[the_duke]

The 'conclusion' hints at or indicates the assumption that cannabis use is the cause for increased suicide incidence.

What's the basis for this?

Depression being the cause for increased cannabis is intuitively a more likely assumption.

With these topics, I think it is very hard to get good data. It might very well be that men do not admit to being depressed before starting to smoke up regularily.

Can anyone comment on the quality of the data used? (National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions)

[savanaly]

>The 'conclusion' hints at or indicates the assumption that cannabis use is the cause for increased suicide incidence.

I read the abstract and conclusions closely and I didn't think they were implying that, although this is the sort of result that is classically misreported along the lines you are articulating.

The conclusion is simply that there is an association between cannabis use and suicide ideation (in other words, when you first have thoughts of suicide) among men (let's just leave the women out of it for now). So not only do the authors not claim that cannabis causes suicide, they don't even claim cannabis is associated with suicide, they claim it's associated with suicide ideation. That no link was made between suicide incidence and cannabis is explicitly stated. ("No significant association was found for the bidirectional association between cannabis use and suicide attempts in either sex.")

From that one paragraph conclusion they seem to focus more on the differences this study turned up between the sexes than on some fantastic new conclusion along the lines of "pot leads to suicide".

[nashke]

Couldn't have said it better. We don't claim there is some mechanism where smoking pot will make you suicidal. But we want to explore the strong association between the two, which has been shown time and again in previous studies. Our findings point to important differences between the sexes, so what I would take from our results is not "cannabis is bad", instead - "cannabis use and suicidality are complex behaviors, and effects of sex differences should be further explored". But that won't make a good headline, I guess :)

[the_duke]

It might very well be that pot makes suicidal after prolonged use.

I wasn't criticizing, just curios.