Health charity calls for cannabis study

Saturday, 29 January 2005 12:00 AM

A mental health charity is calling on MPs to investigate the effects that smoking cannabis has on users.

Rethink wants a parliamentary select committee to assess evidence that smoking the drug may cause psychosis in people at risk of mental illness.

The charity claims that there has been a 60 per cent increase in the number of people who smoked drugs and developed mental health problems in the last five years.

The call comes a year after the Government reclassified cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug.

The charity, which represents schizophrenia sufferers, said the reclassification had sent a "confusing message" to young people and left many under the impression that using the drug was risk free.

"Cannabis is not risk free," said Rethink chief executive Cliff Prior on Saturday.

"We have known for years that using cannabis makes the symptoms of schizophrenia far worse in people who already have the illness."

The charity also called for the introduction of a "long-term, well-funded, innovative campaign" to publicise the mental health risks associated with cannabis and to counter the "risk-free" message prompted by the reclassification of the drug.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said it had no objection to the Commons Health Select Committee examining the issue, but stressed that officials were "in the process of commissioning an expert review of all the academic and clinical evidence of the link between cannabis use and mental health, particularly schizophrenia."

"There is medical clinical evidence now that there is an important causal factor between cannabis use and schizophrenia, not the only factor, but an important causal factor. That is the common consensus among the medical fraternity," added the spokesman.

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