Does Cannabis Really Make You More Violent? Here’s What a New Study Found.
· Vice
There’s science, and then there’s what we know from day-to-day observation, no scientific method needed. From personal experience, many of us can attest that people who smoke weed are usually the chillest folks in the room. Yet, a massive review from King’s College London, published in Psychological Medicine and detailed by Science Daily, reveals a weird link to the opposite. They found cannabis is strongly linked to higher rates of committing crime and being a victim of it.
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What adds a bit more validity to the findings is that this isn’t a study of a group of individual people as much as it is a meta-study, meaning it’s a study of studies – 63 studies, to be specific, encompassing over 265,000 people across both the general population and within strictly controlled psychiatric settings.
Among the general populace, people who used cannabis were twice as likely to commit a violent act compared to non-users. For psychiatric patients, that risk jumped up to 2.5 times. When researchers zoomed in on serious incidents that ended in criminal convictions, cannabis users were nearly 4 times as likely to be addicted. Weed smokers were also 50 percent more likely to be on the receiving end of violent acts, and this was especially true of women.
A Review Covering 265,000 People Found a Surprising Link Between Weed and Violence
The researchers, of course, warned that this is correlation, not direct proof of causation. While heavy cannabis use can mess with executive functioning and lower inhibitions, along with messing with emotional regulation and can even spark a little paranoia, all of which combined to create the perfect recipe for making bad decisions, there still isn’t a direct cause-and-effect being established here.
There’s also the matter of how people who tend to be heavy drug users might be naturally inclined to riskier behavior or might be hanging out in sketchier situations to begin with. It should be noted that some of the studies used in this meta-analysis predate today’s higher-potency marijuana.
That could mean the numbers underestimate violence, or that those older studies skew the data.
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