My Washington Times Review Of 'Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, And Violence'

The Washington Times published my review of Alex Berenson’s Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. 

Many people these days, it seems, believe that marijuana is a mostly harmless drug that helps to ease pain and relaxes people, like a good, stiff, alcoholic drink. But like alcohol, the effects of marijuana can be serious and even deadly.

Alex Berenson, a thriller writer and former New York Times reporter, has written a book that exposes the myths of marijuana at a time when many politicians are pushing for nationwide legalization.

In “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence,” Alex Berenson warns that the chemical in marijuana that causes one to “get high,” 9-tetrahdrocannabinol, commonly called THC, can cause psychotic episodes that can end in violence.

...“Most people will never have a psychotic episode while using marijuana. Some will have temporary breaks from reality. But an unlucky minority of users develop full-blown schizophrenia,” Mr. Berenson writes. “At this point, doctors have no way of predicting who they will be.” 

Mr. Berenson writes that the most important finding linking marijuana and psychosis is a 2017 468-page research report issued by the National Academy of Medicine titled “The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids.” The study reported that marijuana does not appear to cause lung cancer. But the study offers less good news when it comes to mental health. The study found strong evidence that marijuana causes schizophrenia and some evidence that it worsens bipolar disorder and increases the risks of suicide, depression and social anxiety disorder.

The higher the use, the greater the risk, the study concludes.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/20/book-review-tell-your-children-by-alex-berenson/ 

The Real Navy Yard Scandal: Charles Krauthammer On Gun Control And Mental Illness

In a previous post, I linked to a Charles Krauthammer's column from December of 2012 that covered gun control and mental illness - http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/09/monsters-shall-always-be-with-us.html

In light of the Washington Navy Yard shooting, Charles Krauthammer followed up and wrote another column on gun control and mental illness, which appeared in National Review.  

In the liberal remake of Casablanca, the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to “round up the usual weapons.”

It’s always the weapon and never the shooter. Twelve people are murdered in a rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, and before sundown Senator Dianne Feinstein has called for yet another debate on gun violence. Major opprobrium is heaped on the AR-15, the semiautomatic used in the Newtown massacre.

Turns out no AR-15 was used at the Navy Yard. And the shotgun that was used was obtained legally in Virginia after the buyer, Aaron Alexis, had passed both a state and federal background check.

As was the case in the Tucson shooting — instantly politicized into a gun-control and (fabricated) tea-party-climate-of-violence issue — the origin of this crime lies not in any politically expedient externality but in the nature of the shooter.

On August 7, that same Alexis had called police from a Newport, R.I., Marriott. He was hearing voices. Three people were following him, he told the cops. They were sending microwaves through walls, making his skin vibrate and preventing him from sleeping. He had already twice changed hotels to escape the men, the radiation, the voices.

Delusions, paranoid ideation, auditory (and somatic) hallucinations: the classic symptoms of schizophrenia.

So here is this panic-stricken soul, psychotic and in terrible distress. And what does modern policing do for him? The cops tell him to “stay away from the individuals that are following him.” Then they leave.

But the three “individuals” were imaginary, for God’s sake. This is how a civilized society deals with a man in such a state of terror?

Had this happened 35 years ago in Boston, Alexis would have been brought to me as the psychiatrist on duty at the ER of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Were he as agitated and distressed as in the police report, I probably would have administered an immediate dose of Haldol, the most powerful fast-acting antipsychotic of the time.

This would generally relieve the hallucinations and delusions, a blessing not only in itself, but also for the lucidity it brings on that would allow him to give us important diagnostic details — psychiatric history, family history, social history, medical history, etc. If I thought he could be sufficiently cared for by family or friends to help him receive regular oral medication, therapy, and follow-up, I would have discharged him. Otherwise, I’d have admitted him. And if he refused, I’d have ordered a 14-day involuntary commitment.

Sounds cruel? On the contrary. For many people living on park benches, commitment means a warm bed, shelter, and three hot meals a day. For Alexis, it would have meant the beginning of a treatment regimen designed to bring him back to himself before discharging him to a world heretofore madly radioactive.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359006/real-navy-yard-scandal-charles-krauthammer

Monsters Shall Always Be With Us: Charles Krauthammer On Guns, Mass Murderers, Mental Illness And Culture

  

After every tragic mass murder incident like the Washington Navy Yard shooting, the knee-jerk reaction of some politicians is to call for greater gun control. But they ignore the mental illness issue.

 

The problem is not the gun, but rather the madman who fires the gun. 

 

We need stronger civil commitment laws, in my view, not stronger gun control laws.  

 

Charles Krauthammer, who is a psychiatrist as well as an insightful and intelligent syndicated columnist, wrote a column in December of 2012 on guns, mass murderers and mental illness that bears reading again. 

 

WASHINGTON - Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

 

Let's be serious.

The weapon: Within hours of last week's Newtown, Conn., massacre, the focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws.

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn't work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it's almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

A new assault weapons ban proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, would exempt 900 weapons. And that's the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.

Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing weapons and magazines. That's one of the reasons the '94 law failed. At the time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million large-capacity (i.e., more than 10 bullets) magazines. A reservoir that immense can take 100 years to draw down. 

The killer: Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free.

As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people -- often right out of the emergency room -- as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away -- and (forcibly) treated.

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

You can read the rest of the column via the link to the Portland Press Herald  below:

http://www.pressherald.com/opinion/guns-mental-illness-and-culture-all-must-be-addressed_2012-12-21.html