Letter to the editor: Mental health and marijuana

Mental health and marijuana

Received Jan. 11

Yes Mr. Nadauld, the conclusion holds about the doubling of deaths caused by drivers who tested positive for marijuana due to medical marijuana use in Colorado between 2006 and 2011.

Just as with alcohol, one cannot know to what extent the amount of marijuana found in a person's body exceeded the individual's tolerance. But it is reasonable to assume that the fraction of positive individuals who were impaired stayed about the same between the two years.

If you want to know, I estimate from National Alliance on Mental Health's audited financial reports of 2014 that about a third of their income was from pharmaceutical companies. But I can't imagine drug companies are worried about competition from medical marijuana. If a person has a real ailment, he will end up taking their drugs. If more extracts of marijuana pass systematic tests, and are approved by the FDA, the drug companies will be the ones making them.

What I am concerned about, as one familiar with mental illness research and mentally ill persons, is that marijuana and other street drugs make mental illness worse; and regular use of marijuana in adolescence has been shown to significantly increase the probability of acquiring a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, later.

(Word count: 203)

JOHN TANNER

Idaho Falls