Summary: The Downside Of High

Cannabis, cannabis, cannabis; easily one of the biggest recreational drugs, however, does the worlds most popular drug have any side effects? Well that is exactly what the film “The Downside of High” presented by David Suzuki aims at examining. The documentary takes a look at a bunch of different studies that have taken place since the late 1980s and how those studies help clarify the topic of pot and schizophrenia. Some of they key points that the films put out is that most people who eventually develop a mental illness have been found to have smoked cannabis in their teenage years. To find out exactly how cannabis affects the human brain, researchers preformed brain scans on two groups, which had both smoked pot, one with a known case of schizophrenia and another group that did not. They …show more content…
The interesting thing is; cannabis alone will not trigger schizophrenia. Many factors that will include ones family history, other drugs, childhood trauma or even where someone lives are all factors that can be tied to the development of schizophrenia. The film suggests that the reason so many individuals who have schizophrenia have also consumed large amounts of cannabis because they wanted to block early symptoms of mental illness. Meaning that smoking offered them a good short-term effect which was that they would be more calm, however, that within the next one to two hours the effects would turn to the worst and they would become more paranoid then before. Hence why many of these people would smoke so much, they never wanted to stay calm without knowing that doing this would be worse in the long run. So the doctors had to look elsewhere for a reason why pot was so often tied to the development of schizophrenia, and that is when the discovery of the COMT