Prohibiting young adults in Quebec from legally buying cannabis won’t stop them from consuming cannabis. What it will do is to force these young adults to purchase unlicensed/uninspected cannabis products from the cannabis black market instead of legal, regulated products.
Idiotic. And such idiocy is stoked by anti-cannabis pseudo-science (produced in Quebec) like this:
The headline is grossly misleading. The pseudo-science it is based upon lacks any merit.
This is the question asked by the researchers:
Is adolescent cannabis consumption associated with risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality in young adulthood? [emphasis mine]
Simple correlation. Correlations exist all around us: two things that are merely “associated with” each other. A commonly known correlation is the association between economic booms and sunspot activity.
Do economic booms (on the planet Earth) cause sunspots? Highly doubtful. In short, simple correlations prove nothing.
Yet armed with nothing but this correlation, look at the conclusion that came out of this pseudo-science:
Although individual-level risk remains moderate to low and results from this study should be confirmed in future adequately powered prospective studies, the high prevalence of adolescents consuming cannabis generates a large number of young people who could develop depression and suicidality attributable to cannabis. [emphasis mine]
Supposed depression and suicide “attributable to cannabis”, i.e. supposedly caused by cannabis. Bullshit.
They never studied whether cannabis use causes depression/suicide. The conclusion has no more validity than claiming that cannabis use causes teens to paint graffiti and rebel against authority.
Pseudo-science. Meaningless.
Then we have real science. The anti-depressants that (Quebec) doctors prescribe to suicidal/depressed teens have been proven to cause suicides.
This is not mere correlation. Anti-depressants are dangerous psychoactive drugs.
Worse. Anti-depressants have abysmal efficacy. Clinical trials consistently show that anti-depressants are only marginally more effective than placebos.
This is important enough to require restatement. Anti-depressants are only marginally more effective than giving a depressed person a sugar pill. The difference? Sugar pills never cause people to commit suicide.
In the backwater province of Quebec, doctors prescribe anti-depressants to depressed/suicidal teens with barely a second thought – despite these pills doubling the risk of suicide.
But Quebec is too preoccupied to protect its teens from Big Pharma’s dangerous chemicals. This Don Quixote government is busy spending all its time tilting at anti-cannabis windmills.