Father Riley wrote a letter about drug addiction and I applaud him for his work in that area. However, if Chris Googles ‘Childhood Sexual Abuse and Cannabis Use in Early Adulthood’ he might be better informed. The report says, “Young adult men and women who reported experiencing (Child Sexual Abuse) had significantly higher rates of frequent use of cannabis in early adulthood.” Marianne James from the Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that one in seven girls and one in twelve boys are victims of sexual abuse – potentially, over two million Australians. If a ‘significantly higher’ number of them will abuse cannabis it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that a significant proportion of the drug users Chris helps were probably abused long before they used drugs. Blaming drugs for their psychological problems diverts attention from the real cause.
Chris says that people who abuse cannabis in their early teens develop schizophrenia and paranoia in their late teens but he seems to ignore the fact that psychologists will gladly tell you that schizophrenia and paranoia normally manifest themselves in late teens or early twenties regardless of drug use. US studies have also shown that although cannabis use has risen from a boutique drug in the 1950s to being the drug of choice used by 70 per cent of the teenage population, schizophrenia rates have always remained stable at 1 per cent of the population. If there was a causal link, common sense dictates that the 1 per cent figure should have risen dramatically but it didn’t. In fact when “researchers controlled for other factors known to influence schizophrenia risk, including gender, education and socioeconomic status, the association between disease onset and marijuana disappeared”. Chris should ask himself, did early psychological trauma cause people to abuse cannabis or did the cannabis cause the psychological problems? Logic would favour the former.
What we need is a Royal Commission into the pre-cursor crime that seems to be at the root of a significant amount of criminal behaviour, namely child abuse.
A Wollaston
Port Macquarie
