Marijuana scare of the week

The latest terrifying headlines: Marijuana use can cause psychosis! is another example of misunderstanding data - either deliberately or though ignorance.

People with incipient and ongoing mental illnesses are more likely to self medicate, with whatever comes to hand. So they drink more as a group, take more drugs in general including pot. And then they have the episodes of severe mental difficulty they were trying, however ineffectively, to control through self medication.

To draw from this that the higher usage of pot, along with the higher consumption of other intoxicants found in the histories of people with mental illness, was the cause of that illness is a logical and medical fallacy.

And probably a deliberate one.