Associations

A few weeks ago someone or something pointed me at the paper at reference 1a about cannabis & tobacco. A paper which has not leaked out into the wide world, as many do these days, but is available online at reference 1b. An outfit called Qeois which at first (and only) glance appears to offer some form of self publication for authors who do not have the patience to wait for proper publication. They are to be found at reference 5.

The paper reports on a study on cannabis & tobacco in the UK which may have been sponsored by the Society for the Study of Addiction (reference 3), whose house journal (Addiction) is looked after by Wiley (reference 4) from whom you can buy 48 hour online access to this paper for a modest $8 or the pdf for a rather less modest $49. Or, in the days before the plague struck, one could buy a day ticket from the library at UCL and read it there. Quite probably download the pdf too. I am reminded at reference 6 that, the one time that I did this, I paid £7 - which probably compares quite well with $8 once you have added in the HSBC foreign transaction charge.

Back with Qeois, I find that one can copy the online material and paste it into a Word document. Formatting of the resultant text not too bad, but the figures get a bit messed up - although, if one was aiming for a decent copy, one could always lift them as images using the Microsoft Snip & Sketch tool. However, for my modest level of interest, online was good enough.

Having learned that this study was mixed up with YouGov, for whom I regularly complete online surveys on brand awareness and other important matters, I pressed on. I learned that the YouGov panel in the UK included more than 1.5m people. Then that by methods not explained they got that down to about 13,000 people completing an online survey about themselves, their tobacco and cannabis habits. The lack of explanation irritated me as a former statistician, once working in the same building as what was then called the Government Social Survey, people who took a great deal of trouble about the selection of their samples. Who were very alive to all the biases that could creep into one's results if one was careless about such matters. To the need to be careful not to report a fact derived from a number of people which was too small to support it. Perhaps there was explanation but I failed to find it.

Methodological worries aside, the results seemed reasonably clear. Lots of people used tobacco, lots of people used cannabis and lots of people had mental disorders, presumably mostly fairly mild. And these three things were associated.

So something less than 15% of the population smoked tobacco. While getting on for a third of the population had used cannabis at some point and about 2% of the population said that they used it every day. Around half the people using both cannabis and tobacco (self) reported mental health issues of one sort or another, compared with about a fifth of the people who used neither. Lots more numbers in the paper itself.

The authors properly draw back from drawing any conclusions from these associations. But I would settle for substance use and mental health interaction. On the one hand, if one was a little fragile in the mental department, one would be more likely (in the olden days) to use alcohol and tobacco to manage the symptoms. On the other hand, excessive - or even moderate use - of same was likely to make those symptoms worse, even cause permanent damage, mental, physical or both. So given the usually poor state of mental health services, mainly a function of inadequate funding, the outlook was not that great.

PS 1: I learned a new bit of sub-culture jargon, something called a 'blunt'. Seemingly a dealer buys up cheap but reasonably fat cigars, perhaps something like a half corona, drills out the interiors and stuffs the resultant holes with chopped cannabis leaves and then sells them on as ready mades. Perhaps you can buy such things over the counter in places like Canada where cannabis is now more or less legal. Named, according to Wikipedia, for the Phillies Blunt, a cigar which comes in all kinds of odd flavours, apart from cannabis that is. A member of the family which used to be called Imperial Tobacco in the far off days when we were still proud of having an empire.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, I should say that I favour decriminalisation of recreational drugs. Criminalisation has failed, just as prohibition failed in the US in the 1920's and 1930's - even though it lingers on to this day in the form of dry counties. Including, I believe, the county in which Jack Daniels whisky is made.

Reference 1a: Cannabis use and co-use in tobacco smokers and non-smokers: prevalence and associations with mental health in a nationally representative sample of adults in Great Britain, 2020 - Chandni Hindocha, Leonie Brose, Hannah Walsh, Hazel Cheeseman – 2020.

Reference 1b: https://www.qeios.com/read/2F4AQ1.

Reference 2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.15381?af=R.

Reference 3: https://www.addiction-ssa.org/.

Reference 4: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/13600443.

Reference 5: https://www.qeios.com/teaser. 'We are unveiling new ways of creating and distributing knowledge. Through our paths, we have come to honour the creativeness of the individual. We have come to value the diverse judgment of the wider community above the narrow assessment of a bunch of authorities...'.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/a-day-at-library.html.