 14-65 years of age between 2006 and 2023. This time period was selected because it segments into: pre-legalization of cannabis (Jan 2006 to Nov 2015), formal liberalization (Dec 2015 to Sept 2018), and the time since legalization and commercialization (October 2018 to December 2022). The results are shocking.

The research team found schizophrenia associated with cannabis use nearly tripled over this time. And who are we talking about in this psychosis cohort? They show the schizophrenia population was far more likely to be younger males and those in the lowest income quintile. Seems worth asking if there is another group that, if they wind up as the overwhelming majority of the psychosis, opioid overdose, and suicide categories, wouldn't cause the immediate halting of civilization while we remake all our institutions and culture? Well, don't we all have a recent analog evaluate this?

Consider that over a period of four and a half years, British Columbia officially lost 2,766 people to the pandemic virus. Now consider that we lost nearly as many in each and every year just to opioid overdoses alone over the same period. Yes, nearly 10,000 opioid deaths during the height of the pandemic. Right. And those fatalities, unlike with the pandemic virus, were not overwhelmingly seniors in the last years of their long lives but young people in their prime. In one instance, just the threat of some fatalities from COVID-19 alone resulted in an unprecedented emergency — the rewriting of all rules and norms from top to bottom and the transformation of civilization — from the nature of and right to education and employment to the right to free movement and expression and on. In response to a solid decade of fatalities and the threat of many more we've decided to issue more of the very drugs killing these people while gifting them the storefronts, sidewalks, and swales of every downtown as a kind of public purgatory or makeshift morgue...

Is it just me or is everyone who spent the last decade passionately throwing out the word "disproportionate" at every possible instance, even where it doesn't apply, astonishingly, horrifyingly silent about all of this?