Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

One out of every five adults may be us­ing cannabis dai­ly in this coun­try, a re­cent in­ter­na­tion­al study has sug­gest­ed.

And com­pared to oth­er coun­tries this is “very high”.

Trinidad al­so has a high rate of psy­choses com­pared to oth­er set­tings that have been re­searched and cannabis may be con­tribut­ing to that, the study has sug­gest­ed.

This da­ta forms part of the find­ings from the In­ter­na­tion­al Re­search Pro­gramme on Psy­choses in Di­verse Set­ting (In­tre­pid II) re­port, which in­ves­ti­gat­ed psy­chot­ic dis­or­ders in In­dia, Nige­ria, and Trinidad.

“We ob­served a very high preva­lence of cannabis use in Trinidad com­pared to in­ter­na­tion­al find­ings,” Dr Joni Lee Pow said.

Lee Pow re­vealed the find­ings dur­ing a vir­tu­al event host­ed by the ANSA McAL Psy­cho­log­i­cal Re­search Cen­tre which looked at cannabis and psy­choses in Trinidad.

Ac­cord­ing to Lee Pow, the re­search con­duct­ed by the In­tre­pid II team found that 19.6 per cent of the peo­ple sur­veyed in Trinidad were dai­ly users of cannabis.

“That’s a lot,” Lee Pow said.

“So our da­ta sug­gests that about 20 per cent of our gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion may be us­ing cannabis dai­ly, so very high rates of cannabis com­pared to oth­er coun­tries,” she said.

T&T’s 20 per cent was com­pared to the da­ta cap­tured in “The con­tri­bu­tion of cannabis use to vari­a­tion in the in­ci­dence of psy­chot­ic dis­or­der across Eu­rope (EU-GEI)” re­port which found that dai­ly cannabis use in Lon­don was 11.7 per cent and 13.1 per cent in Am­s­ter­dam.

Kanchipu­ram, In­dia and Id­a­ban, Nige­ria which were stud­ied in the In­tre­pid II re­port both record­ed dai­ly cannabis use lev­els which were less than four per cent.

The catch­ment area for the In­tre­pid II study in Trinidad con­sist­ed of the mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties of Diego Mar­tin, Port-of-Spain, San Juan/Laven­tille, Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co, Ari­ma, Ch­agua­nas and San­gre Grande. The pop­u­la­tion at risk was said to be 487,159.

The re­port fo­cused on res­i­dents in the catch­ment area be­tween the ages of 18 to 64.

“One of the ways in which we can in­ves­ti­gate if cannabis has an as­so­ci­a­tion with psy­chosis is com­par­ing cas­es, and when I say cas­es I mean peo­ple who do have psy­chosis, to matched healthy con­trols, so peo­ple who don’t have psy­chosis, and es­sen­tial­ly see­ing if cas­es use more cannabis than con­trols,” she said.

Lee Pow said one of the things the study found is that Tri­nis use a lot of cannabis.

“Okay so what did we find? Well, we found a lot of cannabis in Trinidad, that’s what we found,” she said.

Dr Joni Lee Pow

‘Cannabis users more like­ly to de­vel­op a psy­chot­ic dis­or­der’

Lee Pow said ac­cord­ing to the da­ta those who use cannabis more than once a week are twice as like­ly to de­vel­op a psy­chot­ic dis­or­der.

And those with a cannabis de­pen­den­cy are five times more like­ly to have a psy­chot­ic dis­or­der.

“It should be a bit alarm­ing. I hope it is,” Lee Pow said.

In T&T, at least three stud­ies have con­firmed that be­tween 40-60 per cent of first-ad­mis­sion cas­es for psy­chosis are re­lat­ed to cannabis use, par­tic­u­lar­ly for males.

Lee Pow said with­in Trinidad the groups that use the most cannabis are Afro-Trinida­di­an men who al­so have the high­est rates of psy­choses.

Ac­cord­ing to the UK’s Na­tion­al Health Ser­vice (NHS) psy­chosis is when peo­ple lose some con­tact with re­al­i­ty. This might in­volve see­ing or hear­ing things that oth­er peo­ple can­not see or hear (hal­lu­ci­na­tions) and be­liev­ing things that are not ac­tu­al­ly true (delu­sions).

Lee Pow said the da­ta showed that a quar­ter of the adults who use cannabis did so for the first time when they were un­der the age of 16.

This she said was al­so high com­pared to in­ter­na­tion­al da­ta.

“Half of those ear­ly users, so half of those who used cannabis be­fore 16, went on to be­come adult fre­quent users. So def­i­nite­ly rais­ing some ques­tions about ado­les­cent cannabis use and what kind of path­ways it may lead to lat­er on” Lee Pow said.

‘Co-use be­tween al­co­hol and to­bac­co’

Lee Pow said the study found a high co-use with to­bac­co as most of the re­spon­dents said they smoked “roll-ons” which was cannabis rolled on­to the end of a cig­a­rette.

One of the things that may be con­tribut­ing to the high lev­els of psy­chosis in this coun­try is quite a pos­si­bil­i­ty the “high po­ten­cy” of cannabis on the mar­ket these days, Lee Pow said.

Lee Pow warned of cannabis on the mar­ket that may have high­er con­cen­tra­tions of tetrahy­dro­cannabi­nol or THC—the part of the mar­i­jua­na plant that makes you high.

“At present we can­not make an in­formed choice on cannabis. There is no stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of prod­uct. The THC po­ten­cy is un­known,” she said.

“This should be con­cern­ing to you be­cause it is re­al­ly im­por­tant to think about if you are mak­ing an in­formed choice,” she said.

Lee Pow said there was al­so co-use of cannabis and al­co­hol but the re­searchers did not find al­co­hol use to have any kind of strong as­so­ci­a­tion with psy­chosis.

She said that high-po­ten­cy cannabis con­sists of THC lev­els high­er than 10 per cent.

Lo­cal es­ti­mates cur­rent­ly state that THC lev­els in cannabis in T&T may range from 10 to 26 per cent.

Cannabis was de­crim­i­nalised for pos­ses­sion of 30 grammes or less in T&T in De­cem­ber 2019.