Drug Czar Plays Politics With Mental Illness, Suicide And Marijuana

Via Furious Seasons, a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. This comment at Furious Seasons hits the nail on the head:

Yes, pot makes people kill themselves. That's such a bizarre assertion that it's embarrassing--and, indeed, claiming pot causes anxiety and suicide while perfectly legal drugs such as Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and so on have been linked to suicidality and suicides and to cases of very extreme agitation is the very height of hypocrisy. A 2001 study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that 8.1 percent of admissions to one hospital's psych unit in a 14-month period were due to "antidepressant-associated mania or psychosis." In fact, a Whether you like or hate pot, you ought to be against the feds making such hypocritical claims or you ought to be in favor of Walters warning parents of teens about the dangers of anti-depressant-caused psychosis. I simply don't know of any studies proving that pot causes suicide. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's highly unlikely that such a link is very strong.

Anti-depressants are much more of a suicide threat.