Drugs
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
12 Jan 2003
a moral framework is useful here as in all other areas. If youngsters have been taught that some actions are right and some actions are wrong, we have a better chance of explaining to them that all of us have a moral obligation not to throw away our self-control to either drugs or alcohol.
We now understand better the dangers of drunken driving. Good progress has been made here particularly among young drivers. A similar challenge is to link effectively in the public mind the damage that can be caused to health, happiness and moral sensibility by both hard and soft drugs. It is always useful to know accurately and scientifically what the situation is.
Since at least the mid-nineties we have known that a large intake of cannabis in some people can trigger acute psychoses, such as schizophrenia, or make established conditions worse.
a wise mother who knew her family history told me how she had explained this danger to her teenagers. Like a number of Australian families, hers had a number of alcoholics across the generations. She believed that children with such a background were more liable to psychotic illness from cannabis.
She was convinced her children needed to know this and be particularly careful.
a recent Australian study of 1600 teenagers over seven years has now confirmed a link between cannabis use and high levels of anxiety and depression.
a majority of young people in the English-speaking world now use cannabis recreationally. Middle aged parents should not be complacent about this, because senior police in two states have told me that cannabis sold on the streets now is sometimes a or 10 times stronger than that available 20 or 30 years ago. Some marihuana grown hydroponically is 30 times stronger. The situation might seem the same but can be very different.
One encouraging result from the survey was that adolescent depression and anxiety did not predict either weekly or daily use of cannabis. The linkage ran in the opposite direction, from soft drug intake to depression.
Twenty percent of the young males participating used cannabis weekly and ten percent on a daily basis. In both cases the rate of young female usage was less than half this. Overall 60 percent of the sample had used cannabis recreationally and seven percent were daily users as young adults.
It was a surprise to me that the survey found a stronger link between cannabis and depression for young women.
Young adult women taking cannabis daily were five times more likely to become anxious and depressed than non-users. For teenage girls the risk was a bit less (4 times) for daily use, while weekly use for teenage girls predicted a twofold increase in later depression.
The risk of depression for teenage boys using cannabis was also real, but for teenage girls using cannabis daily the risks were much worse than for their male counterparts.
These statistics do not paint a happy picture, but they deserve to be widely known.
