[nataliste]

You can tell what the paper is going to argue just by reading the author affiliations. They're all part of a group whose funding lines all lead back to NIDA.

NIDA’s mandate is harm. Not cognition, not performance, not any of the reasons people actually use cannabis. So of course the study leans hard on CUD and psychosis as those are the two outcomes that guarantee grant renewals. A proposal about cannabis and creative problem-solving will get immediately buried. But if you emphasize risk (especially adolescent risk, ideally with "first-episode psychosis" somewhere in the aims) then suddenly everyone’s interested.

They do the usual maneuver with FDA-approved derived substances: carve them out as clean, respectable, and clinically manageable, while treating the whole-plant as this murky, unstable mass the medical system can’t "trust." That distinction is purely commercial, not scientific. The plant itself is chaotic, but the extract with an SKU number is pure, controlled, and therefore "clinical." It’s not hard to see what this protects.

It's the exact same thing Cargill, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo did against stevia (Rebiana) and Merck did against red rice koji (Lovastatin). The form you can just grow or make yourself cheaply is dangerous to consumers. But this patented recombination passed solely through greased palms is just dandy. This study is just another vehicle for the same move against cannabis.

Most of the authors work in addiction medicine. Their entire professional world assumes SUD as the governing model. If cannabis doesn’t sit inside that model (as in patients can just go buy it without passing through the psychiatric gate) then they lose money and clients. The conclusion section basically spells out the anxiety: clinicians must provide guidance, clinicians must set the boundaries, clinicians must interpret the evidence. That’s jurisdictional language.

Meanwhile, the practical reality is that patients get contradictory instructions: a doctor says "try cannabis" but a follow-up psychiatrist says "chronic cannabis use is a disorder." They're trying to patch that incoherence by building a moat around medicalized (and patented) cannabinoids and burning everything outside it.

The only cannabis that counts is the kind that runs through the FDA and, by extension, the institutions tied into that pipeline. Everything outside that channel is going to be treated as dangerous and destructive on purpose.

[IAmBroom]

> NIDA’s mandate is harm.

That's an impressive take. In general, or were they institutionally created to destroy all people?

[seec]

I understand what you are saying, and I largely agree that it's how the medical system controls things in general, but that's true for pretty much any industry. I wouldn't see too much of a conspiracy in people trying to protect whatever they believe in.

Anyway, I don't think the research can have the effect you think it has. Cannabis will be available in the black market regardless of whatever the research ends up saying. Whoever really wants to try to see if it works better for them than conventional medicine/treatment can definitely do so and choose for themselves if it's worth it.

I have consumed quite a decent amount of cannabis myself and have friends who are regular users (this is how I access it, basically). I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the bad effects of cannabis; they are very real. And the older I get, the more I think that the good part isn't really worth the bad part unless we are talking about some more extreme situations like cancer treatment, tetraplegia, or basically anything where life outcomes are so fucked there is almost no way to make it worse.

It's probably better to avoid it entirely before 25 yo, until the brain is fully stabilized. But that's very much true of alcohol, nicotine, and even most likely caffeine, but they still get used, so whatever, I guess.