Just days after the Senate confirmed a new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the agency is promoting yet another message warning against marijuana use, linking it to depression and suicidal thinking.
On Friday, the DEA-run site Get Smart About Drugs shared an article published in Psychology Today that warned against cannabis use that was written by Mark Gold, a professor and chairman of psychology at Yale University who has been lauded by prohibitionists, including the organization Smart Approaches To Marijuana (SAM).
The article—titled “Cannabis Use Increases Depressive and Suicidal Thinking”—notes that numerous states have legalized medical cannabis, which “reversed criminalization, but rather than following FDA-like testing and approval,cannabis was suddenly ‘a medicine.’”
Just days after the Senate confirmed a new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the agency is promoting yet another message warning against marijuana use, linking it to depression and suicidal thinking.
On Friday, the DEA-run site Get Smart About Drugs shared an article published in Psychology Today that warned against cannabis use that was written by Mark Gold, a professor and chairman of psychology at Yale University who has been lauded by prohibitionists, including the organization Smart Approaches To Marijuana (SAM).
The article—titled “Cannabis Use Increases Depressive and Suicidal Thinking”—notes that numerous states have legalized medical cannabis, which “reversed criminalization, but rather than following FDA-like testing and approval, cannabis was suddenly ‘a medicine.’”
Legalizing Medical Marijuana Has ‘Positive Impact’ On Child Development
“Cannabis is largely unstudied or has failed rigorous medication trials, so its impact on mental health is mostly unknown,” Gold writes in the DEA-spotlighted article, declining to acknowledge the tens of thousands of studies that have been published on marijuana and the plant’s risks and benefits in the last decade alone.
“Multiple recent studies have presented convincing evidence supporting likely causal pathways from youth cannabis use to depression and suicidal outcomes in adolescence and adulthood,” the DEA-promoted article says. “Trauma or minority stress and self-medication heighten vulnerability, making cannabis a perceived treatment or coping mechanism in the absence of FDA-approved treatments, psychological support, or treatment.”
Read more at Marijuana Moment
