A recent Daily Telegraph headline claimed cannabis users are “twice as likely to be violent.” A Cardiff University researcher just took that claim apart — and the takedown is worth reading.
The headline comes from a King’s College London systematic review that combined 63 studies covering more than 265,000 people. The review did find a link between cannabis use and violence. But as Simon C Moore, professor of public health research at Cardiff University, explains, the headline overstates what the numbers can actually tell us.
First, confounders: poverty, alcohol, other drugs, and a difficult upbringing are all linked to violence on their own — and buying cannabis illegally can bring people into contact with people and places where violence is more common. Some of those factors are more common among cannabis users, so they could partly explain the link. Moore’s analogy: ice cream sales rise and fall alongside drownings, yet nobody thinks ice cream causes drowning.
Second, study design: 46 of the 63 studies were one-time snapshots that measured cannabis use and violence at a single point in time — they can’t show which came first, and those are the studies that found the strongest link. Studies that followed people over time found a much weaker link: 17 percent higher odds, not “twice as likely.” And twice the odds is not the same as twice as likely.
Third, the review’s own supplementary material rates the certainty of the evidence as “very low” — the authors have very little confidence in the size of their estimate. That qualification never made it into the Telegraph report.
None of this means cannabis and violence are unrelated. It means the scary headline is doing more work than the science.
This is the same fear-based framing Kentucky prohibition has leaned on for decades — the “dangerous drug” rhetoric that treats cannabis users as a threat. Between July 2002 and June 2022, 303,264 Kentuckians were charged with cannabis offenses. If fear is the argument for keeping those charges coming, it should at least be honest.
KCFC’s proposal mirrors HB225 — adults 21 and older could possess up to one ounce and cultivate, harvest, and store up to five plants for personal use, free of criminal sanction, with the General Assembly regulating production, processing, and sale.
Read the full op-ed at Marijuana Moment: https://www.marijuanamoment.net/no-marijuana-doesnt-cause-users-to-become-violent-despite-alarmist-reports-op-ed/
Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/LetKentuckyVote
#LetKentuckyVote #DecriminalizeKentucky #CannabisReform #Kentucky #LegalizeKentucky #HB225
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