Last updated : December 16, 2024
On April 14, 2015, Richard Kirk, 48, of Colorado decided to eat some Karma Kandy Orange Ginger, candy infused with marijuana.
Soon after, he began hallucinating and acting erratically. His wife,Kristine, called 911 at 9:31 PM, about 30 minutes after Richard began behaving strangely. She described her husband climbing in and out of their son’s bedroom window cutting his legs on the broken glass. He was ranting about the end of the world and asking her to kill him. As she struggled to keep her three young sons in the basement, her husband could be heard screaming in the background.
More than 12 minutes after she called 911, she started begging her husband to “stay away from the gun” and repeatedly yelled, “Stop it! Stop it!” At one point she says, “Fine I’ll do it. Just give me the gun.” Eight seconds later Kristine can be heard screaming.
Two seconds after that, a gunshot is heard and then silence. At 19 minutes, officers are heard knocking at the door.
When officers arrived, the couple’s two oldest sons sprinted to the patrol car. They told the officer their mom and dad were fighting, and they had heard a loud bang. The youngest son was found in his bedroom, near the living room, where his mother was lying dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The little boy told officers, “Dad shot Mom.”
The youngest son later said that before the police arrived, his dad had asked the son to shoot him so that, “Mommy and Daddy could be together in heaven.”
A shell casing was found near Kristine’s body, mixed in with a game of chess that had been set out. A semi-automatic handgun was found 10 to 15 feet away.
An autopsy report later revealed the gun had been fired up against or near Kristine’s right temple.
Marijuana candy is not harmless fun
Investigators found a partially eaten marijuana candy, an untouched joint and a receipt showing Kirk had bought the items earlier that night at a marijuana store in southeast Denver.
The drug screen on Richard showed that the only drug he had in his system was THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
According to Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse at the National Institues of Health, nobody would question that marijuana can make some people experience temporary psychotic symptoms. Psychotic symptoms include losing touch with reality—hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there) and delusions.
Does marijuana cause psychosis?
People who are experiencing a delusion of paranoia might think that they are being followed when they are not, or that secret messages are being sent to them. Someone with a grandiose delusion will have an exaggerated sense of importance. Somatic delusion is when a person believes they have a terminal illness when in reality they are healthy.
Psychotic episodes are often frightening, leading people to hurt themselves or other. Marijuana may also cause schizophrenia, but that is a little less clear.
There have been nine studies following hundreds to thousands of people for decades looking for a connection between marijuana use and psychosis. All but one of these studies suggest that marijuana use is associated with schizophrenia.
Sir Robin Murray, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London, says that evidence changed his mind about weed. “Even I, 20 years ago, used to tell patients that cannabis is safe. It’s only after you see all the patients that go psychotic that you realize – it’s not so safe.”
The challenge with the studies is that schizophrenics tend to use lots of illegal drugs, so it’s difficult to say that marijuana caused the mental disorder. It could have been one of the other drugs, or it could be that schizophrenics use marijuana to self medicate because they don’t feel right.
“But what is also clear, if you do have a vulnerability to schizophrenia and you smoke [cannabis],” Volkow says, “it’s likely to trigger an episode. It’s likely to advance the [disease].” She says when people with certain risky genes associated with psychosis smoke, the risk of developing schizophrenia goes up sixfold.
If marijuana abuse is causing schizophrenia, the damage is probably being done during people’s early years, according to Krista Lisdahl, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
For most, psychotic disorders develop in the late teens while the brain is still developing. “After 25 or 30, when the brain is done with its major neurodevelopment,” Lisdahl says, most people are unlikely to develop schizophrenia and smoking probably won’t change that.
On the other hand, she says, most people including her who’ve studied cannabis and mental health have seen that the earlier someone starts smoking, the more likely it is they’ll develop a disorder in general.
