DR MAX THE MIND DOCTOR: Neighborhoods are filled with lives devastated by the diabolical drugs that is cannabis

Go into any mental health service as I did and you will face the tragic victims of our nonchalant attitude towards cannabis.

More and more evidence is showing that the drug has a horrible effect on young people, especially the disturbing story of the Mail today. According to one study, a third of psychosis cases in London are due to smoking. Another study by Oxford University showed that the risk of depression in adolescents increased by 40%.

They join the hundreds of other studies that show that far from being the harmless substance that activists make us believe, cannabis is a dangerous and damaging intoxicant that has a profound effect on the structure and the brain function.

Go to any mental health service I know and you will be facing the tragic victims of our nonchalant attitude to cannabis, writes Dr. Max Pemberton.

Cannabis is particularly dangerous for the developing brain of young people and yet this group is most likely to experiment with drugs. It has been proven beyond any doubt that cannabis use is badociated with depression, anxiety, psychosis and disappearance, or low motivation.

It is a bitter irony that, just as our society increasingly understands mental illness, a drug that is directly responsible for the destruction of people's mental health is allowed to take on such magnitude. The smug, aging, and smoky liberal guys in the '60s,' 70s and '80s are particularly frustrating and claim that, as they are always there, everything has to go. They do not realize that not only did many people not come out unscathed from the '60s and' 70s, but also that the very powerful Skunk cannabis present on the street is totally different from what it was 15 years ago, and even less 30 years ago.

Yet, oddly enough, the police are becoming more and more relaxed. We do not apply the cannabis law, which means that the criminal justice system does not support parents who are courageously trying to move their children away. I remember having visited the home of a young man whose parents were concerned about his mental health. As his family waited nervously in the living room on the ground floor, I climbed the stairs timidly and pushed open the bedroom door to find him huddling in the corner, the carpet dotted with hundreds of cigarette burn marks and pieces of paper torn from newspapers covering the floor.

We do not apply the cannabis law, which means that the criminal justice system does not support parents who are bravely trying to keep their children away, Dr. Max Pemberton writes.

He was convinced that the devil had possessed him and that the demons were telling him to kill himself. In the end, he was cut off and sent to a psychiatric hospital, another broken spirit who joined the many victims of this drug.

His parents both agreed that shortly after taking his GCSEs, he began to change. He started using skunk and rarely came out of his room. It was only a matter of time before he ended up in the hospital.

Neighborhoods are filled with similar examples of destroyed lives, sometimes for a short time, sometimes permanently. I have seen dozens of people who became psychotic using cannabis, and the number has increased recently, as the most powerful forms have become more widely available.

Lives ruined by cannabis are not visible to everyone because they are locked up in psychiatric hospitals.