Health
University of Toronto Study Finds Teen Marijuana Use Tied To Dramatic Increased Risk Of Psychosis

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
A study published Wednesday found that teens who use cannabis are 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, according to NBC News.
The study was led by researchers from the University of Toronto and examined teenage patients who used cannabis within the last year and those who did not, according to NBC News. When the study was further limited to teens who were sent to the emergency room or hospitalized, it showed a 27-fold increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with psychotic illness.
“I think that there’s enough evidence out there for us to give recommendations that teens probably shouldn’t be using cannabis,” Andre McDonald, a postdoctoral research fellow at McMaster University and lead author of the study, said, according to NBC News. “If we can somehow ask teens to delay their use until their brain has developed a little further, I think that would be good for public health.”
While the research does not prove that cannabis use by teens causes psychosis, Dr. Leslie Hulvershorn, a child psychiatrist who was not involved with the study, argued it was unlikely that the teens were already predisposed to these kinds of mental health issues, according to NBC News. The study noted that the risk of psychosis did not spike for users between the ages of 20 and 33 and Dr. Kevin Gray, a professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina who was not a part of the study, told NBC News that the increase in risk of psychosis likely had to do with brain development at different stages of life.
“There’s something about that stage of brain development that we haven’t yet fully characterized — where there’s a window of time where cannabis use may increase the risk of psychosis,” Gray said. “This study really puts a fine point on delaying cannabis use until your 20s may mitigate one of the most potentially serious risks.”
Another study from July 2023 found that marijuana addiction made individuals four times more likely to later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic symptoms and two times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. Recreational marijuana use has been legalized in 24 states and Washington D.C., and 13 states have legalized the substance for medical use, according to CBS News.
Economy
Human population set to decline for the first time since the Black Death

From LifeSiteNews
By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute
The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.
The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.
Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.
However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.
The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.
China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.
The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.
India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.
The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.
The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.
The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.
The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.
For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.
Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:
For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.
The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.
But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.
This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.
Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.
After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.
Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.
For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.
This is not a rounding error.
Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.
All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement
It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.
It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.
To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.
The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.
There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.
The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.
But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.
This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024. Edited and republished here with permission.
Addictions
Provinces are underspending on addiction and mental health care, new report says

The Greta and Robert H. N. Ho Psychiatry and Education Centre, the HOpe Centre, a health care facility for mental illness and addiction in North Vancouver, B.C. (Dreamstime)
By Alexandra Keeler
The provinces are receiving billions in federal funds to address mental health and substance use. Why are so many spending so little?
The provinces are failing to allocate sufficient funding to addiction and mental health care services, a new report says.
The report, released Dec. 19 by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, criticizes the provinces for a “long history of … demanding maximum cash for health care from the federal government with minimum accountability.”
The alliance is a coalition of 18 prominent health organizations dedicated to improving Canada’s mental health care. Its members include the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Mental Health Association.
On average, the provinces have allocated just 16 per cent of $25 billion in federal health-care funding toward mental health and addiction services, the report says.
“Given the crisis of timely access to care for those with mental health and substance use health problems, why are so many provinces and territories investing so little new federal dollars to improve and expand access to mental health and substance use health care services?” the report asks.
However, some provinces dispute the report’s criticisms.
“The funding received from the federal government is only a small part of Alberta’s total $1.7 billion allocation towards mental health, addiction and recovery-related services,” an Alberta Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction spokesperson told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement.
“[This] is a nation leading level of investment response.”
‘Take the money and run?’
In 2023, Ottawa and the provinces committed to spend $25 billion over 10 years investing in four priority areas. These areas are mental health and substance use, family health services, health workers and backlogs, and a modernized health system.
The alliance’s report, which looks at provincial investments in years 2023 through 2026, says mental health and substance use are being given short shrift.
B.C., Manitoba and P.E.I. have allocated zero per cent of the federal funds to mental health and substance use, the report says. Three other provinces allocated 10 per cent or less.
By contrast, Alberta allocated 25 per cent, Ontario, 24 per cent, and Nova Scotia, 19 per cent, the report says.
The underspending by some provinces occurs against a backdrop of mental health care already receiving inadequate investment.
“[P]ublicly available data tells us that Canada’s mental health investments account for roughly 5% of their health budgets, which is significantly below the recommended 12% by the Royal Society of Canada,” the report says.
However, several provinces told Canadian Affairs they took issue with the report’s findings.
“Neither the Department of Health and Wellness nor Health PEI received requests to provide information to inform the [alliance’s] report,” Morgan Martin, a spokesperson for P.E.I.’s Department of Health and Wellness, told Canadian Affairs.
Martin pointed to P.E.I.’s investments in opioid replacement therapy, a mobile mental health crisis unit and school health services as some examples of the province’s commitment to providing mental health and addiction care.
But Matthew MacFarlane, Green Party MLA for P.E.I.’s Borden-Kinkora riding, says these investments have been inadequate.
“P.E.I. has seen little to no investments into acute mental health or substance use services,” he said. He criticized a lack of new detox beds, unmet promises of a new mental health hospital and long wait times.
The alliance’s report says New Brunswick has allocated just 3.2 per cent of federal funds to mental health and addiction services.
However, a New Brunswick Department of Health spokesperson Tara Chislett said the province’s allocation of $15.4 million annually from the federal funds does not reflect the additional $200 million of provincial funding that New Brunswick has committed to mental health and substance use.
In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson for the alliance said the federal funding is important, but “does not nearly move the yardsticks fast enough in terms of expanding the capacity of provincial health systems to meet the growing demand for mental health and substance use health care services.”
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‘Blaming and shaming’
The discrepancies between the report’s findings and the provinces’ claims highlight a need for standardized metrics around mental health and addiction spending.
The report calls on federal and provincial governments to develop national performance indicators for mental health and substance use services.
“At the end-of-the day you cannot manage what you do not measure,” the report reads.
It advises governments to communicate their performance to Canadians via a national dashboard.
“Dashboards are being used with increasing frequency in the health system and other sectors to summarize complex information and would be one way to effectively tell a story … to the public,” the report says.
It also urges Ottawa to introduce legislation — what it dubs the Mental Health and Substance Use Health Care For All Parity Act — to ensure equal treatment for mental and physical health within Canada’s health-care system.
This call for mental and physical health parity echoes the perspective of other health-care professionals. In a recent Canadian Affairs opinion editorial, a panel of mental health physicians argued Canada’s failure to prioritize mental health care affects millions of Canadians, leading to lower medication reimbursement rates and longer wait times.
The alliance says its call for more aggressive and transparent spending on mental health and addictions care is not intended to criticize or cast blame.
“This is not about blaming and shaming, but rather, this is about accelerating the sharing of lessons learned and the impact of innovative programs,” the report says.
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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