Laura Ingraham on Tuesday led a segment clearly designed to drum up fears about a supposed link between the legalization of marijuana and mass shootings.
Staying well away from any discussion of gun control, Ingraham had as a guest Dr. Russell Kamer, the medical director of Partners in Safety, a group that works with companies to provide drug tests for its employees, among other things.
Ingraham began by claiming that “it was initially reported” that the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Texas last week “was a user” but that The New York Times “mysteriously” removed that detail from an article.
“Why aren’t people in general not talking more about the pot psychosis–violent behavior connection?” Ingraham asked.
“What we find in studies [is that] it’s very clear that the use of the high potency marijuana is strongly associated with the development of psychosis,” Kamer said. That THC levels are generally higher now than they were decades ago factors into why this “connection,” as Ingraham put it, is apparently not widely discussed.
“My colleagues in Colorado,” Kamer continued, “are sounding the alarm because that was one of the first states to legalize. It’s practically a daily occurrence that kids come into the emergency rooms in florid, cannabis-induced psychosis.”
“People like Beto [O’Rourke]… they are fine with doing a run on the guns and I guess you could argue that if that’s what you want to do—try to get rid of the Second Amendment—but yet [they are] completely oblivious to what the legalization of marijuana has done and is doing to an entire generation of Americans with violent consequences,” Ingraham said.
At the moment, the potential association between cannabis-induced changes in neural functioning and violent behavior in humans remains speculative, and future fMRI studies will need to directly measure levels of irritability and/or aggressiveness in cannabis users to determine if there is an association or not.
NCBI.NLM.NIH.Gov
Source: The Daily Beast and NIH