More news over the weekend about the links between pot use and mental health problems. The top story on New Scientist's website discusses new research about marijuana and psychosis. Jim van Os, a psychiatrist at the University of Maastricht, is worried about marijuana use leading to schizophrenia among young people. According to the report:

"Over the past couple of years van Os and several others have been building the case that, for some teenagers, smoking cannabis leads to serious mental health problems in later life, including schizophrenia. Van Os claims that marijuana is responsible for up to 13 per cent of schizophrenia cases in the Netherlands. And with cannabis use among teenagers on the rise, the age at first use falling, and the strength of cannabis on the up, he says the figure can only increase.

It is a frightening conclusion, and one that is already starting to shape the debate over the legal status of cannabis."

Also, this tragic report from the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia:

Chloe died because we all failed her
By Angela Kamper, March 25, 2005

SMOKING marijuana drove Timothy Kosowicz mad and he strangled an angelic little girl.

A court heard yesterday Kosowicz, 23, had used the drug since he was 12, and for the last five years was in and out of hospital with "voices in his head".

But despite admitting killing Chloe Hoson, 5, in a western Sydney caravan park, the NSW Supreme Court yesterday found him not guilty by reason of mental illness.

Yesterday's finding reopened the debate about the mental damage caused by long-term cannabis use.

The court heard Kosowicz strangled, sexually assaulted then dumped Chloe's body in a creek in November 2003 after she knocked over a "bowl of pot" in his cabin.

"This seems to be yet another example of the link between cannabis use and mental illness, a link which from my judicial experience and reading, I regard as well-established," Acting Justice David Patten said.

Read the rest of the story.