RE: Schizophrenia, drugs link?

[KennyR]

Yep, nothing that plays with your brain chemistry is good for you. Over a period of maybe a million years, nature crafted the human brain with a hell of a lot of natural safeguards, one of which was against excess seratonin or other 'pleasure causing' compounds. Probably this was because being too happy was bad for our survival. Seeing what crawls out of nightclubs in the UK at 4am in the mornings, I can quite understand.

THC (edit) has been linked with (mild!) psychosis for many years now, a link denied by pro-cannabis campaigners, when they can be bothered to deny anything.

[KennyR]

I'm having problems with three letter acronyms today.

[KennyR]

I don't think they get it.

Of course they don't, they're all a bunch of raving schizo's.

[KennyR]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
If we take a look at the past, humans have always lived with drugs, all kinds of drugs (no not XTC or LSD, but maybe natural drugs wich equals these).
So it has to be that the human body/brain has adapted to many of these drugs.

It hasn't, or they wouldn't have an effect. Many of the things in our diet that effect other animals but don't effect us have been 'evolved around'. For example, feeding chocolate to dogs is a good way to kill them. The thiobromine that does this has little to no effect on us.

Certainly there hasn't been long enough or wide enough usage by humans of recreational drugs to evolve a response. But be sure if that response did evolve it would either cancel out the effect of the drug, or make us totally dependent, and so an evolutionary dead-end. Either way, it's not a positive thing.

[KennyR]

T_Bone wrote:
And why marijuana? Opium isn't destructive to any organs in the body, even if addicted to it for decades.

You forget the most major organ of all. Opium is inherently destructive to brain function. It has stunning psychological and physiological independence problems. And chronic use will eventually cause such large doses that they'll cause organ failure.

Why shouldn't that be legal as well? It's better for you than marijuana.

It's not. Once you're a marijuana addict (which IS possible, despite denials from pro-weed groups), you're a stoner. Once you're an opiate addict, your life is gone.

[KennyR]

Dandy wrote:
Why would people, who don't have schizophrenia, need to produce antipsychotic chemicals at all?

Because they're the chemicals that have evolved to suppress primitive drives. Without them you wouldn't think much about cutting the head off a housecat to see how it bleeds, for instance.

How can you know what is good for *ME* and what not?
We do not even know each other!

Because he (and me) are 99.9999999% genetically similar to you?

But the fact that it calms down violent people and makes them peaceful and friendly is a good thing - isn't it?

Yeah, right, then they get down to the last snickers bar and all friggin' hell breaks loose!

[KennyR]

Speel wrote:
And there are no physical consequences when quitting the addiction.

That's not what the medical profession says. Side effects of removing a marijuana addiction include depression and anxiety, probably because of the lack of the calm feeling the drug gives. I can't speak from experience because, although its abuse is almost the norm here, nobody ever really got addicted to it. They just had a rare chance of jumping from smoking it to smoking heroin, if it was available. (Possibly the psychotic effect, who knows.)