CAMH Releases Marijuana Study As Activists Prepare For 4/20
Posted April 20, 2010 10:36 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s April 20 for some, but it’s 4/20 for others.
That’s the day when pot lovers and marijuana activists worldwide light up to legalize the drug.
A huge rally will be taking place at Yonge and Dundas Square at, you guessed it, 4:20pm. Later in the evening, ‘American Drug War’ and ‘How Weed Won The West’ will screen at the Revue Cinema.
Also on Tuesday, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) unveiled research that shows possible links between cannabis use and risk of developing anxiety and mood disorders.
Researcher Joyce Cheung and colleagues looked at 14,000 Ontario residents. They found that anxiety and mood disorders were most common in people who used cannabis almost everyday (heavy users) and lowest in those who did not use cannabis at all (abstainers).
The study was published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
In a surprise for researchers, people who reported using cannabis less than once a month also said they had elevated rates of anxiety and mood disorders – an increase of 43 per cent compared to abstainers.
“This result was something we didn’t expect to see,” said Dr. Robert Mann, CAMH Senior Scientist and investigator on the study, outlined in a press release.
“We thought that the data would likely show a positive correlation between use and psychiatric disorders – with rates of anxiety and mood disorder increasing with use – but these results show that the frequency of use is not necessarily the only factor affecting the rates of these disorders.”
