Kathy Donaghy June 10 2018
Any debate around the legalisation of cannabis must take into account the harm it causes, one of the country’s leading psychiatrists has warned.
Consultant psychiatrist Dr Matthew Sadlier is calling for a public health campaign to educate people about the dangers of cannabis use.
As attitudes to cannabis use become more relaxed and tolerance increases in society in general, Dr Sadlier says many young people’s lives are being wrecked by habitual use of the drug – and that this side of the story is not being heard.
In his work as a general adult psychiatrist in north Dublin over the last five years, he says he could comfortably say that a third of all his patients had been referred because of cannabis.
“There are people out there who have developed long-term psychotic illnesses from smoking cannabis. If they’d never smoked it, they would never have developed it. We know that acute usage causes neurological conditions. The question is does it have a long-term effect?
“We know that the younger you start smoking it, the more likely it is to have a lasting, damaging effect. What gets my blood boiling is that it’s also carcinogenic. We have spent 40 years getting cigarette smoking down, but smoking cannabis has the same negative effects as cigarette smoking,” says Dr Sadlier.
“I think there has to be a public health campaign because the information out there for young people is very confused. We have people speaking up for the medicinal effects. Street cannabis is a very different thing and it’s very dangerous,” he says.
“I have seen families ripped apart by cannabis use. I’ve seen people with good futures ahead of them fall into apathy due to chronic cannabis use. People need to be educated about this. In my opinion, it’s much more dangerous than alcohol,” says Dr Sadlier.
