If there’s a causal link, I wonder in which direction is more common? I know kids from my neighborhood who now smoke a lot of weed. I think most of them had issues long before trying weed and weed was more of an escape for them, much like booze is for many.
Do they have actual, diagnosed "mental issues", or are you judging that some of their behavior is out of the norm for your experience and thus it must be a mental issue?
Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with no psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.
Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with “undiagnosed” psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.
No, I am not a professional psychological specialist.
Yes, I have some experiences to be able to make intelligent “non-professional” judgements about psychological problems. My definition of a psychological problem is one where the problem is seriously negatively affecting ones life, and ones skills are not successfully mitigating or correcting the problem. Environmental issues have a part to play in that. My friends and acquaintances have a wide range of ages.
You seem to be fishing for something - perhaps you could have just made your point instead (with caveats).
Disclaimer: I don’t use any form of THC or CBD. No strong reasons against it, just not my thing. I certainly have nothing against those that want or need to take THC or CBD.
By the way, labeling an undesirable group with "mental issues" has been done many times in the past, sometimes even with "good" intentions.
A well-designed study may be more revealing, but the individual experiences are legitimate and should not be discarded solely because studies are possible.
A strong enough signal will show in a sample of one.
With a correct model, cause and effect can be predicted without any samples (scientific progress often occurs this way).
And some people’s intuitions are remarkably astute. Albeit there are a lot of people who have incorrect intuitions and don’t know it.
A cannabis example would be strong paranoia after one sesh. More ingrained paranoia (qanon?) that I have seen linked to regular heavy usage doesn’t feel to me to be a stretch of the imagination.
Can you please tell me why you think heart rate is more concerning than the psychological effects? Effects which the paper itself mentions and you seem to downplay for some unobvious reason to me.
For me, the difficulty is discerning causation from correlation. Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious mental issues. I am interested in knowing the root cause of mental issues, because then we are given the opportunity to affect behaviours to improve people’s lives. A correlation is often little help to anyone but other researchers.
I didn’t read the paper but the abstract didn’t allude to any insight into causation versus correlation. If an abstract of a paper ignores that issue, then I often don’t bother reading, because there is not enough value from studies measuring correlation (for my personal use for any information).