Psychological Benefits of Cannabis

Drugs mess-up your head. This message is carried explicitly or implicitly within every warning on illegal drugs. The warnings are very rarely placed alongside a balanced description of their benefits. If this were the case we would see: ‘Sometimes drugs mess-up your head, and sometimes they help solve your mental problems’. However, when have you ever seen that realistic message portrayed by the government or mainstream media?

The reason we are rarely told about the psychological benefits of drugs – apart from the promotion of legal and costly pharmaceuticals – is that governments and medical professionals are finding it very hard to reverse the decades of negative spin that they have applied to the subject. So they continue in the vein: ‘Drugs screw you up’.

In contrast with this dogma, grass-roots drug reform movements have long known that simple dichotomies presented by governments and right-wing campaigners are unhelpful and often seriously wrong. It’s not their fault of course, because governments are by their very nature incapable of thinking in complex ways and presenting complex messages. An issue has to be binary for them because they are dumb and reactionary. As for anti-drugs campaigners I make no comment.

Cannabis appears to be useful in helping to treat chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal tract disorders and HIV/AIDS. It is also claimed that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease. Studies have shown it to slow the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice – lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia and in another study THC destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats. Notably a recent epidemiological study found no greater incidence of lung cancer among cannabis smokers than among those who did not smoke cannabis – potentially due to the anti-cancer properties cancelling out the effects of tar or due to its expectorant effect producing mucous which may catch the tar and lift it from the lungs before damage occurs. Most recently, a study has shown it is far more effective than available Alzheimer drugs to halt the disease’s progression. It has also been found to be related to new cell growth deep in the brain’s memory areas. Cannabis appears to be a drug of significant medical utility as well as a drug that some people abuse.

The medical benefits of cannabis may also be psychological. Hallucinogen researcher Charles Grob says that ‘psychedelic drugs have the potential to alter modern medicine’. Charles Grob is editor of “Hallucinogens: A Reader” and recently co-edited, with Roger Walsh, “Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.” Cannabis as a hallucinogen has the effect of promoting direct perception alongside relaxation. This potent combination for behavioural change and self-awareness is only one of the ways in which a person can be helped to provide him or herself with psychotherapy.

Endogenously created psychological change and personal growth is ideal because it is controlled by the patient and permits introspective analysis of the person’s problem as well as presenting unique creative solutions for those problems. Quite often mental problems are based on incorrect perceptions of the world (e.g., depression) and can be alleviated by altering the perceptual frame. As cannabis becomes more accepted as a medicine we can expect to see greater use of both its biological and psychological properties.

Only one problem. Therapies, whether using drugs or not, which break down social conditioning... what authority is going to support that? What element of the conservative establishment is going to reverse a core element of social control - the control that familaies and communities exert on the free thinking of individuals. Just think of what all those free thinking creative minds might do to the safe and established order, fear says 'don't risk it'. It is the conservative mindset that needs its fear breaking down somehow, and only then will it recognise the power of drugs to transform human society, and permit it.