Cannabis use and adult ADHD symptoms

[Jim Finnel]

Cannabis use and adult ADHD symptoms.

Fergusson DM, Boden JM.

University of Otago, Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Christchurch, New Zealand. dm.fergusson@otago.ac.nz
Abstract

BACKGROUND: The present study examined the associations between cannabis use in adolescence and young adulthood and self-reported adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in adulthood.

METHODS: A 25-year prospective longitudinal study of the health, development, and adjustment of a birth cohort of 1265 New Zealand children. Measures included assessments of adolescent and young adult cannabis use and ADHD symptoms at age 25, measures of childhood socioeconomic disadvantage, family adversity, childhood and early adolescent behavioural adjustment and cognitive ability, and adolescent and young adult other drug use.

RESULTS: Cannabis use by age 25 was significantly (p<.0001) associated with increasing self-reported adult ADHD symptoms at age 25. Adjustment of the association for potentially confounding factors from childhood and early adolescence reduced the magnitude of the association, but it remained statistically significant (p<.0001). However, control for the mediating effects of other drug use in adolescence and early adulthood reduced the association between cannabis use and adult ADHD symptoms to statistical non-significance (p>.20).

CONCLUSIONS: The current study suggested that the association between cannabis use and adult ADHD symptoms was mediated by other substance use that was associated with cannabis use. The results suggest that cannabis use leads to other drug use, which in turn leads to increased ADHD symptoms. However, it should be noted that the potential influence of such factors as genetic predispositions may still be unaccounted for.

PMID: 18242878 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Source: Cannabis use and adult ADHD symptoms. [Drug Alcohol Depend. 2008] - PubMed result

 

[adobeboxer]

The road to hell is paved with good intention: the do-gooder (leftist) social engineers and its reshaping of human culture.


Symptoms are not disease signs. The former term may or may not indicate disease, but more precisely, "symptoms" are typically what a patient reports to his doctor, i.e. feeling tired, pain, etc. In psychiatric "medicine", the psychiatrist treats symptoms, and through subterfuge and deceit, the profession(al) has convinced the powers that be that he is a healer. With tens of millions of Americans on psychotropics, I submit that psychiatry's principle function, as a moral-legalistic enterprise, is that of social engineer: Alter the individual and you alter the social.

There is no consensus on the "diagnosis" of ADHD. Labeling the individual with ADHD is prescriptive, not descriptive, a means of justifying those means of modifying the individual's behavior (the collective ends justifying the means?) and not treating or curing a disease state. There are a plethora of ADHD theories. At my local university Library, alone, there are some one hundred book titles (yes, I hand counted), which include the psychiatric label "ADD" or "ADHD" in their respective titles. Moreover, there are seemingly as many theories on the "cause" of ADHD (biological, environmental, social, etc.) in the mix, as there are experts who study this putative disorder. Not to be left out, the medical marijauana community even proposed its very own "endocannabinoid" theory. It does make me wonder if it is the merits of the science or politics which animates this ongoing debate.
The debauchment and perversion of language and the eschewing of common sense is what has made psychiatry what it is in modern, secular society. The inflation of the meaning of disease has made it possible for quackery to call itself medicine, and to call troubling and troublesome behavior diseased and disordered. For psychiatry, and its allied fields, what is alien cannot be human, and so the human and moral dimensions are but confounding to this decidedly reductive profession's take on human (mis)behavior.
It is no surprise that the medical marijuana lobby would endorse the use of cannibis for a host of mental maladies, and quite frankly, I see this sanctioning as nothing more than that of worshiping at the alter of health, with the physician, the psychiatrist, and therapists, as secular society's clergy, dispensing its therapeutic sacraments to its flock. Plus ca change.