PhD question:
- Can we isolate the relationships between cannabis, tobacco and psychiatric disease through triangulation of data from countries that smoke cannabis with, and without tobacco?
Background:
Smoking is the world’s leading cause of preventable illness and death. In the UK, smoking prevalence has decreased from 46% during the 1970s to about 16% in recent years. However, smoking prevalence has not reduced in people with mental disorders, in 2015 it was 32%.
Cannabis is gaining increasing acceptance as a medicinal and recreational drug and prevalence of use is rising worldwide. There are concerns about the adverse associations of cannabis and tobacco with risk of psychiatric disease. However, the association between cannabis and psychiatric disease may be confounded by tobacco-use.
Here we propose an innovative approach to address this problem, by comparing estimates of the association between cannabis use and psychiatric disease in cohorts where cannabis is generally utilised without tobacco (North America) to cohorts where it is generally utilised with tobacco (Europe).