Cannabis Causes Psychosis? The Answer Is in the Hash

A popular story has been fluttering about new media. The article is about a supposed scientific study that linked cannabis use to an increased incidence of psychosis. While I doubt it troubled too many chronic cannabis consumers, bad information is still toxic. All we need is Nancy Grace to get wind of this and load it into her bullshit cannon.

Now, someone has finally pointed out a fatal flaw in this study. Not only has a nearly identical study been circulated before under a different author’s name, but the scientific methods employed to get this data are suspicious at best. “Researchers” relied on self reporting, which is historically not reliable and the study only looks at two forms of cannabis, skunk and hash. Furthermore, the study claims that skunk is high-potency and that hash is low potency and implies that hash is interchangeable with resin.

This is where the sirens and whistles should start going off for readers. Yes, skunk is a pretty powerful strain, but calling hash low potency is laughable. Some concentrations of hash have tested out at over 90% THC (consider for a moment that super strong buds hover around the 20% mark), how is that a low potency form?

If the people they polled self reported and they said that they were smoking hash and described it as pipe-scrapings, that should call the whole study into question right there. Anyone who smokes weed for real would know the difference between hash (very high potency) and resin (the black shit you scrape out of your pipe, essentially garbage).

For comparison, let’s pretend this study was done exactly the same way but let’s exchange liquor for cannabis. For the “science” in our pretend study to match the “science” in the cited study, we would only compare two types of booze, let’s say whiskey and Everclear. We would also then have to claim that whiskey is strong, but Everclear is weaker (to match the statement that hash is weaker than bud). This, of course, is untrue.

I don’t want the curious or inexperienced people out there thinking, “you know, I’d like to try cannabis, but I don’t want to have a bad experience. I’ll just smoke some hash so I don’t get too high like I would with buds.” That’s a one-way ticket to Maureen Dowd’s Fun House.