Tell Your Children Quotes

“Marijuana use was more likely to be linked with the death of children than almost any other factor, including domestic violence or mental illness. Once again, researchers who weren’t looking for evidence that cannabis was linked to violence found it anyway.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Marijuana causes paranoia and psychosis. That fact is now beyond dispute. Even scientists who aren’t sure if marijuana can cause permanent psychosis agree that it can cause temporary paranoia and psychotic episodes. The risk is so obvious that marijuana dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to cause paranoia. Paranoia and psychosis cause violence. Overwhelming evidence links psychotic disorders and violence, especially murder. Studies have confirmed the connection, across cultures, nations, races, and eras. The definitive analysis was published in PLOS Medicine in 2009. Led by Seena Fazel, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at Oxford University, researchers examined twenty earlier studies on people with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. They found that people with psychosis were 5 times as likely to commit violent crimes as”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“In August, Dr. Jerome Adams, the United States Surgeon General, warned about the risks of cannabis for young adults—explicitly noting the cannabis-schizophrenia link.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Marijuana users generally start smoking between 14 and 19; first-time psychotic breaks most often occur from 19 to 24 for men, 21 to 27 for women. In other words, almost no one develops a permanent psychotic illness the first time he uses marijuana—or even after a few months. The gap between when people start smoking and when they break averages six years, according to a 2016 paper in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry that examined previous research. The Finnish paper showing that almost half of cannabis psychosis diagnoses convert to schizophrenia within eight years is more evidence of the time lag. A problem that seems temporary becomes permanent.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Almost no one—not even the police officers who deal with it every day, not even most psychiatrists—publicly connects marijuana and crime. We all know alcohol causes violence, but somehow, we have grown to believe that marijuana does not, that centuries of experience were a myth. As a pediatrician wrote in a 2015 piece for the New York Times in which he argued that marijuana was safer for his teenage children than alcohol: “People who are high are not committing violence.” But they are. Almost unnoticed, the studies have piled up. On murderers in Pittsburgh, on psychiatric patients in Italy, on tourists in Spain, on emergency room patients in Michigan. Most weren’t even designed to look for a connection between marijuana and violence, because no one thought one existed. Yet they found it. In many cases, they have even found marijuana’s tendency to cause violence is greater than that of alcohol. A 2018 study of people with psychosis in Switzerland found that almost half of cannabis users became violent over a three-year period; their risk of violence was four times that of psychotic people who didn’t use. (Alcohol didn’t seem to increase violence in this group at all.) The effect is not confined to people with preexisting psychosis. A 2012 study of 12,000 high school students across the United States showed that those who used cannabis were more than three times as likely to become violent as those who didn’t, surpassing the risk of alcohol use. Even worse, studies of children who have died from abuse and neglect consistently show that the adults responsible for their deaths use marijuana far more frequently than alcohol or other drugs—and far, far more than the general population. Marijuana does not necessarily cause all those crimes, but the link is striking and large. We shouldn’t be surprised. The violence that drinking causes is largely predictable. Alcohol intoxicates. It disinhibits users. It escalates conflict. It turns arguments into fights, fights into assaults, assaults into murders. Marijuana is an intoxicant that can disinhibit users, too. And though it sends many people into a relaxed haze, it also frequently causes paranoia and psychosis. Sometimes those are short-term episodes in healthy people. Sometimes they are months-long spirals in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And paranoia and psychosis cause violence. The psychiatrists who treated Raina Thaiday spoke of the terror she suffered, and they weren’t exaggerating. Imagine voices no one else can hear screaming at you. Imagine fearing your food is poisoned or aliens have put a chip in your brain. When that terror becomes too much, some people with psychosis snap. But when they break, they don’t escalate in predictable ways. They take hammers to their families. They decide their friends are devils and shoot them. They push strangers in front of trains. The homeless man mumbling about God frightens us because we don’t have to be experts on mental illness and violence to know instinctively that untreated psychosis is dangerous. And finding violence and homicides connected to marijuana is all too easy.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“The psychosis-inducing effects of synthetics offered one last, crucial piece of evidence about the risks of cannabis. And so, in January 2017, the National Academy of Medicine examined the thirty years of research that had begun with Sven Andréasson’s paper and declared the issue settled. “The association between cannabis use and development of a psychotic disorder is supported by data synthesized in several good-quality systematic reviews,” the NAM wrote. “The magnitude of this association is moderate to large and appears to be dose-dependent . . . The primary literature reviewed by the committee confirms the conclusions of the systematic reviews.” But almost no one noticed the National Academy report. The New York Times published an online summary of its findings—in May 2018, more than a year after it appeared. It has not changed the public policy debate around marijuana in the United States or perceptions of the safety of the drug.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Marijuana causes paranoia and psychosis. That fact is now beyond dispute. Even scientists who aren’t sure if marijuana can cause permanent psychosis agree that it can cause temporary paranoia and psychotic episodes.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Huffman synthesized many different chemicals that activated the CB1 receptor—and named them for himself: JWH-018, JWH-073, et cetera. Huffman designed his “synthetic cannabinoids” to lock to the receptor more powerfully than THC. Think of the difference between morphine and fentanyl. Morphine occurs naturally. Fentanyl is a synthetic chemical that activates the brain’s opioid receptors more strongly, and so fentanyl produces a stronger high and has a much greater overdose risk. By 1993,”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“While the United States and Canada are suffering an epidemic of overdose deaths, Britain isn’t. In 2000, the United Kingdom and the United States had similar drug death rates. That year, about 17,000 Americans and 3,000 people in England and Wales died of overdoses—a death rate of about 6 people per 100,000. On both sides of the Atlantic, about half of those died from opiates. In 2016, about 65,000 Americans died from overdoses, including almost 45,000 from opiates. In England and Wales, the number was 3,700, including 2,000 opiate deaths. Americans now die from drugs at three times the rate of people in the United Kingdom. And the overdose epidemic in Canada is nearly as bad as that in the United States. Richard Friedman was more right than he knew in his New York Times piece: If cannabis were actually a dangerous gateway drug, as the attorney general suggested, it would be very easy to see in the data. We would find that medical-marijuana laws increased opiate drug use and overdose deaths. So they have. Of”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Marijuana causes paranoia and psychosis.

That fact is now beyond dispute. Even scientists who aren’t sure if marijuana can cause permanent psychosis agree that it can cause temporary paranoia and psychotic episodes.The risk is so obvious that marijuana dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to cause paranoia.

Paranoia and psychosis cause violence.

Overwhelming evidence links psychotic disorders and violence, especially murder. Studies have confirmed the connection, across cultures, nations, races, and eras.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence