May 27, 2018

27,000 Brits hospitalized annually for pot problems

Daily Mail, UK  - There were 27,501 admissions linked to cannabis in England in 2016/17, a 15 per cent rise in just two years from 23,866 in 2014/15.

Labour MP Jeff Smith, who requested the figures on cannabis-related hospitalizations, said the large increase was ‘a concern’.

The influential medical journal The Lancet has just taken the unprecedented step of branding cannabis a ‘huge risk to health’.

Mr Smith, an ex-DJ who has admitted taking drugs, said: ‘It could be that the rise in hospital admissions is associated with rises in particular types of cannabis being used – street cannabis now tends to be more “skunk”.’

‘Skunk’ has a high concentration of the main psychoactive compound THC, which is strongly linked to increased risk of psychosis.

A recent study based on drugs seized by police found that 94 per cent of cannabis now sold on UK streets is ‘skunk’. Academics say this super-strength cannabis could be behind the rise in mental health problems linked to the drug.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why are people in the UK going to the hospital for cannabis? Is it because of the nasty half tobacco joints they smoke? Are they adding some other substance to their joints?

I live in a legal cannabis state, and one can go down to a dispensary and buy cannabis with 30% THC, or get concentrates that are as much as 92% THC. Nobody goes to the hospital for it. Of course the THC percentage is right on the package, so there isn't any question on how strong it is. At the shops, the budtenders will guide new cannabis customers toward more modest percentage options. This situation looks like legalizing cannabis, so it can be bought in regulated dispensaries that label percentages would avoid a lot of these hospitalizations.

Anonymous said...

Quite often psych problems are the cause of self-medication, not the result. This is particularly true with something like pot, where there's a centuries-long cross-cultural history of not much toxicity.

People in their mid/late teens turning up with problems, particularly thought disorders, after smoking dope should prompt clinicians to check with the families to see whether there were already signs that something was amiss.

MAMADOC said...

The pharmaceutical cos. and the drug lords (if the two should be kept separate) will do anything to keep the oldest medicine around illegal... for their profit and our exploitation... The commoditization of what God and Nature give us for free is a sin against the Holy Spirit. So says Mamadoc also known as Holy Mary... Mary's weed was the first plant domesticated by humanity back at the dawn of civilization. See Richard Evans Schultes on our Sacred Plants...