Marijuana use unlikely to boost suicide risk
Smoking marijuana (also called cannabis) is unlikely to increase a person's risk of killing themselves later on, an analysis of more than three decades worth of death records on more than 50,000 Swedish military recruits suggests.
"I don't think this can be interpreted as saying, 'Well, there are no risks of using cannabis,'" Dr. Stanley Zammit of the department of psychological medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine in the UK told Reuters Health.
Nevertheless, "we can pretty much rule out a strong effect of cannabis on long-term risk of suicide whether it's through depression or whatever," he added.
Zammit and his colleagues had previously found a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia while looking at the same group of 50,087 men drafted into the Swedish military in 1969-1970. Nearly all were 18 to 20 years old at the time. In that first analysis, the researchers had also found a "much less consistent and overall weaker" relationship between cannabis use and depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide.
